With 24-hour news cycles bombarding our eyes with headlines every second, it can be overwhelming to try and keep up with the main news of the day, let alone digesting it beyond a scrolling headline or RSS link. Wouldn't it be nice if someone would just summarize it all for us in small bites that still left us satisfied?

The aptly-named Summly tries its best to do just that. With a Neuro-Linguistics Programming and Artificial Intelligence-powered algorithm (seriously), Summly peruses a plethora of sources to curate 400-character summaries of the day's hottest stories that fit neatly on the iPhone screen, without needing to scroll. It's as incredible as it sounds.

Summly's sparse cover page features a single "trending" story with a number that relays how many stories are available to read inside. Content is arranged by categories (which are customizable) containing up to 20 "summlys," which are generated from a series of chosen feeds. Tapping the tiny unread counter retrieves the story list, and another tap on a headline retrieves the summarized blurb.

But what sounds useful in theory gets a little lost in the translation. For one, the interface -- while certainly slick -- doesn't quite live up to the promise of its remarkable demo video. An over-reliance on gestures makes things needlessly frustrating, as swiping in various directions does numerous things, but none of them are particularly intuitive. There's no way to distinguish unread headlines or rank sources, and refreshing a category (more swiping) rarely brought up headlines that weren't several hours old. And while Summlys are very easy to read (though punctuation was an occasional issue), they usually didn't expound the story beyond a subhead.

The bottom line. Summly is a fine idea, but in this case the whole is better than its parts.