Tips on using Blinkfeed on the HTC One

HTC's fabulous new "One" phone has a few tricks that extensive market research has led them to create.  Blinkfeed is one of the most misunderstood and panned features of the new phone.  It actually has some neat little features that never noticed and learned through hard experience.  These features make Blinkfeed much more useful than they appear.  My experience is that it runs faster than Flipboard and integrates with other apps (something Flipboard can't do).  One of the first things I must tell you (as I couldn't figure it out myself) is that tapping the notification bar on your phone returns you to the top of the Blinkfeed page.  This is huge because, waiting in line, you can easily scroll down ten pages of stories and social updates and you don't want to have to swipe your phone 10 times to get back to your clock!

Your Blinkfeed landing screen (homepage)

The first thing you'll see is this the landing page for Blinkfeed:
From here, you can click on the time to go to the clock or the weather (sunny in Seattle...can you believe it???) to open the weather app.  Tap on any news story to expand it.  Simple and quick.









To the left, I've clicked on the top story from Engadget.  From here, you get a nice, scrolling view of the story.  Videos usually work from within here and the feeds from selected partners looks very clean and nice.  You can adjust the font size from the menu on the top right of the screen.  You can share to social networks using the share button on the bottom.  This button disappears but reappears on a single tap within the news article.






Tapping on the feed logo (in this case, the Engadget logo on the top of the story) takes me to an Engadget only feed.  This is very useful to get to just the stories from a selected source.  Unfortunately, this is for selected partners only at this point...you can't do this on your social app feeds (like Facebook) because tapping on those simply opens the app and takes you to that post.  HTC promises updates to Blinkfeed in the coming months...they've already released a software update to the rest of the world but the US has to wait for carrier approval (T-Mobile, AT&T, etc.) before the updates hit US phones.  The update doesn't improve Blinkfeed, but shows that HTC is serious about getting updates out quickly.

Dragging a half inch down reveals
Blinkfeed options.

Want to post to your social account straight from your homescreen?  Blinkfeed will do that for you.  Simply drag the feed screen down about a half inch and you get the options menu in between the clock and your feeds.  Click on the pencil for a quick post.  In the captures, I've selected Facebook and it presents the blank screen with a "Post to" button.  This allows me to (by default) post on my wall or (by clicking the button and selecting) post on a friend's wall.  No opening any apps.  This is a neat feature to get right to business when you need to post something in a hurry.  Of course, you can share an article if you find something interesting.

This is the Facebook post screen.
The Twitter one looks nicer.  The
"Post To" button allows you to
select a friend so you can post on
their wall.

Lastly, clicking on the feed list can narrow down what you want to see.  It defaults to Highlights which is the coolest feature.  Highlights will draw your social feeds, your calendar appointments, and your TV listings (once you set up the TV app...another wholly awesome feature that I hope to write about soon) and news feeds into one continuous magazine.  If you are in the mood for NFL only news, you can tap the top left and get your selector drop-down and select just NFL news and your feed will switch in real time to the news you want.

Hopefully, you don't just skip Blinkfeed and give it a try before you pass on it.  Ultimately, you can set it to be a secondary screen on your phone so you can swipe over to it.  It's not a big deal and still gives you what you need quickly.

Here's a link to HTC's official story about it to get more information:
http://blog.htc.com/2013/03/htc-one-blinkfeed/

Here's a link to buy the HTC One (I get no revenue from this, but I wholeheartedly endorse this phone!)
http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-one/?PS=1&cid=sem157p174347&gclid=CIDZxLP5i7cCFSU6Qgod93YApQ