You’ve got Twitter, you subscribe to RSS and you can read the paper over someone’s shoulder on the bus, but sometimes you just want the facts from an established news outlet – and that’s where AP News comes in.
This standalone application functions as a virtual newspaper, giving you a customisable front page, in-depth sections, photos and video clips straight from ‘the wire’.
Associated Press is over 150 years old, with hundreds of news bureaus and thousands of journalists worldwide, although it still has a particularly strong US focus. The AP News app defaults to a front page showing multiple categories (general News, followed by Business, Sports, Technology and so on). There’s a short headline, occasionally with a tiny thumbnail image, and a link to the full story or to other stories in that category. There’s a weather icon at the very top of the screen, updated every few minutes.
At the bottom of each full story, you can rate it with one to five stars or choose to Share it via SMS, email, Twitter or Delicious. The left soft key opens a menu where you can navigate to sections or choose options. Here you can choose your news region (Europe, North America, Asia, Africa), edit your city for weather updates and enter your Twitter or Delicious log-ins.
As you might expect, news stories are mostly dry and factual, and while they haven’t been dumbed down for mobile access, they often aren’t edited either, giving screens and screens of text to scroll through. You can’t click through to any web URLs in the copy. There are also more serious drawbacks, such as buggy menus that don’t scroll, making it impossible to choose options from further down long lists, and repetitive ‘connection errors’ for some news categories.
We found the app’s choice of front page headlines to be a little strange, omitting some of the day’s biggest stories. Also, photos and videos (Real Player) are not updated particularly often.
AP News is a good first effort at providing a mobile news hub. The stories are reliable and well-written, and there are no adverts to wade through (except on video clips). However, weak editorial selections and a clumsy interface are holding it back. It’s not time to stop the presses quite yet.
Details
Size: 0.6MB
Price: Free
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