We're living in the golden age of online content, a time when there's an extraordinary number of excellent sites, blogs, and vlogs to visit on a daily or weekly basis. RSS reader Feedly (free) lets Android tablet and smartphone users stay on top of the latest updates from their favorite online publications by pulling stories into a clean, distraction-free interface. Feedly works well for the most part, but confusing navigation and some freezing issues prevent it from ranking as an elite app.

The Feedly Feel

Your first course of action is to decide whether you want to create a Feedly account. You should. You don't need to log in to read content, but there's a significant benefit that comes with logging into Feedly with your Evernote, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Twitter credentials: You can save sites to your Feedly list and sync them across multiple devices. If RSS is your primary method of receiving online content, I highly recommend creating an account.

Unfortunately, navigating Feedly on my Samsung Galaxy Note II was a confusing experience—at least at the start. Some pages require tapping the Back button to back out to a previous screen; others require hitting the X button. There are pages with full-screen images that link to one story, and there are pages with the expected multiple images and links. Feedly could greatly benefit from a more consistent user interface experience. Flipboard, the PCMag Editors' Choice among mobile reading apps, tops Feedly in this regard. Its panel-driven interface is straightforward and simple to understand. Likewise, the redesigned Digg mobile reader has a very simple, but effective, interface that you can easily grasp upon booting up the app.

Content, Content, Content

Conversely, adding content to Feedly is quite intuitive. Tapping Add Website launches a panel that showcases Feedly's recommended sites such as Smitten Kitchen and Seth Grodin. Feedly also contains numerous Starter Kits, categories that contain similarly themed sites such as Cooking or Video Games. You can, of course, key in an URL.

Sites are listed in a vertical column that display their logos, number of subscribers, and + icons. The + icon saves a site to your account; tapping the logo launches a page. Like Digg, Feedly displays stripped down, uncluttered pages that are filled with text and images—no adds or extra graphical elements. It's very easy on the eye.

Depending on the source, Feedly displays pages in their entirety or truncated with an icon that requires that you visit the true site page (so that the source gets the page view and ad load). You can share pages to Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, and other destinations. Feedly, thankfully, doesn't pull in your buddies' tweets and updates—something that's one of the noisier elements of the Flipboard experience.

Feedly has a surprising number of useful options that let you customize the reading experience. For example, the default reading setting is black text on a white background, but if you're in a dark environment, you may want to go with the alternate theme designed for night reading: white text on a black background. You can also rearrange the article order, label stories as Must Read, and more.

Freezing Issues

Unfortunately, pleasant reading moments were often interrupted by Feedly locking up for seconds at a time in my testing. Every app has the occasional wonky moment, but Feedly's freezing issues occurr more frequently than I can tolerate. Hopefully an update will eliminate this problem in the near future. Digg, on the other hand, runs superbly on my mobile device; I experience very few hiccups.

The Finale

Feedly is a free and relatively simple to use mobile RSS reader, but Flipboard remains the PCMag Editors' Choice due to its superior performance, intuitive interface, and special features (such as the option to create shareable, curated magazines).  If you're looking for a more basic RSS reader that doesn't have an unusual amount of potentially distracting bells and whistles, you should check out Digg's app, too. Feedly's decent, but there are better options.

For more on RSS readers, check out Get Organized: Streamline Your News Feed and 10 Great Google Reader Replacements.