Everything today seems to be converging to a single point - Mobile
Phones! Email, web browsing, document viewing, etc have now become such
common features that one doesn't even count them as a premium feature
anymore. With the ever so expanding arena of what you can do with your
mobile today, we bring to you here an useful little app that just adds
more value to your handset.
The
Hindustan Times Mobile Application (titled mPaper) is a light app that
can be downloaded to your mobile phone and brings the top news stories
to you on the move! I have been using this application for a few months
now and it has recently undergone an upgrade that further refines its
usability and performance. The application is customizable as per your
preferences and you can choose from an array of sections which in turn
are customizable into categories that you wish to view on your app's
home page.
The sections on offer are - news, entertainment &
lifestyle, columns & blogs and education. I pick the most used
section for review here - The News Section. The app segregates news
items into tabs including headlines, national news, world news, sport,
city specific (Delhi & Mumbai) and business. You can select the ones
that you wish to receive refreshed content for.
The news stories
updation is fairly frequent making the content quite fresh. You have the
option of clicking onto a news item that you wish to read more on,
which opens up the story in full. The app also has a news ticker
scrolling at its top that highlights important and most recent news
headlines. What's more, you may leave your app running in the background
and you have a scrolling ticker on your phone's home screen displaying
recent news.
Although the app has undergone an upgrade and is far
superior to its predecessor, there still remain some glitches that would
need attention to be resolved. To start with, although the news is
reasonably fresh, it does not compare to real time breaking news stories
that may be available on mobile enabled sites of leading news agencies.
The news ticker in particular needs to be updated much more frequently
for it to have any relevance on your home screen. Besides, the app if
left on in the background for automatic refresh of the news feeds
consumes a lot of your battery backup and exhausts it at a much more
rapid rate. Again, for the app to be relevant for auto retrieval and a
home screen ticker, it needs to work seriously on making it much lighter
on the battery consumption. And last, a little more aesthetic appeal
would do no harm to an otherwise useful and innovative product. I would
rate the app at 2.5/5 in its present form - a product worth trying for sure
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