CNN App (for iPad)

It's not easy being a news junkie today with the sheer amount of content available, and numerous ways to consume it. If you consider yourself one, you understand my ambivalence when I learned that CNN released a free, dedicated iPad app. CNN's mobile venture won't replace any of these existing news apps such as ABC News for iPad, NYTimes for iPad, or Flipboard, but it does find a place among them. It's kind to the eyes, generous with video content, and conceals a few unexpected features. Like other 1.0 releases, it has issues and limitations. But for CNN loyalists, this app puts the Most Trusted Name In News on the Most Touchable Tablet.

The Mini Magic Wall
I tested the CNN's app on an iPad running OS 4.2; however, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, CNN has also miniaturized the experience. The new release takes advantage of the extra iPad real estate with three different views. The default view, Broadsheet, gives you a chronologically-ordered grid-view. Each story gets its own two-inch square, and the screen automatically updates, pushing old stories down screen. Along the top of the screen there are three tabs: Top Stories, Featured, and Video. I found Featured most interesting because it includes editorially curated videos I wouldn't have otherwise found.

Comparing Broadsheet to the default Globe view of ABC News for iPad, the CNN App looked polished and refined. In addition, it grants you two other viewing options: List View and Slideshow. Both are fairly self-explanatory, except I'll add that I prefer how the List View arranges stories by category (e.g. "World," Politics," and "Money"). All three views could be greatly improved with some bug squashing. I was surprised to see the app stutter while scrolling on a freshly-restored iPad running the latest version of iOS.
Finding content can be a struggle on the CNN App for iPad. While I found Broadsheet most visually engaging, it would be significantly more useful if they offered a drop-down menu for sorting categorically, rather than relying on List View. Whereas ABC News also grants users a search field, the feature is curiously absent in the CNN App—odd considering the amount of content CNN makes available.

Video Library In The Sky
At 5 MB—the size of a song in your iTunes library—CNN's App is tiny. There's a reason: It has limited functionality without Internet connectivity. You can cache news stories with the "Save for later" function, but the highlights of this app rely on Web connectivity.

CNN has invested heavily in the video capabilities of the app. The news network offers a capacious video catalog, all of which looks great on the iPad's 9.6-inch screen. There's also live video. It streamed smoothly when I was able to get it to load; however, in the five times I tried to launch a stream, live video only worked once. Alongside video content, there's a button for CNN Hourly Updates, which amounts to two-minute radio clips recapping the news of the hour.