Is The New Unfold News Reader Worth Unfolding?

In a space already occupied by such apps as Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, is there still room for another? Swipe App Labs seems to think so, as it has just launched Unfold News Reader for iPhone and iPad. Much like the aforementioned apps, Unfold News Reader is an app that lets you read articles from various online sources. Unfold News Reader comes preloaded with the following categories, presented in a colorful arrangement of Post-it notes: News, Business, Technology, Art & Design, Living, Entertainment, Sports, Food & Dining, Style, Travel, and Everything Else. Each of these categories is preloaded with popular feeds, save for the Everything Else category, which you yourself have to fill with sources that don’t quite fit elsewhere. Of course, you can also add more of your favorite feeds to the other categories. As might be expected, reading a feed item or article in Unfold News Reader offers a clean text mode. Alternatively, an article’s original Web view is accessible as well. Sharing and favoriting options are also made available. To be sure, Unfold News Reader is an interesting addition to the news reading app space. But in its apparent infancy, it suffers from a number of issues. First off, when I launched Unfold News Reader on my iPad, I can’t help but notice how blurry the text and graphics are. The third-generation iPad has been out for a good five months. Yet, here’s a new app that promises “simple beauty” but simply lacks Retina display support for the device in question. And then there’s the matter of adding and organizing feeds. Adding feeds can be a bit hit-and-miss, while organizing them can be a mess. For one thing, I can’t seem to figure out how to reorder feeds in a category or relocate them to another. Furthermore, the app's Twitter, Facebook, and email integration is certainly not the most intuitive out there. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that this app is already at version 2.0 even as it’s, strictly speaking, a newly released app. Unfold News Reader is available now in the App Store for $2.99. I was predisposed to like Unfold News Reader from the moment I saw its friendly Post-it notes category grid. What unfolded thereafter, though, left me wanting more.