The 10inch Motorola Xoom is my primary tablet and i've spent years looking for the ideal news app from an Indian media house to use on a regular basis. My search ended with the
+IBNLive app for Android tablets which is by far the best news reading app for Indian content. The UI is built for Android tablets unlike other apps which are designed for a smaller phone screen. Its slick and easy to use with quick navigation. The picture below gives you a view of the home screen of this app.
As you can see the news is divided into neat sections for top stories, politics, cricket etc. The beauty of the app is that you either scroll through the stories within these headers via simple left and right gestures or you click on any section to expand and read all stories in that spread through that page. The app is overall slick and easy to easy and very intuitive.
There is an also an alternative way to see different sections and accessing those stories directly by clicking on the menu button in the top left hand corner. That will bring up the view that you can see in the screenshot below. This brings up a pane that has the stories divided by headers and also a way to see live scores, you can also access the twitter stream of @IBNlive directly from here.
You can also use the app to access the live TV stream for IBN live. But I personally prefer to reading updates in the app vs watching live TV.
The App has dedicated sections for review of Tamil, Telgu and Kanadda cinema. I would have liked a Bollywood section too that would appeal to a larger audience.
While this app looks great on my 10 inch tablet but usability and look and feel drastically fall when I open it on a 7 inch nexus 7. I hope IBN can optimize the app for different screen sizes.
Other than this I did not find any faults on this app and use this every day on my 10inch tablet.
+NDTV also has an android tablet app which is similar to its ipad app but nowhere as slick and quick as this app. Performance of the NDTV android app is also much slower compared to its ipad version. But more on this in a different review :)
Given the
large number of low cost Android tablets in India and increased adoption, i'm surprised that large brands like
+The Times of India and
+Hindustan Times do not have android tablet specific apps, while both have excellent iPad apps.
