The team behind the popular Dolphin Browser HD have been testing a new version for the past few weeks with a “Webzine” feature that lets you view news from some web sites in a magazine-style layout. Now Dolphin Browser HD 6.0 with Webzine has left beta and it’s available as a free download from the Android Market.

The Webzine feature allows you to customize your new tab page with links to sites such as the New York Times, NPR, CNN, or the BBC. When you click on a link to a Webzine you’re taken to a new page with thumbnail photos, headlines, and snippets of each article. Webzines tend to load more quickly than full web pages and the layout is attractive and well suited for phones with small screens.

Tap on a headline or photo to open the article and things start to break down a little bit. You still get a quick-loading, streamlined mobile experience without any advertisements. But for most web sites you’ll only see the first few paragraphs of a story. If you want to keep reading you’ll have to click the “view article” button to load the full web page.

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Last fall Bloomberg released an Android app for checking stock quotes, watching market trends, or viewing the latest business news on your smartphone. Now the company has launched Bloomberg for Tablet bringing the same features to tablet-style devices running Android 2.1 and up.

Since the new app isn’t made exclusively for Android 3.x Honeycomb tablets it doesn’t feature any Honeycomb-specific design elements. Instead it’s simply designed to look better on a large display than the smartphone app. Fonts are bigger and there’s a new multi-pane view for news headlines. When you click a headline to read an article the story will appear in a column on the right while you can use a column on the left to find additional headlines and categories.

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NBC took a step into the digital age this week and released a new iPad app to complement its full-fledged website.

The app is optimized for easy use on the iPad’s 10″ screen, and provides users with a wide variety of features. These include the network’s schedule, show information, exclusive photos, interactive games, and searchable content (by show.) A customizable dashboard even offers a personalized view of your favorite shows and content.

It also includes some short video clips and recaps, but lacks a major feature: full-length episodes of NBC shows. This means that if you’re looking to rent NBC episodes on iTunes and Apple TV, you’re still out of luck. Interestingly, many shows from NBC Universal are available for streaming on Netflix and even Hulu.

Of course, those are both subscription-based services, but NBC could’ve easily monetized the episodes through ad-support (which it does on NBC.com) had it chosen to make them available in the iPad app. By not choosing to provide its iOS audience with a convenient mobile option for viewing its most popular TV shows, NBC is essentially telling its fans to go use someone else’s app to view its content.

You can download NBC.com for iPad in the App Store for free.

via Gigaom

A few weeks ago an official BBC News app finally hit the Android Market, but at the time you could only download the app if you happened to be in the UK. Now the BBC Worldwide team has launched a global version of the news app.

You can use BBC News for Android to read the latest news, listen to radio stories, or watch videos from your Android phone. You can also listen to live radio programs using the app.

The BBC News app doesn’t currently support tablets running Google Android 3.x Honeycomb, and to be honest it’s not really optimized for tablets running Android 2.x either. I took it for a spin on an HTC Flyer tablet and while it looked pretty decent in portrait mode, there’s no landscape mode at all.

When you fire up the app you’re greeted with a series of photos and headlines for the top stories followed by the latest news in a number of categories. You can customize the home screen by clicking the Edit button and choosing just the topics you’re interested in. There’s also a bar at the top of the screen which shows the latest headlines, as well as an advertising bar at the bottom of the screen. The advertising is probably the key difference between the UK and international versions of the app. British residents pay a license fee that supports the BBC, so they get an ad-free version at no charge.

via Android Police

The Financial Times has decided to replace its aging mobile applications for iOS, Android and other platforms with a new web app based on HTML 5. The move could pave the way for more web apps based on the latest web standards — but not just because of the new features HTML5 offers. The new web app also offers the FT a way to provide its 600,000 subscribers with access to the news while sidestepping Apple’s rules for subscription-based apps sold in the App Store. Update: While the web app is designed for the iPhone and iPad you may have some luck getting it to work with browsers on some other platforms.

The FT joins a growing number of companies that have expressed displeasure with Apple’s system, where Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all subscription revenue. The move also offers a platform agnostic approach. You can access the web app on any mobile device with a web browser that supports HTML5.

The new web app is free to use until June 14th. You’ll need to pay for a FT.com subscription to keep reading after that, with prices starting at $4.99 per week.

Some users are reporting that the initial load time is tediously slow, but mine was zippy and about as fast as waiting for Mobiputing’s new app for iOS to load. The biggest problem is some unnecessary choppiness when tapping new categories, but the overall speed of the app felt quite fast compared to similar native iOS apps.

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The Wall Street Journal has offered an Android app since last year. But the app was only available for Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Now the WSJ has finally released an Android app for smartphones. Wall Street Journal Mobile is available as a free download from the Android Market.

The app shows top stories from the newspaper divided by section, includes a “Photos of the Day” feature, and lets you access video and podcast content. You can save articles to read later and share items via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

One feature I’d love to see in more news apps is a “listen to article” text to speech article. The digital voice is horribly annoying, but at least it seems to do a decent job with punctuation, and if you want to catch up on the latest news while you’re driving, walking, or otherwise unable to read, text to speech is a killer feature.

While some articles are available when you register for a free account, you’ll need to be a Wall Street Journal subscriber to view premium content. You don’t really get to do anything with the mobile app unless you at least register.

via Android Police

The good news is that the BBC has finally released an official BBC News app for Android. The bad news is that unlike the networks' iOS app which is available internationally, the BBC News app for Android is only available to UK residents at the moment. The (other) good news is that an international version is on the way.

If you happen to be one of the folks who can download the app, you can read the latest stories, view full-screen articles and videos, sort stories by subject, and even personalize your homescreen using the edit function to add or remove categories.

BBC News is available for Android 1.6 and up, but if you happen to have be running Android 2.2 or later with support for Adobe Flash you can also watch live streams of the BBC News channel. My guess is that’s the reason the app isn’t available outside of the UK yet. The lisense fee paid by British television viewers funds the BBC, so you typically have to be in the UK to view live content from the network.

My guess is that when the international version of the app hits the Android Market, live streaming won’t be an option.

News360 has launched a new app optimized for Android tablets. The company has been offering news apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms for a while, but the new app for tablets running Android 3.x Honeycomb may just be one of the best tablet news apps I’ve seen so far.

The home screen is divided into a navigation bar on the left and headlines and photographs on the right. You can choose from top stories, latest news, world, US, politics, business, tech, or other categories. You can also connect to your social networks so News360 can deliver personalized news.

From the menu at the top of the app you can search the news, hit the Local button to view stories from your area, and click the 360 view to watch a stream of photos from the news float by. Tap on any photo to view more information or bring up the full article.

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