Flipboard, which calls itself a "social magazine" for the iPad, launched a long-awaited iPhone app today.
The app, which pulls information from Facebook and Twitter accounts, turns friends' updates into nicely formatted, perusal-friendly pages. Flipboard also delivers a couple dozen aggregated content sections (news, finance, music, tech, etc.) selected by Flipboard's creators.
The iPad app is popular for its attractive magazine-style presentation of headlines, story blurbs, and photos. The iPhone app adds a feature called Cover Stories, which Flipboard says learns from a reader's interactions with the content and helps them quickly catch up with some of the most interesting news, updates, and photos being shared at that moment.
While the iPad app allowed users to flip through magazine-like pages, the iPhone app uses a vertical flip that allows users to navigate pages while holding their device in one hand.
"The iPad is an amazing device that challenged us to rethink how people discover and share social news," Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said in a statement. "With the iPhone we redesigned Flipboard for a new use case, where people want to find the things they care about even faster and multiple times every day. Flipboard for iPhone puts all the power of Flipboard in your pocket."
McCue is expected to discuss the app further during a scheduled appearance tomorrow at the LeWeb conference in Paris.
My colleague Rafe Needleman put the app through its paces this evening and found it to be a beautiful but different experience from the iPad version.