StumbleUpon (for iPhone)

While I can't get enough of apps for productivity and organization, I'd be a sad, buttoned-up soul if I never kicked back with my iPhone once in a while. When browsing Web content is my activity of choice, I turn to StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a site and service that encourages you to explore your interests widely across the Web, and it does so on the iPhone with grace, making the StumbleUpon iPhone app a PCMag Editors' Choice.

Here's a quick overview of how StumbleUpon works. You create an account, input some information about yourself, and hit the "stumble" button to see a random page from the Web that meets your interests. For example, one of my interests on StumbleUpon is journalism, and when I explored for content recently in that vein, I found a TED Talk called "The news about the news," as well as a page from the Newseum's website showing front pages of major newspapers today. The more you use StumbleUpon, marking pages you like and dislike and connecting with friends who share your interests, the more savvy it becomes in delivering information, ideas, and images that appeal to you.

The StumbleUpon iPhone app benefits from a stellar design, making use of the iPhone's touch capabilities and screen size very well. It's almost, but not quite, as glamorously smooth and sophisticated as Flipboard's iPhone app. Sometimes pages load slowly in the mobile app, and I'd like to see the return of options to save pages for offline reading (which were removed in the latest version update) but those are only real complaints about the app, and they're minor, all things considered. The core experience is tight, making StumbleUpon one of the best leisure apps for the iPhone.

Stumbling
If you launch the app and log into your StumbleUpon account, the home screen is a welcoming place to land. Various boxes of content, all with rotating images, invite you to tap them to start stumbling for pages based on "content for you," "trending," "activity," or one of your interests.

The app lets you into your account profile and settings, so you can change your interests, update your headshot, and more. You can't customize everything about your account from the iPhone app--for example, you can't add or delete "channels" that you follow?but all the core functionality from the website version of StumbleUpon is intact. When you land on a page you like, you can mark it with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon, just as you can on the full StumbleUpon site. You can find people you know (via Contacts app, Facebook, Twitter) who might also be using StumbleUpon and follow their interests. All this activity and information feeds StumbleUpon's recommendation engine, which spits back at you amazingly well-curated content.

Given the nature of StumbleUpon, which is to show you websites and pages at random, it does a considerable job of displaying all these non-standardized pages. When you hit the stumble button, a preview of the page appears in the middle of the screen, with the category and title written below the thumbnail image. These previews help you decide when to wait for the page to load and when to keep stumbling, and the design here really mitigates any problem with page loading because at least you have something on screen. Page loading speeds only become noticeable in the more detailed sections of the app, like when you drill down to view content related to only one particular interest, or when you want to view only the pages you've marked as "like" in StumbleUpon. In my experience with the app, those pages took much longer to load, and the preview pane disappeared after a few seconds, leaving me looking at a blank page and progress bar at the top that filled ever so slowly.

Sharing
A sharing button gives you the most appropriate options first: send a link via email, share with another StumbleUpon user, post to Facebook or Twitter, and open in Safari. Gone are a few options that were previously available in the app, like read a page in Google Reader and save to Instapaper or the Read it Later app, which I would guess got nixed as a result of not enough Stumblers using them. With these save-for-later features kaput, I wish the Safari option had a one-touch ability to add it to the Safari reading list, as I often wanted to mark pages to read later and didn't like having to open the page in Safari first before saving it to the reading list.

Stumble To Go
StumbleUpon for iPhone has blossomed into a beautiful, compelling, and cerebral plaything, although a little bit of backend tweaking to make pages load faster would help it reach its full potential. Over the years, StumbleUpon's recommendations have become more nuanced and sophisticated, helping anyone and everyone discover new content on the Web that fits their interests and curiosity better than any other comparable service. Because it can also do so on a handheld mobile device gracefully, it's an Editors' Choice iPhone app.

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