Description – BNO News is one great breaking news app with two powerful options. Purchase BNO News and you’ll receive major breaking news headlines directly on your phone as push notifications. Read the headlines without even unlocking your phone – and without eating up expensive text messages. Serious news junkies can also subscribe to have categorized lower-priority updates pushed to their phone. Either way, you’ll be in the know with BNO anywhere, anytime.

Developer – BitMethod

BNO News – $1.99 (£1.19) (Monthly subscription $0.99/£0.59)

I’m addicted to news, for some reason I love reading and receiving news. Ever since the advent of push notifications on the iPhone I had a dream of being notified of breaking news within seconds of it happening. This kind of instant news gratification has always been available to those who pay to have access to news wires but I’m personally not always at a computer. Twitter has become a reasonable substitute on the go and in particular news service BNO News offers quick and concise updates via its Twitter account. For me and I imagine other “news junkies” this is still not enough and the same company has come to the rescue with the almost perfect iPhone App aptly named BNO News.

Don’t get me wrong there have bucket loads of news apps for the iPhone, some that come to mind are AP Mobile, Sky News and FT Mobile. Out of that lot only AP Mobile offers push notifications and even then I receive a notification maybe once a day.

The BNO News app offers push notifications at a cost, not only is there a price to download the app but via in-app purchasing it will be necessary to buy a monthly subscription to enable push notifications, without paying you’ll only receive one update a day. The app itself will continue to function as normal as a news reader. While we’re on the subject the app is a reasonably poor news reader, updates are less than 140 characters (to suit Twitter) and therefore sparse on information. BNO counters this in some cases by offering a link to a website, a trade off I’m mostly willing to make but often it’s necessary to find more details elsewhere (when other sites catch up).

The app itself offers the most customisable system of push notifications I’ve ever seen, by default BNO News will deliver just breaking news via push 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But with some easy tweaking via the app’s preferences–which I should note are within the app itself rather than in the iPhone’s preferences–you can set the app to deliver “low priority” updates via push and also set a sleep period to silence all alerts. On top of all this with one of the recent updates to this app the ability to only receive notifications for certain types of news was added, for example I can now choose to get notifications regarding earthquakes, terrorism, technology but not sport or crime.

Unfortunately the app is flawed, but not in quality of build or delivery but rather the service that runs the content. There will be large chunks of the day where I receive no updates at all despite knowing about breaking news, not impressive for an app and service that promises updates “anywhere, anytime”.

Pros

  • Largely reliable and accurate push notifications, certainly quicker than any other news service
  • Streamlined app for just reading headlines
  • Ability to customise exactly what news to receive and when
  • Cheap app price and subscription

Cons

  • Some stories lack further detail
  • Service often suffers long periods of no updates

Verdict

As it says on the tin, short and precise push notifications about the latest breaking news. BNO News is incredibly customisable and all this for just a small few per month. It’s a shame that the app is let down by what appears to be an inability to deliver news 24 hours a day to all timezones of the world.