[UK] Consuming news-on-the-go is a perfect fit for the iPhone, evidenced by the plethora of news-oriented offerings in the App Store.
On that note, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News announced today that its iPhone app (iTunes link) has hit the 1 million download mark – a quick visit to the UK iTunes Store reveals that it currently sits top of the free apps chart in the news category.
Interestingly, on the paid app front The Guardian newspaper’s recently launched app is still number one in the UK charts.
The Sky News iPhone app was launched in May last year and delivers “breaking news” by text, images and video, taking advantage of the device’s media playback capabilities. While only announced today, the app reached a million downloads at the beginning of January and Sky says its popularity shows no signs of slowing down – the chart position seems to back this up.
Perhaps buoyed by the iPhone app’s success, Sky News have also launched a new text-only version of its mobile site for non-smartphones and also an ‘enhanced’ version that the broadcaster says is aimed at an intermediate level, featuring text and images. News content-wise, multimedia aside, both sites will be on par with the iPhone app.