iPhone App: CNN Mobile

October 21st, 2009

= 4 stars

News app that serves up text articles and video clips from CNN, the ubiquitous television news channel.

The Good

• Pretty intuitive navigation based on other news apps. The menu bar at the top slides to the left and right, revealing more options, and a row of icons at the bottom indicate sections.
• If you don’t like reading, there’s a video section which focuses just on the video content, which coming from CNN, there’s a lot of. All the videos played just fine, and utilize the iPhone’s built in controls for volume and scrubbing, etc. Helpful is a total time indicator beneath each clip. The text articles also have preceding bullet points summing up the major topics.
• Button lets you share content via a text message, email, Twitter, or Facebook.
• A “My CNN” section lets you personalize content. Your location can be used to serve up news, the weather, and traffic conditions. The “Followed” section lets create particular topics and content is served up based on those keywords. A numeric indicator next to the “My CNN” icon updates when new articles are found based on your topics.
• An “iReport” section lets you watch user-created content and even submit stuff you’ve recorded yourself, namely a photograph or video taken with your iPhone. There’s even an “Assignments” section listing topics budding journalists can work on.
• Tilting the iPhone into landscape mode shifts the UI into a “cover view” mode that’s a bit less elegant than Apple’s iTunes version, but is still kind of cool. You can browse news articles visually, and tapping on an image shows you the article’s bullet points.

The Bad

• Can’t read articles in landscape mode.
• Doesn’t have any complete CNN shows. This is just about serving up news and news clips.
• A fair amount of banner ads, a little irksome seeing how this is a paid app.

Conclusion

This app does a great job of serving up the CNN content — in particular, video — on the iPhone. Recommended.

iTunes App Store Link: