Editions by AOL Review

The iPad seems to be at its best when it becomes your de facto, personalized news device. There are apps aplenty that seek to fill our voracious need to know everything as it happens--Flipboard and Zite, for starters, but AOL tweaks the formula a bit in a bid to entice you to their side. Are the new features potent enough, though, to make you want to switch?

In the olden days, we had to wait for the news. Whether we regularly watched the evening news on TV or looked forward to flipping through the daily paper, we were informed of the day's happenings in just a few sittings. Now, with a near infinite number of news websites and 24-hour cable news networks, we don't have to do that. News aggregator apps have further streamlined the process, creating a one-stop shop for anything and everything we care to read.

Editions by AOL looks to the future by molding itself after the past. Instead of updating every time a new story hits the presses, it updates once per day--at a time of your choosing--creating a newspaper/magazine hybrid that delivers all the top headlines from your desired sources and interests.

In theory, this is great. Editions quells the desire to have to always be plugged in. In that regard, it's sort of like The Daily, only without the original content and with no price tag attached. In reality, it falls in a number of areas.

Also like The Daily, actually getting to your content takes a several minutes. Once your edition is ready (you can get notified via a push notification), you load the app and wait. For minutes. Not only do you get a loading screen, but you get TWO loading screens. The first one is like an evil trick; you think it's going to be ready, but it's just a tease.

Once your content loads, the layout is beautiful. The top headlines from a variety of sources are nicley laid out--including local news, which is great--and you can add a splash of color to the design as it suits your mood. It's not entirely different from Flipboard. Unfortunately, your ability to control your sources is highly limited. The app provides you with default choices, and you can suggest others. However, if they are not in a predefined list, you're out of luck. Forget about syncing your favorite, obscure website.

Like Zite, you can rate stories so that other similar ones are more likely to appear. You can also let it know, based on keywords, what kind of stories to show and which to avoid. In practice, though, this is thoroughly confusing. There's a checkbox and an X--sounds simple enough--but if you tap too much, the keyword disappears, which makes it seem like your choice is now committed to permanent memory. This is not really the case, but for casual users, this is going to be annoying.

Editions may look nice and offer a more periodical-style take on news apps, it gets far too much else wrong. There are better options, equally free, that just do the job better. If these aren't broke, why try to fix them?