One way to get real push news on the iPhone
Aug 05, '09 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: Andrew J Freyer
As far as I know, there is only one news app (AP Mobile) that pushes news to your phone. However, they only push really big stores to the phone, which means only two or three updates a week. In my mind, that defeats the purpose of push news.
The other option seemed to be to sign up for loads of email lists from wsj.com, cnn.com, etc. This gives lots of duplicates and since it's email, it cannot compete with the ease of a push (or text) notification on the lock screen. I deleted AP Mobile, unsubscribed from my mailing lists, and came up with this solution:
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Add @BreakingNews to the list of folks you're following on Twitter.
- On your twitter.com page, enable device updates for @BreakingNews (on your Following page), and add your iPhone number.
This give me non-duplicated breaking news pushed to my iPhone (via text message). Since the services messages are already formatted for Twitter, they are complete at 160 characters. I also like that they don't always link to articles with shortend URLS. Some might not like this, but really, when you have an iPhone and are curious, Google isn't that far away.
Of course, these are text messages, so you'll need a hefty SMS plan (I have 1500) in order to cover the activity. BNO is releasing their own native iPhone app soon ($.99 per month) , and hopefully that'll do exactly what this workaround does, but better. Until then, this works great.
[robg adds: BNO has now released their native BNO News iPhone app ($1.99, plus $.99 per month), which would also solve the problem (and is getting good reviews on the App Store), but the above method is free, assuming you have enough SMS messages in your data plan.]
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