24 hour news channel Al Jazeera has launched a new mobile app for Android and BlackBerry devices. The news network had already offered a simple Android app which provided live streaming video from Al Jazeera’s English and Arabic news channels, but the new app is a full-featured news utilties that provides photos, written articles, video clips, and live streams, among other things.
The Al Jazeera English app for Android has an attractive home screen with thumbnail photos for top stories in a number of categories including News, Opinion, Features, and Video.
There’s also a “Your Media” section which lets you submit content to Al Jazeera from your phone, CNN iReport-style.
While there’s still a heavy focus on video, the new Al Jazeera App also lets you view full length articles from the company’s web site, formatted for a mobile device. The app also has a picture gallery which lets you browse for stories by images… for some reason.
My only complaint is that the navigation looks like it was designed for the iPhone rather than Android. You can use the Android back button for navigation — but there’s also a back button at the top of each screen allowing you to return to the previous category or home screen. There are also forward and back buttons at the top of each article which you can use to navigate between stories. And pressing the menu button on your Android device does nothing, but there’s a settings button on the home screen.
What’s funny is that while the new Al Jazeera English app looks like it was designed for iOS and ported to Android, it isn’t yet live in the iTunes App Store. The BlackBerry version, however, is available from the BlackBerry App World.
via Reddit
| Download from AppBrain |
