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Google Currents – Mobile aggregator app

On my Android smart phone, as probably most of you as well, I like to have an application to read trough my feeds and favourite websites / news and so on. This is especially true in the morning when I am travelling to work in the tube, and you have some spare time to kill. I used to rely on Pulse News which used to work flawlessly - at least for me - until some update a few months ago has transformed it from a sleek and sexy application to a cumbersome monster of unresponsiveness! Think about it: on those application what you like the most is the quick opening time, that you can rapidly peek at it and read an article while you are travelling or walking, and you want it to be fast!

Not sure if it had anything to do with my handset (HTC Desire HD), however it simply stopped doing the job for me. So I was eagerly looking for a substitute application, which I ultimately found this morning, and the name is Google Currents. The app promises a lot at least in its headline:

Beautiful, free, favorite publications for your phone and tablet.
Google Currents delivers beautiful magazine-like editions to your tablet and smart phone for high-speed and offline reading.

And I have to say that so far I have been impressed. It's quite easy to compose up your reader, including the feeds and sources, as well as importing anything for Google Reader for instance. The interface is pretty elegant and quick, and includes some features worth of note, such as the "Skip" button when opening and updating a source: the app waits for a few second, then if the loading time is not ideal (for instance you may be in a poor signal area) it provides you a way to skip the refresh and go directly into the articles that (hopefully) you preloaded silently while you were still in a Wi-Fi area.

The app is very quick, the font choices and size are very clean and the articles are split up and composed in a visually attractive way. Looking on the user reviews on the site however the application scores a paltry 3.9 / 5.0 at the moment of writing, and by reading the comments most of this is due to some missing features (read/unread for example) or because it is claimed that the application consumes too much memory when putting together the offline reading edition. I haven't had a chance to prove and test myself the last claim for instance, however so far I am quite happy with it.

And you, what readers do you use for Android? Do you have any specific preference?