I stopped buying printed newspapers years ago. At first, I would check individual newspapers via the Internet. I then started following major news sources on Twitter, and still follow this practice today. With Android, I moved to news aggregation apps. In addition to Twitter, I now use three different news and periodical apps. For Costa Rica newspapers, I tested three different Android apps. These apps use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to collect feeds from the predefined news sites. As the paper publishes an article on their Web site, the article becomes available through its RSS feed. The last two apps also use direct links to the newspaper’s Web site.

Costa Rica Noticias provides live feeds of news from La Nacion, Everado Herrara, Mundo Motorizado, BBC Mundo, A.M. Costa Rica, Marca, Teletica, AS, Sensacion Deportiva, El Pais, and ESPN. Although the app has an option for adding additional feeds, it only provides for entry of the name and not the feed address. Consequently, there is no way to really add a new feed. Sometimes, Costa Rica Noticas gets stuck while reading a feed. The solution to this problem is go back a level, and try to read the feed again. Do not set the mobile formatting option, as it does a poor job of display an article. The app does support the share option, which allows you to share the app to Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Mail and a number of other apps. Those apps include Google Translate, but it only translates the article title.

Noticias de Costa Rica is an unusual app, in that there is no mention of the source for the news. This app simply divides the feeds into five categories: Titulares, Regionales, Deportes, Economia, and Espectaculos. The first four feeds are links to the mobile site for La Nacion, and the last one is from Farandula. The only options for sharing are Twitter and Facebook, and those options are part of the list of articles in the feed. The full article has no share options, except those options provided by La Nacion or Farandula. Unless these are the only two periodicals of interest, this app is not worth installing.

Periodicos de Costa Rica covers the widest variety of periodicals. However, some menu entries link to the RSS feeds and some are just direct links to the periodical. There are no options, no sharing, and navigation is limited. From any level, the only two choices are going back to the main menu, or exiting the application. For La Nacion, Periodicos de Costa Rica links to the La Nacion’s mobile Web site. For other menu entries that are just links to the periodical, and not to an RSS feed, the formatting of the page is hard to read on a mobile device. The typical zoom controls are missing, all you have is horizontal and vertical swiping. The app has potential, but needs some major changes to make it a useful Android app.

All three of these apps suffer one serious problem. When linking to the actual news site, they should follow the standard Android feature of allowing the user to select the browser. I could then send it to Dolphin Browser HD, and to translate the page. It is going to be awhile, before my Spanish is to the level of reading La Nacion. In the meantime, I am following the news for The Costa Rica Star, La Nacion, La Republica, and El Financiero on Twitter. Twitter allows me to send the link to the Dolphin Browser HD. I could follow these source on Facebook, but it is much harder to quickly scan a long list of news on Facebook.

I am dreaming, but it would be great if apps like Pulse News or Google Currents included Costa Rica newspapers in their selection of periodicals. Pulse News presents news as a series of strips from each selected news source. Their format facilitates fast scanning of multiple news sources. When you tap an article, Pulse opens a short version of the article, tap for the full article and it switches to downloading the entire article from the original source. Pulse triggers an event whenever a new article appears in your selected list of periodicals. Google Currents is more like reading a magazine. I prefer Google Currents for periodicals that I read on a regular basis. If you follow English language news, both are excellent apps for following the news.