Little Boat Studios, formerly ReFocus Tech, has now released a new app for BlackBerry 10 called Ripple. Ripple aims to offer you a new and unique way to get the latest news by introducing a predictive chat based feature that helps you browse through the top eight headlines every hour.
Features:
- Ripple provides you with 8 things happening at this hour.
- Ripple provides you with a chat based interface apart from the 8 news every hour.
- The Chat based news reader allows you to interact with news and read more about them.
- Ripple allows you to change the preferences you set for the news you receive including the country and the type of news.
- Ripple allows you to read in the selected country language.
Ripple is only supported in USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, India, Brazil, Germany, France, Indonesia, South Africa, Czech Republic and the Philippines, for now, but Little Boat Studios does note they're looking to add more supported countries as soon as possible. If you're interested in Ripple, it's available right now through BlackBerry World for $2.99 and while this isn't a review of Ripple, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it does feel somewhat incomplete. Much like the additional country support, Little Boat Studios notes they're working on additional chat functionality, and I can see why.
Right now, the chat based portion of the app isn't really chat based in the fact you're never really 'chatting' with anything. Whether you select the feed mode of getting news or go with the chat based option, you're still only tapping the next button to retrieve your next headline. Sure, it feels a slight bit more interactive because it plays along with you and asks you whether or not you'd like to subscribe to different types of news but ultimately, it's the same method of showing you the news as feed mode. I've put together a quick little video of Ripple in action that will hopefully make things a bit clearer.
To sum it up, Ripple is a nice looking and functioning native app that does deliver the news in a more interactive way, but I'm not sold on the chat based side of it yet. Hopefully, Little Boat Studios will continue adding more functions to that area as stated.
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