Reading a newspaper is its own experience that some just won’t give up. Personally, I like the content of newspapers but don’t want to deal with the paper anymore. Books have gone digital with a successful model of e-books but newspapers aren’t there yet. Many are attempting to bring newspapers to tablets and mobile device but it can be a bit of hit and miss. Today I’ll be reviewing PressReader which delivers newspapers from countries worldwide.
The content of PressReader is very good, bringing newspapers from a broad range of countries. The largest newspapers come from the USA (335), UK (169), Canada (282), Australia (185) and New Zealand (103) with other countries having a few or dozen papers only. Some of the most popular papers include The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald Tribune and more. Overall the selection is good and makes the app worthwhile.
The content of the newspapers looks exactly as the real paper itself. This is nice because you get the real feel of the newspaper but bad since that format is not the best for a mobile device. Most newspapers that I viewed looked best in portrait mode with landscape being almost useless. On any page you can pinch to zoom or double tap to zoom which I found to be the most useful since it automatically adjusted the screen to fit. You can swipe to move from page to page or use the arrows at the top. In order to navigate to other pages you can view the table of contents visually or as a simple list.
I found that to read any page required zooming and therefore panning to read the whole article. In essence, this is really what makes reading a newspaper on a tablet not as enjoyable compared to the real thing. You can use the text viewer to get around this problem by clicking on an article headline. This takes you to a new page with just the text formatted to fit the page with the option to adjust the font size. There is also a cool option for a voice reader which I found worked okay for the most part. The voice used was both a man and a woman who seemed to alternate between articles. A good option to listen to articles while you do something else. Although that does defeat the whole purpose of reading a newspaper.
Overall the content of PressReader is excellent and the app works as advertised to deliver full newspapers to your tablet. The reading experience won’t replace newspapers but it really shouldn’t since it’s an electronic device. I think if you are looking to make a jump to electronic newspapers then this is a good app. The app does give trials of 7 newspapers to try out before needing to buy subscriptions. Checkout PressReader and let us know if you’re ready to throw away your paper subscription.
Download from the Android Market.
Also available on the Kindle Fire from the Amazon Appstore.
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