A Quick Look At The New BBC News iPhone and iPad Apps

After a long week of freelance work, I’ve finally gotten around to testing Auntie’s new mobile applications.

The long awaited and much disputed BBC News application is available on your iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad free of charge via the Apple AppStore.

As you would expect from Auntie, I was quickly impressed with the overall user experience.

Those familiar with the Pulse news application will recognise the familiar carousel allowing a simple swipe to reveal other stories in each section.

Selecting a thumbnail neatly slides the story selections off to the left bringing in the full text from the right.

Twitter users who instinctively drag down to refresh content will welcome the integration of  the familiar gesture, allowing immediate updates for those too impatient for the automatic refresh.

From here you can easily move back to the thumbnails screen by poking the back button or use the familiar home screen swipe to the left or right to navigate through the other articles.

It’s nice to see the beeb keeping with it’s excellent accessibility record here providing text size adjustments via well placed buttons on the bottom right.

One should that this increases text size rather than simply zooming in, thus preserving readability and keeping the text sharp on non ‘retina’ displays.

Inset videos are identified by the now easily recognisable iplayer Tap To Play button.

Streaming is excellent on wifi and as it uses the already established iplayer wizardry tech availability and quality are second to none.

iPad users will recognise the influence of Pulse here too.

I love Pulse but the BBC news app is just more polished, though one must admit the BBC is only syndicating it’s own content so it’s much easier to make everything pretty.

Watching the embedded video is much nicer on the ipad as it happily plays in place rather than taking over the full screen.

Like Pulse, other article thumbnails can be ‘thumbed’ through with one hand whilst simultaneously scrolling the main article on the right.

Live streaming is every bit as sharp and beautiful to watch as the recorded video, though I did experience a few problems getting it working initially.

The app informed me that the content was unavailable outside the UK.

Sitting in a house in Merseyside one was a little confused.

However, if this should happen to you simply find an article with an embedded video and play that first.

After that live streaming works just fine.

**UPDATE**
Just had an update from Auntie, issues with live streaming have been fixed.

A must have app for every iWhatever owning Brit.

Well done Auntie! Click the button below to download the app!