AP Mobile 2.5.7 – The Associated Press News app for Windows Mobile
Today we take a look at the Windows Mobile version of The Associated Press. The app is not just a mashed up mobile version of the site. The top level interface is quite finger friendly and the the app have got some great features, but like every thing else in life its not without some little flaws here and there. So lets get in and see how the app looks like.
AP Mobile
The main interface has got a nice design. The news items supports kinetic scrolling and is very smooth, most of the item has a thumbnail image along with the news title. The main topics are on a slider that can be slide left or right. Each of those main topic is split in to subcategory on a second slider. These are quite finger friendly and the transition is very smooth. There are a number of topics that you can choose from including World News, Local news ( US only , fetched via post code ) Showbiz, Tech, Sports, etc. The sports section for example is sub categorized in to Golf, Soccer, Basketball, etc. The good part about this is you can configure the app to show only the topics you care about and you can rearrange the order in which they are displayed. But to this you got to open up the ugly Windows Mobile menu , it would have been much better if they would have have a drag and drop menu for this.
Sharing the news on sites like Twitter, Facebook or tagging it with Delicious or just sending am email about the news item to a friend is made so easy with this app. Kudos to the developer for integrating these features. Seeting it up is a breeze, add the username and password for these services in the settings menu. Then when you click on the share button on each story the app shares it on the selected service. Email, Delicious and Twitter works without any glitch, but Facebook was working at times and kept throwing me wrong password / username error at times. You also have an option to get a message-box pop up when the news is successfully submitted.
The app has the the usual bells and whistles like switch to full screen, toggle image download, number of articles to download, switch to next/previous article, etc. The go to next unread article is a nice touch that is not found in many similar app. Lack of deeper integration of finger friendly interface can be seen here , it would have been so much easier for users if we could have switched between stories with a left and right swipe gesture, rather than the need to open up the menu to go back and forth between stories.
If you live in the US then its a very good news app , mainly coz it offers local news and it covers most of the things happening in the US. If you are living outside the US, its still not a bad app to get your daily digest of news. To conclude this is a good new app and worth the download until something better comes along.
Pros :
- Social Network Integration is awesome
- User interface is good
Cons :
- No swipe gesture to browse through the images in photo galley
- No swipe gesture support for moving between news item
- Facebook Integration was hit-or-miss
Possible Improvements :
- Video News will be a good addition to this news package
- Local news via GPS Location
Tested on : WM6.1 Emulator ( VGA )
The app is available via the Windows Mobile Marketplace. Go in to News and Weather >> News
Screenshots:
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