A few days ago Google launched its online news reader Fast Flip. The Internet giant launched the product to make reading news online as comfortable and faster as flipping through the pages of a print magazine, at least the official GoogleBlog says so.

Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.

When I got the news (coincidentally through Google News) I headed straight to get a first-hand experience. Yes, the page loads fast, but does it allow you to flip through the various news pages like a newspaper or a magazine? At present, no. It actually gives you screenshots of the news pages on a single page, allowing you to scan through several pages--only if you have an eye sight that allows you to read tiny prints. The screenshots of the pages are what will grab the attention of your eyes but they fail miserably to let you see the headlines and other details as the pages are squeezed into 200px by 220px images. You end up taking help of the secondary element on the Fast Flip page--the text headlines below the screenshots--which obstructs the normal flow of eyes.

Designers often appreciate Google's search page's design, particularly the huge text box for entering search queries. But ask any graphic designer about Fast Flip, and Google's new venture that is out to offer netizens the comfort of print in their Web Browsers, will hardly be appreciated.

Let's get past this. When you click on one of the screenshots of the news pages, you end up on another page with a bigger screenshot where fonts are of the size that human eyes can read. But as soon as you want to read the remaining portion of the news, you are transported to the original page.

What does this mean. After going merry-go-round with Google Fast Flip, I end up on the same "media-rich page" that "loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband". And I took this detour with Fast Flip just to save some time!

Couldn't I just subscribe to the feeds of those important news sites? That would have been a lot better. I could have read the entire news in my RSS reader or at least would have been directed straight to the "media-rich" page without ending up on some intermediary page that provides me just half the news. What do you say?