The Gymbl - makes your iPhone not quite a good phone or a good camera

Jon Hickman reviews iPhone tripod Gymbl Pro.

Jonathan Ive didn’t design my iPhone with a pistol grip. Instead of a hard, brittle feeling, bumpy, plastic case, Jonathan Ive fashioned a fetish object wrapped in perfectly smooth flat glass. Jonathan Ive did not design the Gymbl Pro, by Youbiq.

Would Jonathan Ive use a Gymbl Pro in pistol grip mode to shoot a video?

No, he wouldn’t. Jonathan Ive would use an iPhone 4 to grab short informal videos. If he was in the field and had a chance to grab an important interview with somebody, he’d not hesitate to use his iPhone 4 in the hand. Jony would know that informal handheld shooting would add a sense of urgency or intimicay to his media file – he’d say: “There’s no need for handheld slickness, we’re over that now”.

Would Jonathan Ive use Gymbl Pro in tripod mode to take a photo?

No, not until he’s tasked the iOS team with putting a self-timer into the camera – then he’d say, “Hey this is pretty cool for family portraits”.

Would Jonathan Ive use the Gymbl Pro’s adaptor, so that he can mount it to a professional tripod?

No, if Jonny was going to go to the trouble of lugging around a heavy Manfroto tripod, he’d be sure to take a D-SLR with him too – in for a penny in for a pound.

Would Jonathan Ive pay for the optional Gymbl Pro app?

No, Jonathan Ive wouldn’t pay an extra £1.99 for the Youbiq app. He’d wonder why he needs another cloud storage solution for photos, and he’d wonder why Youbiq didn’t think to offer this app (which does have a neat panorama stitching feature) for free as a promotional tool to drive sales of the Gymbl (after all, a tripod makes stitiching panorams much easier).

What would Jonathan Ive do if his phone went off with a Gymbl Pro attached?

He’d have to stop his film shoot to answer or reject the call. I imagine he’d find hitting the wake/sleep button to mute the ringer a little tricky due to the case thickness. He’d also find talking on the phone slightly tricky because his phone has grown a load of spiky metal.

In Summary

• What is it?
  • It’s a tripod system for an iPhone 4. You put your phone in a case, the case clips onto a mini tripod which also doubles as a pistol grip.
• Why would you use it?
  • To provide a comfortable grip for shooting longer videos, as a stand for face time calls, or to provide a tripod for photography and video. But really you’d use it because you’re a bit of a geek.
• Positives
  • Comfortable holding for longer shoots; pretty stable as a table-top tripod.
• Negatives
  • Seems pricey for what boils down to a gimmick; turns your phone into a camera, reducing ease of use as anything else other than a camera – so really you’d be better off with, you know, a camera.
• In a nutshell
  • Smartphones are great for production when you’re in a tight spot, cameras are great for producing something more polished – this gets lost somewhere in the middle.
• Price: $99.00
• Rating: 2/5

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with a new web service and mobile app called Springpad. LifeHacker describes it as a “super advanced personal assistant”. And I can see particular applications for journalists and editors. Here’s how it works:

Investigating on the move, and online

In Springpad you create a ‘notebook’ for each of your projects. You can then place Tasks, Notes, bookmarks and other objects in those notebooks.

For a journalist, the notebook format lends itself well to projects or investigations that you’re working on, especially as ideas occur to you on the move. As new tasks occur to you (‘I must interview that guy’, or ‘follow up that lead’) you add them to the relevant notebook (i.e. project or investigation) from the mobile app – or the website.

If you’re browsing the web and find a useful resource, you can use the Springpad bookmarklet to bookmark it, tag it, and add it to the relevant notebook(s).

And any emails or documents you receive that relate to the project you can forward to your Springpad account.

What’s particularly useful is the way you can choose to make public entire notebooks or individual items within them. So if you want others to be able to access your work, you can do so easily.

There are also a range of other features – such as events, contacts, barcode recognition, search, and a Chrome bookmarklet – some of which are covered in this video:

How I use it

Springpad seems to me a particularly individually-oriented tool rather than something that could be used for coordinating large groups (where Basecamp, for example, is better). None of its constituent elements – tagging, to-do lists, notes, etc. – are unusual, but it’s the combination, and the mobile application, that works particularly well.

If you have a number of projects on the go at any one time you tend to have to a) constantly remember what needs to be done on each of them; b) when; c) with whom; and d) keep track of documents relating to it. The management of these is often spread across To Do lists, a calendar, contacts book, and filing or bookmarks.

What Springpad effectively does is bring those together to one place on your mobile: the app (although at the moment there’s no real reason to use it for contacts). This means you can make notes when they occur to you, and in one place. The fact that this is both synced with the website and available on the app when offline gives it certain advantages over other approaches.

That said, I’ve adopted a few strategies that make it more useful:

• Assign a date to every Task – even if it’s in 3 months’ time. This turns it into a calendar, and you can see how many things you need to get done on any given day, and shuffle accordingly.
• Tasks should be disaggregated – i.e. producing an investigation will involve interviews, research, follow ups, and so on. Each of these is a separate task.
• Start the day by looking at your tasks for that day – complete a couple of small ones and then focus on a bigger one.
• If new ideas related to a Task occur to you, add them to that task as a note (these are different to standalone Notes). This is particularly useful for tasks that are weeks in the future: by the time they come around you can have a number of useful notes attached to it.
• Use tags to differentiate between sub-projects within a notebook.
• Install the bookmarklet on your phone’s browser so you can bookmark project-related webpages on the go.
• Add the email address to your contacts so you can email key documents and correspondence to your account (sadly at the moment you still need to then open the app or website to tag and file them, but I’m told they are working on you being able to email-and-file at once).

Not a replacement for Delicious

You can import all of your Delicious bookmarks into Springpad, but I’ve chosen not to, partly because the site lacks much of the functionality that I’m looking for in a Delicious replacement, but also because I see it as performing a different task: I use Delicious as a catch-all, public filing system for anything that is or might be relevant to what I do and have done. Springpad is about managing what I’m doing right now, which means being more selective about the bookmarks that I save in it. Flooding it with almost 10,000 bookmarks would probably reduce its usefulness.

For the same reason I don’t see it as particularly comparable to Evernote. Dan Gold has an extensive guide explaining why he switched from Evernote to Springpad, and simplicity again plays a large role. It’s also worth reading to see how Dan uses the tool.

Perhaps the best description of the tool is as a powerful To Do list – allowing you to split projects apart while also keeping those parts linked to other items through notes, tags and categories.

Early days – room for improvement

The tool is a bit rough around the edges at the moment. Navigation of the app could be a lot quicker: to get from a list of all Tasks to those within one notebook takes 3 clicks at the moment – that’s too many.

Privacy could be more granular, allowing password-protection for instance. And the options to add contacts and events seem to be hidden away under ‘Add by type’ (in fact, the only way to add an event at the moment appears to be to sync with your Google account and then use a calendar app to add a new event through your Google calendar, or to go to an existing event in your app and create a new one from there).

The bookmarklet is slow to work, and alerts only come via RSS feed (you could use Feedburner to turn these into email alerts by the way).

That said, this is the first project management that I’ve actually found effective in getting stuff out of my head and onto virtual paper. Long may that continue.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ADwPLSFeY8]

A few months ago I was asked what sort of mobile phone I would recommend for a journalism student. Knowing how tight student budgets are, and that any choice should have as much of an eye on the future as on the present, I recommended getting an Android phone.

The reasoning went like this: iPhones are great at certain things, and currently benefit from a wider range of applications than other mobile phones. But the contracts are expensive, the battery life poor, and Apple’s closed system problematic, for reasons I’ll expand on in a moment.

Currently, BlackBerry smartphones (apparently you can’t say ‘BlackBerries’) and high-end Nokias are probably the most popular phones for journalists. Both have excellent battery life and BlackBerry smartphones (yes, it gets annoying after the first time) have a particular strength in the way their email works.

But these are also expensive, and Symbian (the operating system for most high end Nokias) does not have a long term future, while its replacement, Maemo, has yet to build a present.

Which brings us to Android – the ‘Google’ phone – and the most affordable option for the student journalist looking at a multiplatform future.

• With Google behind the technology, Android phones have excellent email integration – not quite as strong as a BlackBerry, but more than good enough.
• Android’s app store – the ‘Market‘ – competes with Apple’s – and is catching up fast. Most of the must-have apps for journalists are already in there, and on this score it’s much stronger than BlackBerry or Nokia.
• The biggest weakness is Android’s battery life, which is around the same as the iPhone (some tips on that here).
• But apart from their affordability it is the openness of the Android platform which presents the strongest case for being the student journalist’s mobile of choice.

When I advised that student to get an Android phone, it was because I think that Android will seriously challenge iPhone both in terms of userbase (which is already happening) and app development.

Computerworld’s Jonny Evans (an “Apple Holic”) compares the situation to the struggle for the PC:

“[Apple's] insistence on a closed system means partnership deals aren’t open to it in the hardware space.

“So, where Android can deliver multiple devices for multiple niches at multiple price points to the market, Apple delivers a limited number of devices, hoping the quality of its software will make a difference. It seems to attract customers that way.

“As fellow blogger, Sharon Machlis, noted last week, the result of that strategy during the PC wars enabled Microsoft to seize monopoly-level market share on the desktop.

“The game’s not over.“

The same post, however, notes that “Apple’s key advantage against Android is its developer community”:

“Despite criticism of the way it curates its store, Apple does have an App Store that works, where 95 percent of apps are approved fast.

“This means developers already have a reliable and profitable route to market at 100 million iOS users – set to climb with the addition of at least 24 million more iPhone 4 users this year.

“Android developers may be able to develop more openly, but development is fragmented by the need to develop for multiple devices.”

Apple alienated parts of their community earlier this year when they released a new developer agreement. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Google provided a platform for a whole new community when it announced the launch of a tool that can only challenge Apple’s dominance: the App Inventor for Android:

“To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

For the student journalist, this tool also offers an opportunity to experiment with mobile journalism and publishing in the same way that Blogger allowed you to experiment with online publishing and distribution, or Yahoo! Pipes allowed you to play with mashups (TechCrunch’s MG Siegler compares it with GeoCities). Tony Hirst has already written a series of posts exploring how the tool works (it’s currently in invite-only beta), which are worth bookmarking.

This tool seals the deal for me – it’s the difference between doing the job now and redefining it for the future.

But what do you think? What features do Android phones lack? What advantages do other phones hold?

For the record, I use an iPhone and an old N95. I use the N95 for phonecalls, texts and streaming video (because of its long battery life) and the iPhone for web browsing and apps – particularly RSS readers, Audioboo, editing blog posts and checking comments, Twitter, and email. Each handset is with a different operator, which gives me better 3G coverage options too. I also pay for an Android phone (a HTC Magic) in my household.

It is hard to imagine that a sports-crazed country like the US would have any dearth in sports reporting. However, while professional and major college sports get covered no end by traditional media, sports leagues and user-generated sites alike, high school and minor college sports remain largely uncovered, an issue that is being exacerbated by declining revenues.

This was one of the reasons that inspired Ted Sullivan, a former minor league baseball player and a graduate of Harvard Business School, to ease the pain of parents, coaches and fans of youth sports, literally,  by launching an application that is making the process of scoring simpler, and allowing for easier distribution of stats from the field.

“An entire category of content called real-time sports doesn’t exist for what is the enormous majority of athletic events happening everyday, whether that is organized sports from the small college level or high school and youth sports,” says Sullivan.

Having not only played the sport, but also having coached at a downtown little league in Manhattan, Sullivan understood the challenges of scoring baseball manually. Earlier this year, along with co-founder Kiril Savino, he launched GameChanger, an iPhone application that transmits data in real time from the field. Using the tool, scores and stats, as they happen, can be tapped into an iPhone by coaches, fans and parents. This is translated into a “gamestream” that appears on the Gamechanger site instantaneously so fans can access live updates, box scores, and play by plays.

Balls, strikes and hits are recorded using the tool’s menu options, and players are tracked by dragging and dropping names. In addition, a coach or scorekeeper can create a team’s schedule, roster and lineup. There is also a provision for fans to add to the stream by posting comments or uploading photos and video.

“I believe in the mobile device as a great data collector,” says Sullivan. While mobile devices are useful for content consumption, the very nature of smart phones prompts something more than passive viewing by the user. And this makes them ideal vehicles for data gathering and delivery.

So GameChanger provides an application to the community surrounding a team, which, in turn, allows the community to provide data from the field to GameChanger. In other words, it is crowdsourcing with organized content gathering.

Each team can have more than one hub based on how many people choose to use the app for scoring, but Sullivan assures me that the tedium of score-keeping restricts it to few, very avid fans or parents, thus reducing potential imposters or error-prone score keepers. Besides, GameChanger makes baseball scoring easy enough for anyone with a basic understanding of the sport, thus alleviating the need for extensive experience or in-depth knowledge.

“The key piece here that needs to be stressed is that this business doesn’t work if we aren’t providing a huge incentive to the person that is using the application and collecting the data for us for free,” says Sullivan. He explains that manual scoring takes an average of 45 minutes to an hour per game; factor in several games per week stretched over an entire season, and therein lies Gamechanger’s incentive.

Lisa Winston attests to this over at the MLB Blog, bemoaning the fact that an app “so brilliant and simple” wasn’t available when her daughter played in the little league.

All the content that is collected is available on the GameChanger site. While some content is free, more detailed information, such as play by plays, requires a subscription. Sullivan believes that the data is exclusive and time sensitive enough for people to be willing to pay for it. For a fee, a simple html code also allows local news sites to pull data from GameChanger’s database in the form of widgets. Profits are shared with news partners.

Potential other uses in journalism?

If such an application can make data gathering, analysis and distribution easier in the case of simple scoring of a little league game, could it find potential in other, more complex issues? Such as election results, exit polls or the statistics of climate change?  With the popularity of crowdsourcing, citizens are being entrusted with more and more complex tasks in areas such as citizen science and E-governance. Such a foolproof application would increase participation and minimize error.

While projects like WNYC’s crowdsourced maps have successfully used their Web sites as data collectors, the content obtained from the public in such cases has been relatively simple, such as the number of cars on a street, or the price of milk at a grocery store. In these and similar such exercises, the task of making sense of the data or painting the bigger picture has been that of a journalist, perhaps rightfully so.

But if data-specific applications could be designed to maximize contributions from the public, it would perhaps make citizen journalism more relevant and valuable while reducing the workload on news organizations. It’s debatable if it will work for areas more serious than sports or entertainment, but, if anything, such weighty topics could use applications that would make information gathering easier.

Here’s a video interview by Conrad Quilty-Harper with the creator of the ASBOrometer app for iPhone and Android. The app pulls information available through Data.gov.uk, allowing you to see levels of antisocial behaviour (and other data) near you. More broadly he talks about the potential of data.gov.uk going forward. Obvious implications for local and hyperlocal journalism…

We’re all being told that mobile is the next big thing for news, but what does it mean to have a good mobile news application?

Just as an online news site is a lot more than a newspaper online, a mobile news application is a lot more than news stories on a small screen. The better iPhone news apps integrate multimedia, social features, personalization, and push notifications.

Not all apps get even the basics right. But a few are pushing the boundaries of what mobile news can be, with innovative new features such as info-graphic displays of hot stories, or integrated playlists for multimedia.

Here is my roundup of 14 iPhone news offerings. I’ve included many of the major publishers, some lesser known applications, and a few duds for comparison.

NYTimes
The New York Times Company
Free

The New York Times iPhone application

The Times doesn’t do anything new with this application, but they do everything fairly well.

The app is designed around a vertical list stories, with a headline, lede, and photo thumbnail for each. Stories are organized into standard news sections, plus the alway interesting “Most Popular.”   Banner ads sometimes appear at the bottom, plus occasional interstitial ads when appear when you select a story.

The focus of the news is of course American. There’s no personalization of news content based either on interest or location, which may well prove to be a standard feature for mobile news applications. Fortunately, the app includes a search function, though it only seems to go a few days back.

Downloaded articles are available when the device is offline, which is a useful feature. Favorites stories can be saved, or shared via email, text message, Twitter, and Facebook.

The UI has a few quirks. The “downloading news” progress bar is expected, but the sometimes equally long “processing news” phase makes me wonder what the app is doing. The photos in a story very sensibly download after the text, but the scroll position jumps when the photo appears,which is hugely annoying.

There’s little innovation or differentiation here, but the experience is smooth.

Daily Zeitgeist
Sharpest Cookie
$1.99

The Daily Zeitgeist displays headlines visually

The Daily Zeitgeist tries something completely different, and it works well.

The app draws news from a number of different sources, such as Google News, Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo Buzz. Headlines from each source are displayed in text panels on an uncluttered screen. The size of each panel indicates the story popularity and the background color indicates the freshness, with stories gradually fading as they age. Tapping on a panel brings up an info window with a thumbnail photo and the first few lines of the story. Doubling tapping on the info window loads the story from the original source in the integrated browser.

From within the browser view, stories can be loaded into Safari, emailed, or posted to Facebook.

That’s it. The entire experience is clean, simple, and fast. It’s possible to get an immediate, at-a-glance sense of what is news from the clever infographic-like interface, and I really enjoy the addition of user-curated news sources such as Digg and Reddit.

The implementation is not without its flaws. Less popular stories are displayed very small, necessitating zooming with two fingers, or by double tapping. It’s annoying to need two hands to zoom, and sometimes the zoom limit isn’t high enough to allow reading of the smallest headlines. Because the stories recede into one corner, I find myself imagining a one handed, one-dimensional zoom gesture.

I’d also like to see better customization of sources, such as the ability to display specific sections of Google News, or read the news in different languages. Nonetheless, The Daily Zeitgeist may well evolve into my favorite news application. It’s definitely something different and innovative.

NPR News
NPR
Free

NPR's iPhone app features an integrated playlist

The NPR news app, from the American public radio station of the same name,  has a lot of audio as one might hope. In fact it’s the only news app in this roundup to include an integrated playlist manager.

Stories appear in the usual vertical list, with those that include audio clearly marked. Within each story page there are buttons for “add to playlist” and “listen now.” Wisely, NPR includes comprehensive text summaries even for its audio stories.

The app includes a “programs” screen where listeners can queue up popular NPR programs such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Planet Money. The “stations” screen allows users to find programming produced by NPR affiliates all across the US.

Radio is different from print, and NPR has done a good job at imagining how mobile radio consumption should work. The integrated play list is a welcome innovation, and the programming selection features are thorough and well thought out .

A few obvious audio features are missing, such as the ability to seek to an arbitrary time in the program, and integration with the iPhone’s volume buttons. It should also be possible to play programs in the background while using other apps, though this is a limitation of the iPhone OS. Helpfully, the NPR app includes a “Go To iTunes” button for programming that is also available as a standard podcast.

NPR includes some non-audio stories from the Associated Press in its article list. Banner ads sometimes appear at the bottom of the screen. Stories can be shared via email, Twitter, and Facebook. There is no search feature.

The app is not quite perfect, but it’s useful and unique. NPR is definitely on the right track.

AP Mobile
The Associated Press
Free

The Associated Press' iPhone app pushes breaking news

AP’s global network produces a huge amount of news, and their content forms the core of more newspapers and television reports than most people realize. Their app is therefore a welcome addition to any serious news junkie’s iPhone, but seems to miss one of the AP’s key strengths: comprehensiveness. The content is really a very narrow selection of AP’s stories, and there’s no search feature.

The interface is list-based, with a “Front Page” category that shows a couple hot stories from each of a customizable list of sections, including “Headlines”, “Most Recent”, and “Most shared”. There is a Photos button for some sections which leads to an attractive grid of clickable thumbnails, and a video button which leads to a list of video reports that play in the iPhone YouTube app.

The AP app is one of only two in this roundup that does push notification. When enabled, AP sends big headlines to your phone even when it’s off, which arrive much like text messages. I appreciated this for some stories, but found other headlines a waste of my time (another Tiger Woods story? Really?) The ability to customize push content is badly needed.

Kudos also for localization, though it’s incomplete because it is based on zip code — useless to the majority of the world, which is strange for one of the most global news organizations.

Stories can be saved to a favorites list, or shared via email, text message, Twitter, Facebook , or Evernote. Banner ads sometimes appear at the top of lists and stories.

The AP application feels a little clunky, with a somewhat cluttered UI and several incomplete features. That I can live with. What I’d really like to see is a much broader selection of AP’s huge output, combined with strong filtering and search features.

Thompson-Reuters News Pro
Thompson-Reuters
Free

Thompson-Reuters' iPhone news app also provides market data

News Pro knows what it’s about: business and financial readers. The app includes comprehensive market information, and a scrolling ticker at the top of every screen.

News is presented in a list of selections from the full wire feed, at the bottom of which are category choices. There is nothing like a “most popular” or “trending” category, but business news is broken down finely into sections such as “Corporate,” “Market Report,” and “New Issues.” The coverage is nicely international, and the app gives the user a choice the US, the UK, Canada, and India on first invocation.

News Pro includes attractive photo and video sections, but where the app really shines is its market information. All of the standard indices are updated in near real time, as are exchange rates. The stocks section allows quick checks on any ticker symbol, and a user-defined watchlist. Any index or stock can be graphed within a fairly sophisticated interface.

Text size is adjustable and stories can be shared by email only. There is no favoriting feature.

This application is not the greatest for general news, but then it’s clearly not designed for the general reader. Thompson-Reuters knows their market, and understands that stories are just part of what a mobile application can deliver.

TIME Mobile

Time Inc.
Free

Time Mobile in the iPhone

Where TIME Mobile shines is the interface. Of all the apps tested, it has simplest, slickest, cleanest interface. Or maybe the black background just makes it seem glossier.

The app is very much oriented around photography. Instead of a vertical list, the user is presented with a smoothly scrolling row of large thumbnails, much like iTunes’ “cover flow” interface.

Rather than the traditional news sections, Time’s categories are “News”, “Lists”, “Quotes,” “Popular,” and “Media”. In the era of 24 hour news, Time’s weekly format is ill suited to breaking stories, and they have wisely elected to focus on a different sort of content.

The app also supports favorites, sharing via email and twitter, text size adjustment,

TIME Mobile is pretty, and well suited to those looking for more of a magazine reading experience.

The Guardian
Guardian News and Media Limited
$3.99

The Guardian UK's iPhone app

The UK’s famous newspaper has done well with its iPhone application. The app is based around the usual vertical story list, yes, but it is well implemented and supplemented with multimedia features such as photo galleries and integrated podcasts. The usual sections are available, but “Latest” and “Trending” are the home screen options.

The search function stands out. It finds topics, sections, and contributors, not stories, but the archive seems to go back a full year, unique among iPhone news apps. A topic search for “plane” brings up “Hudson river plane crash”, “Plane crashes (world)”, and “Lockerbie plane bombing (uk)”. Each of these categories expands into a long list of previous stories.

Stories can be favorited, or shared via email and Facebook. Text size is adjustable.

The Guardian’s app is cleanly implemented, the multimedia features are welcome, and the archive search function is innovative and useful. Well worth the low cost.

CNN Mobile
CNN
$1.99

The CNN iPhone app has lots of video

The CNN app is slick and complete. Really complete. The app includes custom search, GPS location-based content, gobs of video, and the ability to upload photos to CNN’s iReport citizen journalism website.

The headlines pages is divided into categories, and features a story list below a large photo. Stories within a section can be browsed by sliding horizontally between pages, which has a lovely magazine-like feel. Every story has a large photo, and many of the stories have associated video, streamed as usual through the YouTube player.

The video page features even more multimedia, also broken into one list per category, including the venerable “Most Popular.”

The MyCNN page allows content customization. The app can choose local stories based on your GPS location or zip code, which means it only works inside the US. It also supports topic searches by keyword, which are saved into custom news sections.

The “iReport” page features selections from CNN’s iReport citizen journalism content, plus the ability to submit your own text and photographic reports. Most intriguing of all, the “Assignments” page provides detailed suggestions on submission topics, such as “Winter weather near you” and “Tsunami: Five years later.”

The app rotates into landscape mode when the phone is turned. Banner ads appear in story lists. Stories can be saved or shared via text message, email, Twitter, and Facebook.

The CNN app is a monster in terms of functionality, yet the whole feels uncluttered and functional. The content is good, the customization is good, and the iReport features are on the cutting edge of web-enabled journalism.

The Independent
Missing Ink Studios Ltd.
Free

The Independent's iPhone app works much like an RSS reader

The Independent’s main screen is a graphical topic page showing unread stories in each category, with all content from the UK newspaper of the same name. Thankfully, you don’t have to wait for all stories to update before you can read those already downloaded. The total number of unread stories appears as a tag on the app’s icon in the iPhone’s home screen.

Within each category is a list view. Most story items have thumbnail photos. Banner ads appear at the top of both the story list and individual articles.

The font size is adjustable and items can be favorited, but shared only by email.

This is a bare-bones app that feels more like a sharp RSS reader than a news organization product. This simplicity is not entirely a bad thing, but the app misses many mobile possibilities.

Al Jazeera English Live
Livestation
$2.99

The Al Jazeera English Live app does exactly what it says

The Al Jazeera English Live app streams the AJE broadcast feed to your iPhone. It is produced by LiveStation, whose desktop player can be used to watch Al Jazeera and other stations on your computer.

Video quality is quite good over wifi, but much lower resolution over a 3G connection, as might be expected. In my tests around Hong Kong the video often stuttered or froze and was not really watchable without wifi.

And that’s it. This app is a viewer for the Al Jazeera English television channel, no more or less. It’s exciting to be able to watch it from my phone, and as 3G networks improve we can expect the experience to be more reliable. Al Jazeera is to be commended for leading the charge to mobile video broadcast. But the internet is not television, and I’d like to see the ability to select programming, as the CNN and NPR apps do so well.

Jakarta Globe
Equinox Inc
Free

The Jakarta Globe iPhone app includes no Jakarta-specific features

Disclosure: I have been  a contributor to The Jakarta Globe.

The young Jakarta daily comes to the iPhone in minimal form. The interface is the standard news list, divided into categories such as City, National, Business, Sports, and Life and Times.

Stories can be favorited but not shared  – a problem for users and publisher alike. Banner ads appear at the bottom of story pages.

In the era of aggregation and global reach, local news is under-served. This creates an opportunity for focused reporting. The Jakarta Globe application is a good example of a local news application, but it lacks compelling city-and country-specific features. For example, why can’t I look up Jakarta movie listings?

Ultimately, users will install this application only because there are few other mobile sources for English-language news about Indonesia and its capital city.

Fluent News Reader
Fluent Mobile
Free, plus subscription for some features

Fluent News Reader aggregates from many sources in a customizable fashion

Fluent News Reader aggregates stories from a user-defined list of sources, by default including the RSS feeds of the Washington Post, the New York times, the BBC, NPR, USA Today, Al Jazeera, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, the Economist, Fox News, and several dozen others. Duplicate stories are removed, much like Google News.

The app comes with a standard set of sections such as “Business”, “World,” and “Sport”, but Fluent differentiates itself through the ability to make custom sections. Sections are defined by keyword searches, which are extremely useful in their own right. The balance of results can be adjusted by promoting or demoting individual news sources.

But only up to a point. Fluent wants you to subscribe at $1.99 for one month or $2.99 for three months for “premium” features including the ability to create an unlimited number of sections, promote more than one source, and remove the banner ads in article lists.

Stories can be saved, or shared via email, Twitter, and Facebook.

Fluent news is perhaps the only truly comprehensive news aggregation app for the iPhone. Its search and custom sections features are very useful, as is the ability to adjust the importance of sources. But when the most expensive iPhone news app is selling for $4, dishing out $1 every month just to keep features unlocked seems a bit rich.

BBC News Mobile
Joseph Nardone
$0.99

The BBC needs to make their own iPhone app

This application, which does not seem to be supported or authorized by the BBC, is one of a several in the BBC fan creation category. The interface is simple, with a list of stories in each of three sections: “World News,” “World Sport,” and “World Business.” Choosing a story simply brings up the appropriate bbc.co.uk page in the integrated browser. The “Share Story” button sends an email.

That’s it.

What we can learn most from the existence of this and similar applications is that the BBC has not satisfied pent up demand for an iPhone app.

The Huffington Post
HuffingtonPost.com
Free

The Huffington Post app includes comments and tweets

The Huffington Post looks like a mobile newspaper should. The design is clean, with their trademark headline photo up top. The interface is simple, with the usual sections including a “blogs” category. There is a well-stocked video section which makes use of the iPhone YouTube player.

Where the Huffington Post stands out is its social media integration. There is a “comments” button on every page, and new comments can be posted from within the app. The bottom of each article also includes a selection of recent tweets on the article topic, complete with a “reply” link for each tweet that integrates with a user-selectable iPhone twitter client (though not Tweetdeck, which is annoying.) All of these features are unique among the apps in this roundup.

Font size is adjustable and stories can be shared by Email, Facebook, and Twitter.

There is no search function. Otherwise, the app is full-featured, good-looking, multimedia, and actively social. The Huffington Post continues their embrace of the web with their thoughtfully designed iPhone application.

For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with a review copy of Novatel’s MiFi, a portable wifi hotspot that allows you to connect to the web with multiple devices.

It’s a cute bit of kit – slightly shorter than an iPhone, and ideal for journalists because it bridges the need for a wifi hotspot while addressing the limitations of a 3G smartphone.

The technology is pretty straightforward: inside the MiFi is a SIM card which pulls a 3G signal that is converted into that wifi hotspot.

Up to 5 devices can then connect to the web through that hotspot – there’s a password which is shown, intelligently, on the back of the battery cover.

Clearly you need a 3G signal for the MiFi to work – it’s great in urban areas but less successful where there’s poor mobile coverage. But even with a relatively low 3G signal the wifi hotspot is surprisingly strong. And even if you already have access to wifi – or a 3G dongle – the MiFi provides a second, often more reliable, connection for uploading material.

In fact, if you’re relying on 3G connections for mobile journalism I would recommend having a MiFi on one mobile operator, a pay as you go 3G dongle with another, and a smartphone on a third.

I managed to stream video very easily from my laptop, connected to the web on the iPod Touch, and had a group of MA Online Journalism students using it to access the web while we conducted a lesson. (aside from journalism it’s perfect for mobile education).

Sadly, I didn’t get to try out the Eye-Fi card alongside it, but now that it’s hit the UK I’m hoping to play with that too. The Eye-Fi sends images and video straight from an SD card to social media via a wifi hotspot, so you could use an SLR camera or mini camcorder with a MiFi to upload your footage as soon as you shoot it without having to mess with laptops or smartphones (or police officers).

The major weakness, however, is battery power: the specifications say that the MiFi should have 4 hours battery life after a charge (which is, to its credit, quick). But this is shorter if you have multiple devices, and after 4 weeks of using it (and yes, it will have been used by other reviewers), the battery no longer held its charge. Given that you have to sign up to a contract to get the MiFi*, this is rather worrying.

UPDATE: The company that sent me the unit tell me “Standard warranty for the Novatel Wireless Intelligent Mobile Hotspot 2352 is 24 months.”

That aside, this is a must-have piece of kit for me.

*Contract details:

T-Mobile:

• Pay Monthly Contract (18 months)
• Device is free at point of sale, then £20/mth (3GB data according to T-Mobile Fair Usage Policy)

Vodafone:

• Pay Monthly Contract (24 months)
• Option (1) Device purchase is £69.99, then GBP 15/mth with 3GB data
• Option (2) Device is free, then £25/mth with 5GB data

Steve Outing highlights how Men’s Health are exploring the new features of the 3.0 iPhone/iPod Touch operating system:

“Now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

“Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.”

Outing then explores what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app (much more detail on his post):

1. One-off premium purchases
2. Enable premium services for an added fee
3. Delay the news by an hour
4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
5. A paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house.

Steve is inviting more ideas on his post.

Last September in ‘Why fantasy football may hold the key to the future of news‘ I wrote that data was one of the few advantages that news organisations have, and they should be doing more with it. A piece in today’s ReadWriteWeb adds a little commercial stardust to that hypothesis:

“MLB.com’s already wildly successful iPhone app [has] a $10 price tag that sports fans are apparently happy to pay, this could provide a great model for other struggling media to find an important new revenue stream – and not just because it charges for content. “… Any media outlet that can leverage statistics and data visualization as a central part of its coverage would be well served to put those visualizations in an iPhone app and sell it. The iPhone and Android platforms are brilliant for scrolling and zooming through layers of data in ways that print, TV and radio could only dream of. Mobile, touchscreen and hand-held beats a web page on the desktop computer too for data visualization.”

Amen to that.

Whenever I do sessions with people in the industry about online business models I show them The Guardian’s Chalkboard. That for me is a prime candidate for a premium mobile app (assuming there are no licensing issues) – not just because of the data, but because it is social. News orgs take note.

You may have seen this on Mashable, but equally, you may not, so I thought I’d pass it on. Demonstrating the value of being open about your processes (because this document will now be viewed by thousands of people), PhotoKast created this 37-page guide to how they developed their iPhone app. Very useful reading if you’re thinking of doing something for iPhones.

Building PhotoKast: Creating an iPhone app in one month