UPDATE: Google went ahead and announced it. Details here.

Remember back in September when there were reports coming out of Google working on a Flipboard competitor under the codename “Propeller”?

Now, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, the product may launch as soon as Friday, and it is called Currents.

I know what you’re thinking. Doesn’t Google already have a news reader called Google Reader? The answer is yes. Yes it does.

But the trend these days is all about the sleek, visual magazine style news-reading experience – particularly on tablets, which is apparently what the product is targeted at. Robert Scoble said back in September that it would be targeted at the iPad and Android.

Flipboard itself just put out an iPhone app, after being exclusively an iPad app in the past, so it will be interesting to see if Currents is available for phones. My guess is that it will. Particularly when it comes to Android, we need more apps that work just as well from a small phone to a bigger-screen phone, to a small tablet like the Kindle Fire to a larger tablet to a big flat screen TV.

Hopefully Currents will achieve that, and hopefully it will work let you import your Google Reader data (I can only assume that it will). If it doesn’t, it will be interesting to see how many Reader users abandon that in favor of Currents. That will be interesting to see either way actually.

Google Reader only recently got a more Google+-friendly design of its own. For that matter, it wasn’t really that long ago when it finally got an Android app.

Here’s a video for Flipboard on the iPad, to give you an idea of the kind of experience Google may have lined up: