A Windows Phone app for the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), the oldest continuously published newspaper in the Southern Hemisphere is now available exclusively for Nokia Lumia devices. As you might expect, the app gives easy access to news content, weather forecasts, and image galleries with an Australian slant, but it also makes the most of the smartphone context with daily notifications, Live Tile support and an offline mode.

SMH is a slick app and ranks as one of the better newspaper apps available for Windows Phone. It combines good use of the Microsoft Design Language (Metro), with some clever extras, such as customisable tiles for news categories and variable font sizes.

The app's opening panorama is split into four pages. The first, today's news, show the top ten current news stories; the second, news category, gives access the addition content divided into topics; the third, image gallery, gives access to picture galleries; and the fourth, weather, shows current weather conditions as well as a forecast for the next few days.

Support for offline browsing is not immediately obvious at first, but it is present. You will need to activate the feature in the app's settings, where you can also specify which categories of content should be available offline. This is also where you activate notifications and enable the location detection for local optimised content (e.g. mapping and weather forecasts). On Windows Phone 8 devices there's also lock screen integration, which can, optionally, be used to show the latest news and an associated image when locking / unlocking your phone.

Windows Store description:

Breaking news from Sydney, Australia and the world. Features the latest business, sport, entertainment, travel, lifestyle, and technology news.

The SMH app can be downloaded from the Nokia collection of the Windows Phone Store for free.