I have both newsstand and manifesto. Newsstand was my primary rss feeds reader until recently when i've decided to remove newsstand from my iphone and use manifesto exclusively. I have a few reasons for my decision.
One is the fact that I didn't like the fact that newsstand capped the number of articles per feed to 50. When I asked the developer if we could have a setting to not cap the max number of articles but provide a setting by which we could specify number of days to have an article before auto removing the article.....this way the number of articles is controlled by how recent the article is, the developer's response was "I'll think about it". Can you imagine if email was capped to some hard number? if you are like me, i'm sure the number of articles is less important than how recent the articles are. Manifesto on the other hand will display all the articles for a feed going back to x days as per your setting. I also asked him to add time stamps to articles like manifesto has, and he questioned me on the "usefulness" of having a timestamp. Can you imagine if you had no notion of when an email was received other than the date? That is just unacceptable, and to be questioned as to why I would ask for it is ridiculous to say the least. I just didn't like the newsstand dev's attitude based on my correspondence with him.
Second, manifesto allows you to import your google feeds. This is key!!! There are enough reports of users of any application and newsstand is not immune to this, where during updates, data or settings get wiped out. If you have quite a number of feeds, to get them back into the app would be a manual pain in the ass. With manifesto, you just enter your google feeds login info and then select which feeds you want to import (or all) into your iphone. a quick 5 second process to get back up and running in case of data loss.
Third, after running both apps for sometime on my 3g iphone, i have to say manifesto seems much quicker in pulling down articles when compared to newsstand.
Fourth, the developer for manifesto will respond very quickly to questions and is very open to new ideas. I have corresponded with him on multiple occassions and he is working hard on closing the gaps where newsstand has advantages, namely, ability to organize feeds into folders. Also, a bug i pointed out was fixed in the most recent release. and another suggestion of mine will be fixed, where i mentioned too much of the title was "scrunched" up due to him using a screen wide column to hold dates in the aggregate view. he agreed and is looking to fix it.
As for the cover flow view of newsstand, as the previous poster said, it is just a gimmick. unlike him, i thought it was cool for a min or two then realized what a waste it was. when viewing it, and you drill down into an article you only get a partial text of the article, to read the full text you need to put the device in portrait mode. so the cover flow thing is limited in usefulness. in fact, if you read the reviews, enough people will mention cover flow is a waste.
So if you are like me and want to keep your master feeds on google reader, and use an app to pull in feeds to your reader, if you want time stamps in your articles, if you want to control articles pulled in not by # of articles but by how many days old they are, and if you want a dev open to suggestions and ideas, manifesto is the way to go.
hope this helped
