iPhone app: AP Mobile 3.0 pushes the news to you
By Ronald O Carlson
Everything in this app is available someplace else. Actually, about a million someplace elses is more like it and that’s what makes this app, flawed though it be, such a great addition to your news junkie’s toolkit.
Whether you get your news from CNN or your local newspaper website, it’s rather likely a big chunk of that content was aggregated and delivered by the Associated Press, which bills itself as “the backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers with coverage in all media and news in all formats.”
So, if you’re a self-respecting news junkie with an iPhone or iPod touch in his pocket (or are you just glad to see me?), then you’ve gotta get AP Mobile (free, iTunes), one of the first apps for Apple handhelds to win legions of fans. That said, somewhere between then and now, AP Mobile seemed to lose it focus and quality suffered noticeably.
Have things improved in v3.0? Let’s have a look.
Gassing up, getting ready…
Set up is a breeze with AP Mobile first asking your location and then whether or not you to activate push notifications. The issue here is that you can’t configure notifications, which means you’re getting stuff that AP editors think is important.
Next, AP Mobile will ask for your local location, so it can feed you local news and weather. Lastly, the app will next offer you want limited configuration there is with the option to turn on or off categories, 16 in all, with no additional ability to focus the content.
Also, you can customize which of the various categories get displayed on the front page (or at all), though there’s no way to drill into sections and tweak further without doing a manual search each time you open the app.
So, if I wanted to focus business news on say the transportation and food industries, there’s no way to that beyond manual search. Thereupon, it would be nice if one could set up alerts for highly granularized content like you can with Google News, which is ironically chock full o’ AP text, image and video content.
So, you can get news pushed to you, but it’s going to be what an editor thinks is important and you just gotta know that’s gonna include Paris Hilton’s house rat (dog) or inclement weather on the wrong side of the state.
How do you like me now?
After AP Mobile lost its way, I stopped using it, so I’m not going to carp about those problems or pick those nits. What I will talk about is how complete the Accuweather (way more accurate than weather.com) module is. It’s not very pretty, mind you, but it’s all there—overview forecast, hourlies and regional radar map. I guess this should count as “mostly there,” but that’s plenty good enough for me.
I’d like to complain about the ads, which appear on every static news, image or video page, and, as of this writing, are all Dell but that would myopic and unfair. Realistically, the ads aren’t obtrusive and AP’s gotta eat just like everybody else.
News photos can be viewed one at a time or as a slide show, and content includes AP info graphics. It’s that latter item that’s a huge, huge plus as info graphic content is one of the things that makes AP special.
When viewing articles, and this feature’s been around for awhile, one can scroll through full news stories, allowing the reader to at-a-glance scan full articles. If you’re a news hound, you’ll understand the value of this feature.
One real issue is that lack of landscape view when viewing categories. That is, you’ll need to choose the articles, videos or images you want to view with your iPhone oriented vertically and then view it all, turn that hand maybe three times, in landscape—this is just silly.
If all fairness, lots of iPhone apps have this orientation problem (no, it’s not a choice!) and it’s something I imagine Apple needs to address at the OS level.
In addition to being able to view all of the videos continuously (chronological order, for example), I would like to be able to listen AP radio news and reportage as a continuously updated loop. Unfortunately, AP Radio isn’t available at all via AP Mobile and viewing video news requires one to individually play each and every report.
Conclusion
All in all AP Mobile 3.0 is greatly superior to earlier versions both in terms of features and, most importantly, stability. I’ve been using it for hours on my first generation iPod touch running iPhone OS 3.0 without a single crash—not too shabby.
Also, whereas there are some real interface (ie universal landscape mode) and configuration issues, AP Mobile is now solid enough top to bottom to earn a spot next to iCab 1.6 (review), Wall Street Journal 1.1.2 (review) and ABC News 2.0 (free, iTunes) on my Apple handheld.
I’m liking it (a lot)…
What’s your take?
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on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
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August 10th, 2009
Nice review. I would say that I’m not a news junkie, that said though, I am intrigued enough to have a look at this app.
August 11th, 2009
Wow! What an honest review…Glad to see they are working on improving this app…Ive always noticed that AP is attached to so much of the news I read…nice to have it all in one place
September 9th, 2009
I’ve been using the new AP app for a couple of days. I like it allot as I used to just go to their mobile website. One thing I could not find was how to disable the Push feature as I don’t want to prompted every half hour.
Anyone no how to do this besides removing and reinstalling the app?