The Guardian Anywhere

 Power hungry and net an official app, this is still an excellent source of news 

A lesson in how to re-tool a news website for viewing on a smartphone, though it is power hungry.
    

Free Exemplary newspaper app 






The Guardian may not be offering an official app on the Android Market, but this is not to say that the newspaper giant isn't catering for the mobile masses. Yes the paper has a bespoke application on the Apple App Store but it is also letting any developer take its content and do things with it through its API.

One who has jumped at this chance is Future Platforms, a Brighton-based app creator who has released The Guardian Anywhere for the Android Market.

We have to stress that th is is an unofficial app, but It was flagged up by the Guardian recently as one of the best apps on the market, so you don't really get much of a higher recommendation than that.

To use the app best, you need to allow it to download the paper's content to your phone.This lets you view things offline and takes a few minutes but once done the results are impressive.

The app looks just like the Guardian website and is broken down into tie following categories: Recent News, Browse all Stories and In Pictures.This is then broken into all the categories found on the Guardian website.
The app is a revelation for those who have been browsing the 'full fat' version of the Guardian on their phone. Articles take seconds to load, images just a little more. Everything  is laid out in an easy to read manner and the whole thing is a joy to use.
   

Though it's an unofficial app, it was flagged up by The Guardian as one of the best on the market
 

You can save pictures for use as a phone background, save articles you want to read later, and can choose what feeds you want to download, so you don't have to have the whole paper on your handset.

The only gripe is that it drains your batten/ downloading all the content, so it's best to do it when your phone is charging. You can schedule the full download to happen when your phone is in sleep mode and it can also happen only over Wi-Fi.

We found that there were a number of cached pages on our SD card after a few days use. These slight issues aside, the app is still fantastic to use.  






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