The Windows Phone app draws on the Windows Phone Metro UI to deliver the same style of news as The Daily Beast website; making good use of panoramas, typographic variation and images it is a beautifully designed and easy to use news app.
An opening panorama (featured, cheat sheet, my favourites, galleries, and categories) gives quick access to key content and headline pages. Features has the current top stories, cheat sheet (described below) is a pithy summary of the days news, my favourites offers user configurable access to a selected topic, galleries contain image heavy slideshow style stories, and categories lets you drill down into specific topics.
To keep things speedy the amount of content of the top level panorama has been limited to just a few items per page. However, additional content is available via the links in the categories list or the see all / read all links. These links drop you into a larger secondary panorama, which is divided into the same sections as the website (featured, politics, business, entertainment, beast tv, books, art, women in the words, newsweek, election, the royalist, andrew sullivan, howard kurtz, david frum, peter beinart, innovation, and fashion). Each section has at least 10 headlines listed and the ability to load more stories as required.
Tapping on any headline, or its associated image, drops you into the story view where you can read the full story and view related stories. A toolbar at the bottom of the page offers options to skip to the next or pervious story, as well as sharing the current via social networks, sms or email.
The Daily Beast is perhaps best known for its "Cheat Sheet", described as "must reads from all over", it is a curated collection of news stories, from multiple, source that aims to get you up to date with all key news stories in five minutes or less. Cheat sheet stories generally contain a summary paragraph, associated image and link to the source story.
In the Windows Phone app the top four stories from the current cheat sheet are available in the second page of the app's main panorama, and the full cheat sheet is just a single tap away.
It's worth noting that The Daily Beast merged with Newsweek magazine in late 2010. It was a marriage that reflected the Internet age: the instant analysis, web-based distribution and short form style of The Daily Beast contrasting with the heavyweight, paper magazine distribution, long-form style of Newsweek. The two news source share content, but have maintained their respective styles.
Marketplace description:
The Daily Beast app is the quickest way to get breaking news from across the Web on your phone. The Daily Beast offers instant summaries of the Web's must-read stories, plus original news reporting, opinion, and photos.
Features:
- The Daily Beast’s "Cheat Sheet" of the best stories from around the Web — the latest summaries of breaking news on your phone.
- Original news reporting and features on politics, entertainment, culture, and books.
- Share stories via email, Twitter and Facebook.
The Daily Beast app can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace for free.