The USA TODAY app for iPad could represent the future of reading newspapers digitally. The application gives you access the the top news stories, scores, weather and photos from the popular daily newspaper on your Apple iPad.
The way news is delivered on the USA TODAY app is simply stunning. Open the app and it's like you're looking at a real copy of a newspaper. The layout of the page makes it easy to check the latest headlines, view live weather information and look at the latest scores in national sports games.
Click on a headline in the USA TODAY app and the story will open in full screen. You can browse through the story in portrait or landscape mode, and flick up and down to cycle through the pages of the article. It's possible to change the text size in an article using a slider bar, although annoyingly, there's no pinch-to-zoom feature. You can flick through the pages of the digital newspaper in much the same way as you would with a real copy of USA TODAY just by thumbing across the screen.
You can browse different sections of USA TODAY by clicking on the masthead in the top corner of the screen. Besides the main news section, you can access Money, Sports and Life, each designed with the same gorgeous interface. It's a shame there are so few sections when compared with the iPhone version of USA TODAY, which has extra content for technology and travel.
Unfortunately, during our tests, the USA TODAY app proved quite unreliable at times. Sometimes it took a long time to load stories, while other times, the stories wouldn't load at all and it appeared like the application had crashed altogether.
USA TODAY offers an ultra comfortable way to check the news on your iPad. It's a shame that it's unstable and light on content.
