If you’ve been looking
for a new way form of entertainment for your commute, your morning jog, or your
time at the gym, iOS and Android users can take advantage of a new free app,
Umano. The idea behind Umano couldn’t be simpler, and it’s surprising that no
one has thought of this before now. Umano has a team of professional voice
actors recording readings of articles from popular online sites and magazines
from around the Web. Bringing podcast or audiobook elements to the fast-paced
world of blogging and online articles makes perfect sense.
Signing up for an
account allows you to create a playlist and manage your favorite articles, but
the app is otherwise completely usable without signing up for an account. To
sign up for an account, you can log in using your Facebook credentials, or
create a new account with your email. The real advantage to creating a playlist
is that it gives users access to offline listening, perfect for keeping up with
the news on the go during your commute or at the gym.
After signing up for an
account (or skipping that step if you’re so inclined), you can access a variety
of articles either by popularity or by topics. The first part of the menu
features the most popular articles, your own playlist, and your likes (or
bookmarked articles). The second part of the menu features 6 topics (or
interests): entertaining, must know, geeky, entrepreneurial, inspirational and
scientific. The best place to start is to browse the popular articles. The list
included posts from Forbes, Science Daily, Flavorwire, Lifehacker, The New
Yorker and more.
To open up an article,
simply tap on the story and it will open up, and the reading will begin
straight away. Each article page is accompanied by a link to the full story,
which you can open up in the app’s native browser. It will also tell you which
‘channel’ (or in other words, website) the article appears in, and makes it
easy to look up more articles from that same site. Lastly, you can also easily
share articles directly from Umano to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or via email.
You can also add the article to your likes by hitting the like button
underneath the image accompanying the article.
To add an article to
your playlist, double tap the story and it will be added, making it available
for offline listening. When you first access your playlist after adding
articles to it, you can choose to automatically download articles for offline
listening. If you choose not to automatically download articles, you can always
go to the app settings at a later time to switch this option on, and to
restrict downloading to WiFi connections only. Other app settings include
automatically playing the next article when listening to a channel, receiving
daily reminders, and automatically sharing your likes or listens with your Facebook
friends. Now for the most important aspect of the app – listening to articles.
Because the articles are read by real people, rather than relying on a robotic
voice, it’s no different to listening to a podcast. It makes for easy
listening, and brings the same idea of audio books to your favorite online
sources, no matter what your interests happen to be. We couldn’t be happier
with the way that articles are read on Umano, and appreciate the fact that the
source of the article is mentioned in the intro, meaning you don’t have to
worry about looking at your smartphone screen to know which site or magazine is
behind the article you’re listening to.
The choice of sources
on Umano are also pretty solid. The most popular sites and magazines are
included, but if there’s one feature we wouldn’t mind seeing – it would be a
way to search for articles or sources. It also isn’t entirely clear how
articles are selected from each site.
These are, of course,
minor nitpicks when it comes to the overall experience that Umano provides. The
app itself is slick and intuitive, but more importantly, the listening
experience is enjoyable. At this point, it’s hard to imagine what our commutes
were like prior to Umano.
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