1st Impressions

As a news junkie, I’ve been anticipating the BNO News app ever since it was announced.  For those of you familiar with news sources on Twitter, @BreakingNews is consistently one of the best sources for breaking news.  It repeatedly beats any competition with the first to post an alert.  They are able to do this because they don’t just repeat news, they are a new Breaking News wire service.  They even offer email alerts if you are not into Twitter.  Since early March, they have gone from roughly 30,000 fans/followers getting their alerts to a million or more and are now adding to that by as many as 10,000 per day.  You don’t get that kind of following without providing premium news content.

The BNO News app is much more than just another interface to their Twitter account.  While I followed the Twitter tweets, I did not subscribe to the SMS alerts for them.  Did not want SMS alerts for everything.  Advertisements for the BNO service was not something that I wanted to wake me.  But this app has some really nice push features.  You can turn off the push alerts between certain hours, and also turn off alerts for low priority news.  Push notifications that the Russians have two nuclear attack subs patrolling the eastern seaboard of the US get though with a popup window and alert sound (just like a SMS).  The fact that the Russian president called Obama to wish him happy birthday (with subs? LOL) did not alert.  But it and all the other news is available in the application.  As you can see in the first image that I posted, the critical alerts are marked with a bar on the left side.

When you tap on a news item, you are brought to a second screen.  This screen reflects the link to the story (which will take you to the third screen I posted) if one exists, as well as the option to turn on or off the alerts for low priority news.  If I could offer one suggestion at this point, I would love for the tap of an item in the news list to take you directly to the full story, with perhaps a finger swipe that will take you to this intermediate screen that doesn’t really offer a lot of new information.

The app is a very reasonable $1.99 in the app store.  This covers the first month of push notifications.  After that, a subscription fee of $0.99/month will be introduced that will cover the bandwidth costs of the notifications and offer additional options.  As the app description puts it, “Non-subscribers will still continue to receive some notifications but will not have the more advanced filtering enabled. The monthly subscription fee will be the current minimum product price in the App Store ($0.99 in America).”

Besides wishing that I could bypass this second screen, I would love to have the ability to interface to Twitter and re-tweet a story, the ability to forward a headline via SMS and/or email, and once on a page for the full details of a story, the ability to email the link or bookmark it.  Perhaps this could be done with an option to open the news links in Safari and a link to Twitter where things could be re-tweeted from there.  Enabling cut & paste within the app might work as well.

The bottom line is that this app does not disappoint.  It makes my Must-Have list.  With additional releases already being planned, I am looking forward to all this will offer as the app matures.