Mashable! for iPhone and iPad Review
Our rating:
By: nclud, LLC
Version #: 1.4.6
Date Released:
Developer: By Mashable
Price: Free
User Rating:Mashable is one of the biggest technology sites on the internet; if you have any interest in tech, you probably have it’s news prominent your RSS reader and chances are you read one or more articles every day. Whether it’s business information, startups or social media, Mashable often has the scoop.
The website is easy to use, but now Mashable came up with apps for your iPhone and iPad to make reading articles on their site a lot easier for iOS users. The apps for both devices have a lot of similarities; they are very clean and make reading of articles a very nice and clean experience. All posts are presented on a nice and clean page with a white background and are a joy to read.
Both apps appear to store articles when you are online; when I switched off my wireless, I could still read all articles on the screen. Images might be missing and of course you cannot watch video, but all text is still readable after only a few minutes wireless connection. I like this feature (even though it might be unintended) and I think they should cache the images as well, so the article is complete. That would really make it a complete joy; hook it up for a bit and have all in.
The overall experience of both apps is great. I like this a lot better than reading with my RSS feed or going to the site directly. There are a few minor downsides; on the iPad version you have no indication that you are searching when you type a query, while on the iPhone it nicely shows that it is getting results for you. A cool feature on the iPad is scrolling forward and backward through articles when you are on a detail page, but instead of using a nice swipe to move between articles, they use clumsy back and forward arrows; not a good choice imho; we are used to swiping!
Being a free app this is a must-have for people interested in everything tech, internet and social!
We rate this app 4 out of 5 stars.
Fixing caching, swipe and search progress would bump the iPad version to a 5/5 for me.