Sky News Android
BSkyB released a Sky News application for Android yesterday. It’s free, and boasts of its quick access to video content.
On the face of it, it’s quite an ugly application. They’ve said to hell with the Android default theme, and gone with something which shares aspects of their website design. The result is not pretty, and doesn’t provide an enjoyable user experience.
Citizen Journalism
One interesting feature in the application is an option called “Report” which sits at equal prominence to news and video. This is for citizen journalism. On selecting this, you are presented with fields to enter your name, phone number, location (not automatically detected unfortunately), comments, and even a photo, to send in to Sky News. I’m glad to see something of this nature so prominent. It’s not citizen journalism as I’d like it, because the information is not sent to and held in an openly accessible place, like it is when Twitter is involved for instance, but it certainly makes the submission of news, by citizens on the go, a breeze.
It does have decent access to video content, and it’s nice to see they’ve released the app for free, even though that does seem perhaps slightly at odds to what we’ve been hearing from the Murdoch camp in regards to free news recently.
Personally, despite missing out on the video content, I’d still rather use the BBC news website and the news & weather app that comes with the Nexus. That’s of course until the BBC’s Android app is released, which will surely be great.
Tags: android, application, Mobile, news
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