If you’re looking for an alternative to the newly redesigned Google Reader for your iOS device, Newstream might be a good option.

The app turns feeds of any type into a clean newspaper layout, much like Flipboard does on the iPad. It’s simple, yet extremely functional at the same time. The design is a bit reminiscent of recently updated Instapaper, but Newstream stands alone as a discovery app, not based on the premise of marking things to read later.

Discovering feeds to read on Newstream

RSS feeds haven’t been the most consumer friendly technology. Most people don’t understand the technology behind what an RSS feed is, so Newstream takes that confusion out of the equation. Simply search for things or publications that interest you and add it to your saved feeds.

Newstream lets you turn images off, and asks you whether you want to see a full story or just a summary. Not a lot of options here, but it’s well executed.

Reading your news

When you open Newstream, you can swipe from right to left to cycle through your subscriptions. It’s nice to have a mix of blogs as well as Twitter feeds, as everything shows up in the same clean design.

Once you’ve read an article you can Tweet it, email, or post it to Facebook. The simplicity of Newstream shines through here, not giving you a lot of useless bells and whistles. The newspaper-like layout is easy on the eyes at any brightness level, and the Flipboard style swiping lets you consume a lot of information quickly.

Once in a while you’ll catch Newstream showing random HTML tags, but that’s easy to overlook and doesn’t seem to be a huge issue.

After spending a few days with Newstream, I’ve decided that it’s the easiest way to add more publications to my reading on the go. It also gave me the opportunity to start from scratch with my reading list, which was nice. There’s no desktop version or way to manage your subscriptions online though, which is a plus of a service like Google Reader. The app is $2.99, and will serve you well if you’re suffering from information overload.

Google announced some upcoming upgrades to its Google Reader product today on its blog, here are some details:

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

Using Reader for your RSS feeds has been simple enough, but since Google+ was introduced, there has been a major disconnect between the two products. Luckily, Google hasn’t forgotten about Reader, and is making sweeping changes.

If you prefer to take your feeds elsewhere and aren’t interested in its new upgrade, Google says you can take your feeds with you and points out that “your data belongs to you, after all”.

We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

• Your subscriptions
• Your shared items
• Your friends
• Your likes
• Your starred items

Sharing news easily with your circles is what Google+ has been missing, and should be a welcomed with open arms by publishers everywhere. Copying and pasting links into Google+ or even using the +1 button on individual stories has most definitely slowed down the flow of news in streams. This will kick things up quite a bit.