Sky News review

Andrew Williams

We review Sky News for iPhone, a news app that lets you get news and video reports from Sky for free

Published on Sep 3, 2009

People can get very tetchy about where they get their news, always paranoid that they’re being sold a horribly slanted view of the world. There's already been a handful of providers who have thrown their hat into the ring and produced an iPhone news app, including the BBC, but how does Sky’s offering shape up?

The interface is accessible, split into four main tabs that sit at the bottom of the screen. The first is ‘News’, which gives you a run down of the latest headlines, each paired with a picture. Up at the top of this screen, you can select between different types of news. The default is simply ‘Top Stories’, while you can also filter the latest news into ‘UK News’, ‘Sport’, ‘Business News’, ‘World News’, ‘Showbiz’ and ‘Strange’. Yes, that lot is a bit of a mouthful.

These options rest on a scrolling bar that unfortunately isn’t all that thumb-friendly. It’s takes a while to get used to the small touch area that actually scrolls this bar. If you’re using your thumb, you need to use the tip of it rather than employing a more relaxed thumb swipe. Thankfully, actually scrolling through the headlines is a lot simpler.

The next bottom tab is ‘Videos’. Here, you can watch a selection of news videos lifted right off the TV. They’re split into ‘Top Stories’, ‘Showbiz’ and ‘Weather’. These are displayed with whopping great big icons. Just tap on them and the video will start buffering. Easy? Yes. Attractive? Not quite as much.

Unfortunately, the last two tabs are less to do with the user’s experience and more about Sky making earning a few more quid. ‘Alerts’ is essentially an advert for the ways you can get Sky News delivered directly to your phone via a text alert. When browsing with your iPhone, references to positively archaic SMS news alerts seem a little out of place- especially when you’ll generally be able to get all the news you’ll need free through the Sky News app over the net.

The last tab feels even more out of place than its services-hawking partner. ‘Your Report’ allows you to submit your own news to Sky, using nothing more than your iPhone and a net connection. It lets you attach a picture from your iPhone’s gallery to a short report, along with your details, and send it into Sky News.

These two dubious tabs mean that Sky News is actually less feature rich than it initially seems. What we miss most is the lack of offline reading. None of the stories are actually saved on your iPhone, so if you’re not connected, you can’t read or watch a thing. There’s no preferences or settings menus either, so you can’t customise your news feeds at all.

Sky News is a competent news streaming app, but nothing more. It doesn’t cram in as many features as we’d like, and so falls short of some of its rivals, including the BBC Reader.

Sky News info