CBS News launches dedicated iPad app
iPad owners looking for CBS News content now have a free app for that. CBS is following the lead of ABC News with an app that caters to the dimensions of the iPad. The CBS News app features an easy to use interface that includes stories, images, videos, and even various CBS News Twitter feeds.
Like much of TV news, there is a lot of stuff, but not much depth. Stories usually run just a few paragraphs, but sometimes there is some more welcome detail.
Many of the videos are from CBS owned CNET, but they are tech specific and appear to be there as filler. There is no local news, other than your local temperature, and every time you quit the app and come back in, you have to tell the app to use your local location. That's just dumb.
Stories can be downloaded for offline viewing (a very good idea), and they can be shared via email, Facebook, and Twitter. The news videos play back with good quality, and they work well on either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. To subsidize the free app, every news page has an ad on it. Today, I was seeing lots of ads for the Amazon Kindle, which is kind of interesting to see on an iPad.
There are plenty of news clips and some complete broadcasts as well. I tried to watch some old Face the Nation broadcasts, but there did not seem to be any posted. There are brief clips from the show, however. 60 Minutes, one of the most popular programs on CBS, is not slated to appear at all, even though the app store page promotes 60 Minutes content.
All in all, CBS News for iPad is a welcome addition to the roster of news apps. I think it's too thin on deep content, preferring to give a smattering of news about lots of things. There are abundant links to other information, which is good. If I were CBS, I'd use the iPad and iPhone apps to add more content that didn't fit on the evening news, rather than just recycle material, but hey, that's just me.
CBS has a version of the app for the iPhone, and it also appears on the Android, Blackberry, and Symbian platforms.