Thursday, August 18, 2011

Readers Hub: Newspapers

The Galaxy S2 includes Samsung's Hubs, which includes four Hubs - Social, Readers, Music and Game Hubs. I have decided to use them all (or at least the ones that's available in South Afirca (Grrr at Music Hub)), and let you know what I experience for each one.

I've decided to start with the Readers Hub. It consists out of three sections, namely News, Magazines and Books.


Tapping on the News section, opens up the news reader part of the Readers Hub. At the top we have three options, namely My Library (containing everything you've purchased), Store and Settings. This screen shot is on the Store tab, and here is a list of all the countries, and next to the name the number of publications that country has to offer through this app. See South Africa has 23 - not too shabby :) Also, another nice thing is you get 7 free credits to try out the feature :D


Tapping on the country, will take you to the list of newspapers available there:


I used on of my free credits especially for this blog so that I can show you how it works (I'm nice hey? :) - I got the "Beeld" newspaper - today's (18 August 2011) copy:


You can see in the above screen shot, that you can have the one you're buying be delivered automatically, and you can add it to your favourites. Quite nice features :)

After selecting the paper to get, it started downloading:


After the download was done, I tapped on the Newspaper, and got this welcome screen with some instructions and tips on how to read the paper:


Pretty straightforward as you can see. I had a quick scan through the paper, and found it very easy to navigate and read the articles.



Click on the images above to view them in more detail.

That covers the Newspaper part of the Readers Hub that comes standard with the Galaxy S2. I must admit, I was a bit skeptical at first, I usually don't like the "default" apps that come with phones, but this one I'm really impressed with.

To get a new Newspaper to read is a quick and painless exercise. Now, I haven't bought one yet (downloaded the one in this post with one of my free credits), but as soon as I do, I'll amend this post with how that went...

Till next time!