Have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch and curious which are the best, most must-have RSS feed reading apps you need to check out? We’ve already covered readers in general, from eBooks to comics, but this time we really wanted to focus on RSS news. So if you want to keep your syndication really simple, and yourself up to date with the latest new, read on for TiPb’s top 5 most recommended RSS feed readings apps for iOS.

NetNewsWire for iPhone, iPad

NetNewsWire is the granddaddy of iOS RSS readers and is still a favorite for many. It syncs with Google Reader, and while in version past that was a laborious process, improvements to both the app and iOS have made it much smoother these days. It’s now been given a whole new codebase and has been picked up by a new team of dedicated developers so its quite possible grandaddy might just become the new, fresh kid on the block as well.

Rather than a universal binary for both iPhone and iPad, NetNewsWire has separate apps for both. There is, however, a free version for iPhone with ads that you can try before you buy. If you want a great way to organize and chew through your Google Reader-synced RSS feeds, give NetNewsWire a look.

• Free – iPhone App Store link
• $4.99 – iPhone App Store link
• $9.99 – iPad App Store link

The Early Edition for iPad

The Early Edition was one of the first RSS readers available for iPad when it launched and it’s still iPad-exclusive to this day. Beautifully rendered in a newspaper-style motif, it won’t sync with Google Reader but will import your feeds to get you started. You can flip pages in the same way you can in iBooks, and there’s a familiar Action button to share your favorites.

Just like iPad itself, The Early Edition isn’t meant to be an on-the-go, breaking news reader. It’s meant for when you want to relax. When you have your feet up and a glass of wine or a latte close at hand. It’s for when you have time to just enjoy your feeds.

• $4.99 – iPad App Store link

Reeder for iPhone, iPad

Reeder manages to sync with Google Reader but without the slowdown many other apps seem to experience. Indeed, for a sync-enabled app, it’s smoking fast. It presents everything in a clean, clear interface that doesn’t seek to ground you in tradition or wow you with modern effects.

If you just want to power through news on the go, get in, get informed, and get back out, Reeder is a great way to do just that. It’s not a universal binary, however, which means you’ll have to buy it separately for iPhone and for iPad.

• $4.99 – iPad App Store link
• $2.99 – iPhone App Store link

Flipboard for iPad

Flipboard is a fun, fancy way to not only keep up with your Google Reader RSS feeds, but also Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more. And that’s both a blessing and a curse. If all you want is your news, just the facts and fast, then Flipboard may be eye-candy-coated social overkill. However, if you prefer your news filtered through your social networks, if you value sharing as much as gathering, the Flipboard can be a blast.

Because of all of the above, it feels better suited for quickly glancing through tons of content than for deep diving and focusing on news reading, but it’s also free so you have nothing to lose by trying it. Except your time…

• Free – iPad App Store link

Pulse for iPad

When Pulse debuted it seemed like the RSS feed reader someone in the Star Trek universe would use. Geometric, colorful, and elegant its a mosaic view of your news and a great way to browse all the laster stories. Pulse doesn’t sync with Google Reader but rather lets you import your feeds so you start off with the sites you want, where you want them.

While Pulse isn’t a universal binary for iPhone and iPad, it is free so there’s no pain or price involved in trying it out on all your iOS devices.

• Free – iPhone App Store link
• Free – iPad App Store link

Your top apps?

So there you have them, our top 5 best RSS feed reader apps to get you going. Be sure to check out our Picks of the Week and iPad App and Games Forum for more recommendations, and if we missed any of your favorites leave them in the comments below!

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad’s Pick: Lumines

This week I am picking Q Entertainment’s Lumines. This game came out a little while ago with poor fanfare due to the horrible controls. Good news? There is now and update that fixes these issues and this game is now a pleasure to play. You even have in-app purchasing for additional theme packs. The music is not as good as the original IMO, but still fun!! [$2.99 - iTunes link]

Chris’ Pick: BitFlip

BitFlip is a matching/lineup style game in the style of bejeweled, where you try to match up tiles with the same color and shape. It is a little more complicated however, because in addition to swapping two tiles to line them up, you can also “flip” them to change the tiles. With two play modes, an easy interface, smooth graphics, a fun sound track, and a $1.99 price tag, it’s a fun game for those that enjoy the Trism/Bejeweled style games. [$1.99 - iTunes link]

James’ Pick: TripIt

As a consultant, I am on the road each week. In order to keep my life organized, I would always enter my trip details (hotel info, flight numbers, etc.) into calendar entries. TripIt makes my life easier by automatically creating my trip entries for me. The service syncs with various iPhone apps like FlightTrack Pro [$9.99 - iTunes link] and they even have their own free app. If you don’t have any room for one more app, you can subscribe to an iCal feed right on your iPhone. Perfect for the road warrior. [Free - iTunes link]

Leanna’s Pick: KENKEN

As someone who loves math and anything involving logical thinking, I am quite the sudoku fan. KENKEN took it to the next level. Just as with sudoku, each row and column must contain every number exactly once with the additional requirement that the bolded groups of blocks must add, subtract, divide, or multiply into a specific number. I love a great challenge and KENKEN is a great way to get that brain working and have fun at the same time. [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick: Pocket Tunes Radio

II was initially wary of purchasing Pocket Tunes as there where other apps at a much cheaper price, however, more recently Pocket Tunes made some significant changes and addons that blows all other competition out of the water – with the ability to play streams in the background, record your favorite stations(& play them back later), and the ability to play AAC+ audio ($3 in-app purchase, but highly recommended), and if you have sirus/XM subscription, pocket tunes will play that as well! Quite frankly I got rid of my XM subscription because I could use Pocket Tunes instead! [$6.99 - iTunes link]

Rene’s Pick: NetNewsWire Free/Premium

I need to keep up with RSS, and I’ve tried every RSS reader on the iPhone. Each have their pros and cons, each makes a tradeoff somewhere between interface and feature sets, and while I wish I could just stuff several in a Hadron-esque collider and god-particle myself the one perfect reader, they just won’t (and shouldn’t) grant me access to CERN. So, I’ve been using NetNewsWire Premium a lot lately, simply because it gives me my Google Reader-synced news fast enough, lets me see the most recent updates across all my feeds, allows me to star and email out complete articles, and/or save them to Instapaper for later offline perusal. It’s not perfect, but perfectly usable for me, for now. [$4.99 - iTunes link] or [Free - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

NetNewsWire [Free with ads - iTunes link] and NetNewsWire Premium [$1.99 - iTunes link] for iPhone, the mobile version of NetNewsWire for Mac and FeedDemon for Windows, have just hit 2.0 and brings a lot of compelling features to the table — especially for RSS geeks:

• Google Reader sync including Starred items synchronization
• Twitter integration – send articles as tweets
• Instapaper integration
• Latest News view –
• New article view
• New up and down arrows for navigating through news list
• Title and date of most recent item on Feeds screen.
• Excerpts and dates on news item lists
• Send articles via email without leaving NetNewsWire

It’s enough that I’m finally going to go all in on Google Reader and NNW 2.0 (at least for the next week — we’ll see if it sticks).

Screens after the break. If you give NetNewsWire 2.0 a go as well, let us know what you think.

I must admit, I’ve stopped using NetNewsWire on my iPhone because I’ve just found it unmanageable. What was an awesome fire hose on my Mac just threatened to drown me on the much smaller machine. Enter Daring Fireball’s John Gruber with some awesome tips on making NetNewsWire on the iPhone far more functional:

What I want in an iPhone feed reader isn’t just a little bit different than what I want in a Mac feed reader, it’s a lot different. So what I did last week was start over from scratch on the iPhone. Rather than going through my full list of feeds and turning some off, I turned them all off, then went through and re-enabled about 20 feeds — the ones I like best, with the highest signal-to-noise ratios, and which would be most enjoyable in those I’m bored, give me something to read moments.

Now NetNewsWire is both snappier for him and more relevant to a mobile experience.

I tried it and I’m loving it. If you give it a try, let me know how it works for you!