With the number of Honeycomb tablets steadily making their way onto the market, it is always welcome to see more apps being supported on the latest iteration of Android’s OS. The latest of these is Google Reader, the search giant’s own RSS aggregator and feed reader. The first improvement is the all important new layout that caters to the OS and takes advantage of tablets that are 10.1” (including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Acer Iconia A500).

The two pane layout – with categories on the left and items on the right – is a familiar one, as it shares its look and feel with its desktop counterpart. In our test, it worked flawlessly in portrait and landscape view on our tablet, and seemed to make good use of the screen real estate on offer.

Additionally, the update also brings an improved manner of marking which items have been read. This can quickly become an issue when you are updating your reader several times during the day. This is done by holding and pressing an item, which brings up a context menu. From here, you can choose to ‘star’, like, share, tag or add a note to items. Users can also mark individual items as read from the context menu, which replaces the ‘Mark previous as read’ button.

Updating from the old version took us a few seconds, but once installed, the updated reader flowed news to fit the screen as well as we could have hoped, while offering a speedy response and navigation. Additionally, we did find the updated Google Reader to be a bit more stable, as well as ‘cleaner’ in its appearance.

While Google Reader, which was launched at the end of last year, is by no means the only aggregator available, we still appreciated the upgrade, and only hope that more Android apps receive the Honeycomb treatment sooner rather than later. The Google Reader is still a free download on the Android Market.     

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