I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, but I don’t generally have time to sit and read a newspaper. TV and radio news is OK, but on occasion it’s good to go deeper and get some editorial comment. BBC Newsreader for iPhone is OK, and it is certainly much improved since its latest release, but the angle of stories on the BBC tends to be much more ‘straight-bat’ than in a newspaper. And that’s where The Telegraph for iPhone comes in.
As a personal aside, I prefer comment that’s apolitical, but I’ll always take a broadsheet over a tabloid, and if I had to pick a broadsheet that had a bias it’d be The Daily Telegraph. So, in the absence of an iPhone app from The Independent, one from the Telegraph is the next best thing.
In fairness, the app gives you nothing you can’t get from the paper’s own website, but what it does do is offer you all of that content in a neat, quick, easy-to-navigate, pleasing-on-the-eye interface at a price-tag of £Free.
Whomever designed this app gave it some thought, and it has a genuine ‘Mac’ feel to it, and for that reason alone it deserves to be on every iPhone. Tap the icon, a tell-tale calligraphic ‘T’ on a blue background, and the app appears as a blue screen onto which the a larger version of the aforementioned black ‘T’ fades in and zooms into view, spinning as it does.
Once loaded, the app presents a menu that offers ‘News’, ‘Sport’, ‘Finance’, ‘Travel’, ‘Motoring’, ‘Technology’, and ‘Telegraph TV’. Tapping the main heading that you want will bring the spinning black ‘T’ on a blue background into view, and a counter that alerts you to the progress of the story downloads. Each section will load the last 51 (no idea why ’51′) stories in that section.
Once your section is loaded, which is generally done pretty quickly, you are presented with a list of stories in chronological order, each with a heading, a thumbnail picture and a quick intro paragraph, all looking rather smart with white text on a black background. Tapping the ‘In Full’ button will load the full story, which is given to you in the more traditional back text on a white background.
A major advantage of this application is that it is not simply a neat portal into the Telegraph’s own website, but rather it is a stand-alone news-source, with stories being available from within the app itself, making it quicker and easier to use than some news readers. The flipside, however, is that you don’t get a breadth of opinion – you get the Telegraph’s view and that’s your lot.
I use this daily and find that it allows me to be targeted in my reading, keeping abreast of main headlines and going deeper into the stories that interest me without having to scan page after page of a newspaper. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in tracking a single news source.
