The BBC News app has finally made it across to the Android platform as a free download from the Android Market.
BBC News for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch has been around since July last year and is now one of the most popular downloads for Apple device users.
As of now, Android mobile phone users can download the BBC News app completely free from the Android Market. It works on Android versions from 1.6 through to the latest 2.3.4, but unfortunately there is no tablet support for the app yet, so it won’t work on Android Honeycomb devices such as the Motorola Xoom.
The main features of the app include:
- Simple design with scroll functionality to enable efficient browsing;
- Tap action to reveal full-screen article and in-story video;
- Sideways ‘swipe’ functionality to move between stories;
- Sharing tools to post stories to a range of social networks, email or send via SMS to a friend;
- Rapid news stories refresh and latest and breaking news ‘ticker’;
- Neat personalisation features, allowing you to personalise the home screen by adding and removing categories;
- Font controls to increase or decrease the story text size.
Your Android device will need to be running Android version 2.2 at least to use the Live Video feature, but other than that from what we can see it’s a great app!
The iPhone version of the BBC News app has just recently hit over 6 million downloads, do you think the Android version will be as successful? Let us know if you have the app already and what you think of it by leaving a comment, or tweet us @Gadget_Helpline.