UK-based Taptu started as a search engine for mobile websites and has wisely evolved into a news reader-aggregator like Flipboard and Zite. Its tagline is “DJ the news.”
Taptu offers iPhone and iPad apps. There’s also an Android phone app and, as of yesterday, an app for Android tablets. The company says that it built the new Android tablet version “from scratch rather than just porting an iOS version to Android.”
It has a number of features that the iPad version does not have. For example:
Using the Instapaper API, Taptu gives users the ability to archive articles to read later via their Instapaper accounts. With the new Taptu themes, users can also switch between dark font on a white background, or white font on a dark background—allowing customers a better option for reading during the day or at night. Taptu 1.4 also takes advantage of the larger tablet screens with the ability to full screen article cards.
Here’s a screen from the Android app:
The iPad universe is already crowded with news readers — Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, Apollo — and there are still more on the way (Google, AOL, Yahoo). Taptu hopes that by being one of the first news readers on Android it can get out in front of competition as the Android tablet market grows.
The only problem with that logic is that right now is that Android tablets aren’t really selling. According to a recent US-based tablet-owners survey by Nielsen 82% of tablets in market are Apple iPads.
