The good news first: Josh Marshall and the good folks at Talking Points Memo are working on a mobile app for the iPhone and Blackberry and it’s likely to be free! Josh has a lot of good ideas about what the app is going to be like. In his post, this bit stuck out to me:
…these mobile platforms may eventually become dominant ways to read the site, perhaps even rivaling the number of people who read TPM on the web. It would provide resources for building these different applications and customized versions, which isn’t cheap.
As a rule, I say never say never with technology. If anything, the minute you say building a better phone or news-reading platform can’t be done, it’s then destined to happen. So, in this case, I won’t say it’s impossible, but as the iPhone and computer are now, respectively, I think the computer will be a much more comfortable way of reading the news.
I love my iPhone but it definitely has its limits and I tend to use it to read the news when I don’t have my computer and/or a stable internet connection handy. The problem with the iPhone is that you can’t really skip around the internet as fast as you can on the computer. This is partially because there isn’t a large keyboard on the iPhone like there is on the computer. But also because even on a good day, a strong 3G connection isn’t quite as comfortably fast as a strong wireless or broadband connection. Additionally, there’s something about being able to have open tabs on a computer that makes reading the news much more pleasurable —I think the sensation has to do with the fact that some news and feature sites update automatically and you can notice as they do while focusing most of your attention on something else. That just doesn’t happen on the mobile phone browsers.
These critiques could (and I bet will) change sooner if not later but as it stands now I think the optimal way of surfing the news is on the computer, not the iPhone or Blackberry or whatever.
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