When I initially tried the Flipboard beta, I wasn't too keen on it. But I've been experimenting more with Flipboard now that it's had an official release, and I actually think it's an awesome app. You just have to use it in the correct way.
Here's a few things that I would suggest:
1. Link your social accounts. Especially Twitter, if you use it. As far as I can tell, Flipboard uses Twitter as its primary form of social infrastructure. If you're browsing through articles, and one of them has been linked to by a friend on Twitter, it'll show what that person said at the bottom of the screen. Also, while I can't be sure, I suspect that it prioritises articles linked to by people you follow in Twitter when you browse through the "Cover Stories" section. And of course, if you link it to your Twitter account it also makes it very easy to tweet about any articles that you find interesting. In summary, I wouldn't use this as my primary Twitter client, but if you already use Twitter it's a great companion app.
2. If possible, only add souces that are optimised for Flipboard. This is slightly tricky, because the "optimised" sources aren't labelled as such in the app. The only way you can find out is by adding a source and seeing whether it displays text using the generic web view, or the cool flipping effect. Or, alternatively, check out the
Flipboard website and see who their official partners are. In general, sources that are Flipboard-optimised tend to load faster, look better, and are easier to read.
3. If you have a large phone such as the Galaxy Nexus, SGS3 or One X, try reducing the size of the text to "small" in the settings menu. One of the things that initially irritated me about Flipboard was the extremely low information density, but this fixed it. You may even want to try this if you have a smaller device.
3. An extension of point #2: in general, I find that Flipboard works better when you add your own sources rather than using using the content aggregators that Flipboard provides. Some examples of sources I've added: The Atlantic, The Economist, Al Jazeera, BBC World, The New Yorker, Salon, The Verge, Wired, Engadget, Popular Science, The Telegraph, National Geographic, and several others. These cover most of the topics I'm interested in (politics and technology mostly). And all of them are Flipboard-optimised. But there are lots of publications that are optimised for Flipboard these days, so you can probably find sources to suit a fairly diverse set of interests. That said, I do wish there were a few South African sources that optimised for Flipboard; the Daily Maverick would be nice.
4. Connect Flipboard to your "read later" account (ie Pocket, Instapaper or Readability). (And if you don't have an account with one of these services, you should totally get one.) I find that even when you set the text size to small, the overall reading experience on Flipboard isn't quite as good as it is on Pocket. And besides, often I'll see an interesting article on Flipboard that I want to save for later, but in the meantime I also want to keep on browsing. In that case, I just save to Pocket and move on. Sometimes, Flipboard feels more like a tool for discovering new content than for actually reading it.
Since I've been using it like this, Flipboard has rapidly become one of the most frequently-used apps on my phone. In fact, I'm once again starting to lust over the idea of buying a tablet, just because I'm assuming the Flipboard experience must be so much better on a tablet. (And surely a version for Android tablets is coming soon, right?)
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