Fast and personal – not a bad way to get your news. And when you are reading it on the Number One Consumption Tool available today, it doesn’t get much better. Hitpad is another news reading app for the iPad, yes. But the slick app offers “bite-sized” news nuggets of the top stories, that get better and more personalized to your tastes the more you use and interact with the app. Hitpad culls from many major news sources, so you are getting a broader feed. And the app distinguishes itself from the burgeoning pack by (in its own words) offering the following:

• Hitpad is a rich visual dashboard that tells you what are the most important things you should know today in your areas of interest
• Hitpad is instrumentation by measuring, analyzing and determining what is important to consume in order to minimize reverb and improve discovery
• Hitpad is agnostic to the publishers that are providing the data
• Hitpad is tuned and personalized based on your interests

Hitpad is very visual (a big plus for me) and looks a bit like a Tweetdeck for news. But it does it one better by curating based on your uses and interests. And it is fast – the first layer shows a single sentence that gets to the heart of the story so you can skim a wide field, but you can still drill down to get more if a particular blurb piques your interest.

And, best of all, its free.

If you are looking for a cool newsy add for your cool new iPad, this might be a winner. Slice and dice through your news with Hitpad.