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First look at the new SZ iPhone app

Here's my direct comparison of today's New York Times Business Section in their iPhone app vs. the new Sueddeutsche Zeitung app vs. their iPhone-optimized version of sueddeutsche.de.

Amazing how different designs can be and how the NYT manages to have a far clearer appearance while offering more than double the (text) content. (I counted chars: the whole text content in the SZ app example equals the NYT's first article plus the second title and 9 more chars. It's just an example, but obviously the additional content (what's the article about?) is valuable.

The other open questions are: why should I (or anyone) pay relevant money (€1.59 per month) for a push notification service (=annoying) and offline browsing capability (=rarely needed on an iPhone)? On the other hand it's clear why they don't charge for the Basic app, as it seems to offer just the same content as their (very similar looking) sueddeutsche.de website.

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Comments (2)

Jan 07, 2010
drayde said...
Would have been so easy. Just copy the NYT app... BTW: Offline browsing is a nice feature for ipod touch users.
Jan 07, 2010
Florian said...
Good point with the iPod touches. But anyway - while I'm at ranting - the offline mode itself is not nicely done, too. You have to go to a seperate settings tab and manually start a single import there. And when the import is done, you have to manually switch between 'offline mode' and 'online mode' if I understand the interface correctly. I would have wished for a seamless offline caching or at least for an automatic switch back to 'online mode' when network connection becomes available.

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