Microsoft’s experimental projects lab aka Microsoft Garage is back at it again. This time round, the band of engineers from Microsoft that has developed a reputation for designing some good-looking apps for platforms other than Microsoft’s own has a new Android app.
The app, News Pro is, according to its description on the Play Store, meant to “help you search for news around your work and life every day”. Still, it is not that Newscast app that reads news to you that we heard about last year but which, unfortunately, is yet to see the light of day.
The app’s availability appears to be limited to a few countries at the moment. I have not been able to access it for download and installation even though I can see it listed on the Play Store.
However, according to Android Police‘s Phil Oakley, the app does not present the news to the user in a realigned way. Rather, it just serves up headlines with accompanying images and one is redirected to a web view page upon clicking any news item.
News Pro reportedly tries to automatically guess your interests based on your social media history (that is if you sign up using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter) and what one reads on the app. So it is pretty much a personalized news app along the lines of Flipboard and other popular news apps but without the fancy user interfaces.
According to the Play Store description, the app has an interactive bot (personal news agent) whose work is to learn as much about you as possible and help in delivering tailored content. It also has news discussion boards and forums where users can interact with one another. Users can also annotate on news articles and then share them.
I’ll give News Pro a spin when it becomes possible to download it through the Play Store or when I can download it from APK Mirror, whichever comes first, and probably give my thoughts then.
