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There’s no shortage of news apps for the iPad, but few of these, including the kind you pay for, are worth the electrons used to make them. If you’re a multi idevice kind of girl, or guy, one of the best has gone universal while bringing some new and newsy features.

SkyGrid for iPad 1.5 (iTunes, free), an app that’s been on my home screen since it launched, represents a significant advance for this top-shelf news tasting, consumption and sharing app.

• Now universal; runs natively on iPhone, iPod touch, too
• Faster article loading
• More web sources
• Easier user interface
• Simpler saved searches

In a short hands on, I found the layout to be cleaner and load times were indeed faster. Also, yes, saving searches is easier as any search generates a button, so you can save with a single tap.

If there are more web sources, it’s hard to tell — not a bad thing — because SkyGrid’s been steadily adding and tweaking it sources from the beginning.

On the user interface front, sending a story via email on the iPad seems a good deal nicer with this release as they’ve scrubbed the boilerplate out and tastefully rejiggered the remaining text while leaving a big “paste text here” whitespace — thanks, guys.

The fire hose in your pocket

Again, the headline feature is that SkyGrid is now universal, which means it’s designed to run natively on an iPhone or iPod touch. Naturally, the UI has been completely redesigned and, as you can gather from the above, it’s slick n’ easy.

Given that my wife is known to abscond with the iPad, the availability of SkyGrid for iPod touch is gonna make those times a good bit more bearable.