Feedly, the app that plans to take the RSS reigns from Google Reader when it’s retired in July, released a new version of its app on Android this morning. Over the last two weeks, Feedly has added some 3 million new users thanks to Google’s announcement, prompting the team to quickly upgrade their apps to be much more polished, stable, and feature rich. After spending the weekend with this new version in place of Press (my usual RSS reader app), I can easily say that I’m a fan of what Feedly is up to. 

With Google intending to kill off Google Reader by July of this year, people in my industry are freaking out a bit. You see, we all live and die with RSS feeds as we browse dozens throughout the day to help us create the stories that we bring to you. But we’re a small group, as the comments on this site and Twitter have helped us realize. RSS feeds are not as popular as they once were – if they were, Google wouldn’t be killing off their famed service. Many of you have turned to Twitter, Pulse, Flipboard, Google Currents, or a variety of other services.

Speaking of Currents, I retweeted a comment this afternoon from a reader who suggested Google kill it off instead of Reader. As someone who rarely looks at Currents unless it has received an update, I fully agree with this person, however, many of you were quick to point out that you enjoy the service and would rather stick a needle in your eye than use Reader.

So that brought me to today’s poll – how are you gathering your news throughout the day? News readers? News gatherers like Pulse? Social media?

This afternoon, Google announced that they have more spring cleaning to do, which yes, means more closures of services that you probably use. In order to focus on making better products, they do not want to spread themselves too thin and have decided to eliminate a number of products. One of those is Google Reader. Yes, that Google Reader. The same one that you probably use to store all of your RSS feeds in. 

Press, our favorite feed reader application on Android, received an update today to add extension support for the hottest app on the block right now, DashClock. This new extension will show you unread counts for articles, as long as you have it set to sync automatically in the background. Otherwise, it’ll just show a “0″ until you manually refresh it.

In order to use this new extension, you’ll need Press and DashClock. With both installed, add DashClock to one of your lockscreens, press the “Add Another Extension” button, and then choose “Press.”

If you are a big feed or Google reader user, you should really check out Press even with its $2.99 price tag.

Play Link $2.99)

Cheers Michael K!

Press, the feed reader Android application that has quickly become a favorite of the DL staff, received a sizable update this afternoon. While the original release of the app grabbed our attention, it was still missing some pretty basic features that other feed reader applications have had for some time. Simple things like background syncing and auto-sync on app launch are just a couple. Those are now included, along with a new way to quickly navigate between articles, more detailed sharing to social networks, and new text-alignment options. 

Both Google Reader and Google Docs have updates available in the market as of the last hour. Each received an Ice Cream Sandwich makeover of sorts that includes swiping between stories or document categories, the same sharing options as you will see on new web versions, and prettier widgets. To be honest, the Reader update doesn’t look all that different, but the new Docs version most definitely resembles the look of G+ which was also recently updated.

Market Links:  Google Reader | Docs

Cheers Manny!

Hooray for more tablet apps!  The number of Honeycomb apps seems to be on the rise these days, but we could always use more, especially the apps we use on a daily basis.  Google Reader is by far my top choice for a feed reader, so I couldn’t be happier that it now looks tabletified.  Sure, there are plenty of spicy photo-centric readers like News360 and Pulse that get the job done – I just like my news simple.  If you want something without all the fluff and that reminds you of an in-browser reader, then this is a great choice.  

Go ahead and uninstall Pulse, Greed or any other RSS reader app you had installed on your phone as Google finally released their Reader which mimics the browser version perfectly.  OK, telling you to uninstall those other apps isn’t really fair, but after glancing at Google’s attempt for 5 minutes I can tell that this will immediately become my default.  It’s free, simple and has the backing of Google which means it should actually work correctly.

Grab it now!