TED 2.4.5

One of mankind’s best inventions, video on demand is one of the easiest ways to learn anything about stuff. That’s because most of the information we feed to our brains comes through our eyes, making it not only the best learning method, but also the fastest.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, TED is not featured in the same category as YouTube,VEVO and Hulu.Despite being a VOD service, it differs from these through one key strength: content. TED has been around for much longer than you’d care to imagine, but it’s been desktop-bound for most of its existence. Thanks to the introduction of smartphones and tablets, however, TED has grown to reach unimaginable heights, delivering its massive collection of riveting talks to almost any place on Earth.

Flat, iOS7-inspired UI

Upon launching TED, a loading screen precedes the Featured listing, showing a key point from a random talk. Like most VOD apps, TED then proceeds to display a main page featuring the latest added content, where you can choose from a wide range of talks on an even wider range of topics.

At the bottom you have the aforementioned Featured tab, which works much like the one in Apple’s iTunes, and the Surprise Me tab, which lets serendipity guide you to a playlist of undiscovered talks with the option to select the time you have on your hands to watch something awesome.

The Discover tab lets you to choose the subject you’d like to learn about on that particular occasion, such as Invention, Corruption, Communication, and others. At the top of each talk there’s a pair of headphones that brings out only the audio in that particular talk, and more options can be found below the video preview, such as download, bookmark, and share.

My Talks is the place where you’ll find your downloaded / bookmarked talks, while each video comes with a brief description of what you’re about to see. The trusty search Option allows avid users to look up famous talks by famous people.

Enchanting talks from the world's most knowledgeable people

The magic of TED lies not within the navigation of its UI, which flows faster than Niagara Falls, but within the awesome content it hosts. You can use it to tap the brilliant minds of nobel prize winners and unknown thinkers, learn about the importance of team work, sensibility, courage, desire to achieve your goals, verified formulas to grow a business, little known information about clean energy or outer space, alternatives to plastic and the next-generation of computer chips, pretty much anything you can think of.

Don’t be surprised to see your favorite singer, actor, TV celeb or scientist in one of the talks. Chances are you’ll get to know them on a whole different level.

Think of TED as Wikipedia on video. Instead of reading through pages and pages of text, you get to hear actual experts weigh in on global matters, each talk featuring humor and catchy slideshows to ignite the audience.

Not a native English speaker? Is the talk in a language that you don’t fully understand? No problem. Once you start your video, the three-dotted bubble hides various subtitle options for the most commonly spoken languages.

The iPad version of TED obviously leverages the increased screen real estate to display more talks in a cleaner, more spaced-out manner. Some of the areas are slightly different because of the difference in screen size, but overall TED is pretty much the same shebang on both iPhone and iPad. The biggest benefit of using TED on iPad is the viewing area and battery life.

The video streaming app has received Chromecast support, which means you’ll be able to check out your favorite videos on the big screen TV as well, which is obviously great especially if you own the $35 Google dongle. You may cast TED talks, playlists, and even Surprise Me playlists.

Add to watchlist:

Reference

• NeuroNation 1.4.22
• Clarify 1.4.1
• Goodreads – Book Recommendations and Reviews for great Books and eBooks 3.1.4

Portable version:

• TED for Android