I had high hopes for this site when I first noticed it in the Apple Web Apps directory. It seemed very promising, and maybe it still will be if they put *a lot* of work into their iPhone version – but for now, not good at all.
PressDisplay seems a good concept to me (and it may well be OK on a PC already) – it lets you choose your favorite newspapers and other news titles from a good, broad list of some 500 titles from 70 countries, and then browse through stories from all, or select just one to view at the moment and so on. Nice idea it seems to me – I quickly ran through their list and chose The Guardian, The London Evening Standard, The Miami Herald, Washington Post, a Spanish newspaper, and others – and thought great, let’s browse through these.
Small problem though – very small problem in fact. See the screencaps above? Notice how it looks like anything below headline text is tiny and impossible to read? Well, that’s because it is. That’s OK though right – it’s an iPhone optimized site – I’ll just double-tap to zoom … and nothing happens. OK, I’ll use two fingers to zoom in … nope, no dice. What you see (very little) is what you get.
So I can look at the cover page of The Guardian, like I could from yards away while walking past a newsagent, but I can’t read any of it. Marvelous. Same for The Washington Post, The Evening Standard, The Dallas Morning News, and a few other titles I tried.
Then I thought perhaps the front pages were just intended to be treated differently, as decoration almost, and if I drilled down to some content inside the papers, I’d see real, readable content. So I gave that a go:
And … yeah, I can’t really read below the headline there either – and that is as zoomed in as I can get it.
Now I have to tell you, PressDisplay does have a main home page where there is a listing of Top Stories – and those are formatted quite nicely for the iPhone, on both the listing with short summaries view, and the individual story view. But … that page seems to pull its contents from wherever it likes, not based at all on my selection of favorite titles. I did not see an obvious preferences setting to swap this to display my preferred titles – so this is just a pretty weak news headline listing, that really doesn’t match up to Yahoo or Google News or any general sort of news aggregator.
What interested me about PressDisplay was choosing my own lost of quite a few good news sources and seeing them all displayed nicely and fast-loading on the iPhone. I don’t find the site interesting as a Yahoo or Google News alternative. So the one area that did interest me, and the one they are really touting in their Apple Web Apps entry – "Allows you to get access to hundreds of newspapers from around the world." – is the one that sucks, from my experience with it.
There is also some sort of tiering of how many digital ‘issues’ of titles I can look at / get before I have to change from a free account to various levels of paid account. I didn’t explore those at all – as I think this could be a nice service, but still not one I’d pay for even if it was working perfectly I don’t think, as I could just as easily RSS-subscribe to the titles I’m interested in.
PressDisplay could be quite a nice little aggregator of good news titles for the iPhone, if they put in some work on making the iPhone version work a whole lot better. For now though, I have to say I find newspapers more interesting when I can read the content in them …
If you want to give PressDisplay a try yourself, and tell me what I’m missing, give it a look at:
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With the iPhone’s massive impact on mobile web browsing, iPhone specific sites are popping up in great numbers every day – some very good, some that suck. If you’ve spotted any that really stand out in either category, let us know by email to news AT justanotheriPhoneblog.com – you know the deal, replace AT with an @ symbol and get rid of the spaces. Look forward to seeing your favorite – or least favorite – sites …
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