This week the Wall Street Journal launched its own iPhone reader - for free! What do you get? The top 15 stories of the moment as well as editor's picks and some select videos. The setup is simple and clean. All articles are set up like columns, so doing a quick finger swipe left or right will move you to the next or previous piece, respectively. It may be the best iPhone news reader out there, especially for a newspaper with $100 subscriptions.
The free New York Times iPhone newspaper application has been around for a minute, but it has been universally slammed for freezing up or crashing iPhones. It's actually not that bad - at least, it wasn't before the WSJ news reader came along - and any iPhone crashes require just a quick reboot. In other words, the flaws aren't that serious. You also have non-WSJ app features like article search. NYTimes junkies will want to download this one, anyway.
Finally, the USA Today iPhone app is as slick as the national paper it represents. A running news ticker up top shows the weather and the news categories, while the bottom has team scores, pictures and the infamous USA Today snapshot surveys. Like the paper itself, the biggest weakness of the USA Today app is that there is no real angle to the news - WSJ is business and NYT is high-brow national/international, but what is USA Today? As far as iPhone apps go, this one is right between the superb WSJ and the buggy NYT in quality.
All the apps are free and available through the links above or directly in the Apple Music Store.
Comments