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Following a shake-up of the newspaper scene in London with the advent of a number of free morning and evening papers, the Evening Standard has now become a free paper as well. Browsing through Windows Phone Marketplace the other day I came across a new application called Evening Standard, and decided to investigate, especially as it is a free application. As the title suggests, this is indeed a mobile implementation of the main newspaper, and very good it is too!
After browsing Marketplace or doing a search, you will find the description of the program as in the screenshot below. Depending on your Marketplace settings, it can be installed into device or storage card memory. The core program is about 1.5MB and the stored cache can be around 500KB. After installing, you will find an 'Evening Standard' icon in the Start Menu. Launching the program initially shows the main News page.
The organisation of Evening Standard is very much like an RSS reader. Each headline opens a small synopsis of the story, from where there are links to open the full story within the program itself. The main news page contains links to the seventy most significant stories of the previous five days biased towards the previous two days.
Each synopsis page also has links to enable the story to be sent to a mail recipient, delicious, Facebook or Twitter. There is also an option to save a story for offline reading. The full story pages also have the same options, plus the ability to navigate the the previous or next story.
Back on the Home page, there is a list of topics in the header which can be dragged sideways to see additional categories in portrait mode. The content of categories other than main News is more limited, but certainly sufficient for casual browsing.
Each 'list' page and Synopsis page also has a very small advertising link at the top. Presumably this is a necessary feature of a free application and it is fairly discreet.
Menu settings in the synopsis and full story pages have similar options to the onscreen links plus the ability to open the story in a full browser window to the main Evening Standard web site. The menu from the home page includes options for refreshing the content, marking content as read/unread and saving. There are also links to the Settings and Help pages. The latter simply gives a list of keyboard shortcuts for those using devices with a hardware keyboard, but which is useful nonetheless.
My impressions of this program are very positive. it is an excellent way to catch up on news if you have a few spare moments and the content appears to be pretty comprehensive. Of course, there is a bias towards London and the Southeast, but even users away from this region may find something of interest, especially given that it is free of charge.
Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Maybe they'll try to snare a number of users then introduce a subscription?
