Best Windows Phone 7 Apps » News And Weather

Fuse, an elegant RSS reader for WP7

bestwp7apps — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 04:47:46 +0000

Fuse ($ 1.29, Trial)

Fuse is a functional and elegant RSS reader for WP7. The app comes with a trial option that is fully functional, but forgets your settings every once in a while, so you can have a full experience in your trial.

The feed reading experience comes in three themes: Ribbon, Ipsum and Square. All three are somewhat original and not banal; we prefer Ribbon that mixes text and images.

Fuse comes with 5 preconfigured feeds, including Engadget, MTV and LA Times, but you can, of course, add your own favorite feed or youtube channel.

The app is integrated with Google Reader in the sense that you can import one or more of your feeds here, and this is a very useful feature.

The social integration includes Facebook and Twitter – plain – but also Read it Later and Instapaper – original.

The reading experience is what matter most on an RSS read – and here Fuse is offering a solid experience. Looking at the highlights with the pictures is snappy – one of the best on WP7 – and the detail read is clear and fast too.

If you are looking for an elegant and efficient RSS reader on WP7, give a try to Fuse, you might decide to stick with it.

Genre	News+Weather	Rank	506
Rating Avg.	4.5 Stars	# Reviews	69
Price	$ 1.29, Trial	Version	1.0

NBC Nightly News: stay informed on the go with WP7

bestwp7apps — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:50:24 +0000

NBC Nightly News (Free)

NBC Nightly News came out on Windows Phone 7 at the end of June, adding another triple-A title to the WP7 App Marketplace which is now approaching the 25,000 available titles.

The app had some juvenile issues with multiple reports of startup and content problems, but the last update seems to have fixed all the hiccups. We have been able to see the content and play the videos nicely in the past few days on our Samsung Focus – no problem.

The apps features clips from the latest program or per topic, as well as full broadcasts (which we love) and a selection of the most viewed videos. The video playback is smooth but not high quality (not even on the web it is), with basic Facebook sharing functions.

NBC News with Brian Williams is one of our favorite news casts on TV, and it will become one of our top news sources, together with the other WP7 best news apps and the recent USA Today.

Genre	News&Weather	Rank	545
Rating Avg.	3.0 Stars	# Reviews	80
Price	Free	Version	1.1

USA Today: one of the best news apps on Windows Phone 7

bestwp7apps — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:35:46 +0000

USA Today (Free) [Best Rated]

More and more big name-apps are showing up on WP7, this is again a sign of a healthy marketplace and a growing interest for Windows Phone – especially now that Mango features are considered to take WP7 at the level of iOS and Android.

These are not our words, but USA today’s analysis of the latest announcements around the next version of Windows Phone. The same USA Today released in May a gorgeous news app, with great Metro-based user interface and snappy experience.

The app is what you expect: USA Today news are on the home screen, where you can see the top article with a picture and the others with just the headline. Tap on an article and you go see the details. You can share the article on email, sms and social networks (Twitter and Facebook). Nothing fancy. BUT FAST! And to the point: the app is there to provide news, not bells and whistles.

On the home page a weather icon on the top right sends you to a detailed page with info coming from Accuweater.com. Again: fast and to the point: current conditions, 5 days forecast and radar. What you want, now.

Back to the home screen all the colored sections of the national paper (News, Money, Sports, Life and so on) together with a picture section. All is beautiful (thanks to the great Metro integration) and snappy.

This is a gorgeous app. It rivals our preferred news apps News 360 and Drudgeraptor.

Technically, USA Today is one of the best app on the marketplace, avoid it only if you don’t like the content – otherwise just tap on the icon below, it’s free!

Genre	News & Weather	Rank	36
Rating Avg.	5 Stars	# Reviews	302
Price	Free	Version	1.0

Best News Apps for Windows Phone 7 (part 2)

bestwp7apps — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 06:52:00 +0000

Here we go with part two of the best news apps for Windows Phone 7 review. As we mentioned in our part one, we are looking for the best journalistic news apps that will keep you informed and up to date every day. Here are two more great apps for this purpose available on Windows Phone 7 today:

Got News (free app)

Got News is a great source of information as well as a fast app that presents some useful customization and clever time saving features. It is actually a hybrid feed reader / news app since provides access to pre-selected RSS feeds for specific categories.

Like a newspaper, Got News presents editorially curated categories (Headlines, Gossip, Money, Sports and Tech); with pre-selected relevant, authoritative and interesting feeds that will get you access to the best information on the topic. For example, CNN, MSNBC, Fox and NY Times are some of the news sources in the Headlines category. If you select a source, you will get access to its latest headlines, with a brief description (and a picture in some cases); one more tap and you will get to the relative website with the full content of the selected article. The app navigation and startup are fast, but the UI has some unconventional colors and fonts that might get you thinking (you get over it soon, though).

The app is customizable, and clever in doing it: you don’t need select your favorite feeds, because Got News will do it for you: the feeds that you access the most are automatically added to the Favorites category. You can also define your own category and add feeds to either existing or personal categories. Finally you can import your Google Reader feeds and share the news stories on Facebook, via email or text message, standard feature in all the best news apps we reviewed.

Verdict (reviewed version 1.2.0.0)

Overall Got News is a great package of news information and handy functionality that will save you time and keep your tapping fingers up to date with your Windows Phone 7.

News360 (free app)

Simply said, News360 is the best way to stay informed on Windows Phone 7. It is a news aggregation app, that extracts the best news from thousands of sources. If you have used Google news you know what I am talking about: news are “reported by Wall Street Journal and 97 other sources“…

As you launch the app, you access the today page, that provides a list of hot topics for the day, topics vary from politics to sports, technology and so on… the list gets updated with what is fresh, new and interesting (!). With a swipe to the right, you can access the photos section, presenting a list of pictures that can be tapped and reveal the headline of one top article (similar to AP Mobile media view). With a swipe to the left, you can access the news categories. Tap a category and the today page will filter the content to reveal only related news. Reading articles on News360 gives you access to different points of view, linking articles from many different sources to the same argument. Pictures are also linked: you can swipe tens of images on the same topic without reloading the page.

The articles have keyword expansion with extracts from Wikipedia and link to related news, you can get lost digging deep into a headline news article for a long time!
If you tap on the GPS icon, then local news are displayed, this is a very natural way to focus on local news and it works really well.
The app is generally fast, loads fast and resumes quickly from lock screen. Some performance problems appear if you scroll the today’s news list too fast, the UI will slow down and be hard to control; this is not the standard way you will use the app though: if you are reading the news as you scroll down (as you are supposed to when using that list), you will not notice any slowness and your experience will be gooood.
NOTE: News 360 just released update 1.3 that solves some of the scrolling problems: now if you scroll too fast it gets scattered but no longer unmanageable.
Additional features include the possibility to follow news by keywords: for example, give me all the news about Windows Phone 7, as well as sharing articles via Email, Facebook or Twitter.

Verdict (reviewed version 1.2.0.0)

News360 presents an impressive package for relevance of the news, easy of use, ability to drill down and completeness of features, all in a FREE app that you can’t miss to hold tap and pin to your Windows Phone 7 start menu.

Best News Apps for Windows Phone 7 (part 1)

bestwp7apps — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 19:19:00 +0000

There are several apps in the News and Weather category. At the time of writing, we are counting 200 of them, which makes up the 6% of all the apps in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. With all this choices available, we want to help you discover the best apps to stay informed. We mean journalistic news apps (not RSS/Feed readers, those are material for future reviews): the purpose here, is to replace the morning newspaper, web site, TV or radio show that you use in the morning to know what is going on around the world and in town. You should not need anything more than your Windows Phone 7 and a few good news apps (which might also come for free these days!).

We have pinned to our start menu several news apps and got informed by them for a few days: initial selection included the most downloaded, best rated and most recently published news apps in the marketplace. From this list, we selected four apps worthy of your precious taps, here are two of them:

Drudgeraptor ($0.99, no free trial)

Drudgeraptor is the Windows Phone 7 client for the news site drudgereport.com, a news aggregation site editorially curated by Matt Drudge. We liked the app because the content is good and can be easily consumed.

There are top relevant headline news right on the home page, extended by additional “columns” (one, two and three) that complete the news coverage for the day. The editorial selection is relevant and fresh with politics, business, sports and all the news categories you would expect to read in your favorite newspaper; Drudgeraptor makes a great job in aggregating interesting and relevant arguments and presenting them in a concise way to the reader. On the negative side, the UI is somewhat non metro standard, since you need to swipe the title rather than the content; the UI also reloads every time the screen locks, that is annoying if you have a short time-out, but reloading is fast enough not to make this a huge problem.

Finally the content cannot be personalized and there is no sharing functionality, but I guess this is by design as it helps the user focusing on reading the news: that should be what this app is all about!

Verdict

Great aggregated news content on a quick app, but over bare bone functionality.

AP Mobile (free app)

The Associated Press is one of the most authoritative sources of information in the world, this news agency provides information to many of the information channels we consume daily (TV, web sites, newspapers and so on…) On Windows Phone 7, AP Mobile gives us first hand access to the news source, with a nice app that has great content with a few secondary technical defects.

The content is top notch: relevant important content is presented in the front page screen. The top two articles for every category are displayed here, with a link to more news in the same category. The user can add other sections and re-arrange the existing (front page and others), allowing us to have a personalized experience. We feel that two articles per category are too few, though, forcing us to tap back and forth into the categories to see more headlines. The app has an interesting media view that will display news pictures, proportionally sized to the importance of the argument. It is a nice way to visually access the interesting/important news in a single page.

The app tile is active on the start menu, displaying a picture from the AP articles; this is a nice touch, but not very functional: we do not recognize the app as we flick through our start menu. Also, navigating the app is sometimes flaky: the app will easily take a down swipe for a side one and a short swipe for a tap. This does not happen with other apps, so we believe it might be an app problem, rather than a phone one.

Verdict

Great content from one of the best news sources on the planet, some technical bug on the app keep it short of a full score.

Well, this does it for part one, check our PART TWO, that reviews additional great news apps for Windows Phone 7.