It’s my new favourite app – Flipboard, and if you haven’t given it a try then 5 minutes is all it will take for you to embrace a better way of “catching up” – and that means news feeds, social streams, and more!

Flipboard is for your Apple products or Android devices, and it presents what I think is a much better way to consume the vast amounts of information that you regularly pay attention to, in a much nicer way. Think of it the way they do – it’s your new “social magazine.”

Setting up the app is simple and easy. Give it a few topic areas that are of particular interest and optionally connect it to your Facebook or Twitter accounts to bring in social feeds. On mine I’m most interested in Tech, Entertainment, and Photography, with a few other news-related topics for good measure.

The interface is beautiful, vibrant, easy to read, and easy to interact with – truly with just a flip.

On my Galaxy Nexus the flipping goes bottom up, and there’s something about this simple change vs. book-style that has made all the difference for me. I’ve become a flipper! It might be that one-handed phone users can flip through using their index finger while they hold the phone, or it might just be that flipping bottoms up is more of a natural gesture. I don’t know, but it works.

Give it a try and see what you think – there are so many apps and sites that try to bring together multiple feeds and present them in a unified format. So far, this is the app that I think has done it the best, comparable and possibly better than Google Currents (which I’m also rather fond of).

* all images via Google Play