Yahoo Launches Slick News Digest App For Iphone

It’s been a while since we’ve been impressed with anything Yahoo has to offer, but they’ve definitely been making a comeback lately. The Yahoo Weather app is beautiful and functional, and today at CES they announced a very interesting and visually impressive News Digest app for iPhone.

The application works like a newspaper, with a summarized selection of the most important news stories twice a day, at 8 AM and 6 PM. This isn’t like Google News or any number of other web apps or mobile apps that try and use algorithms to generate your news for you on the fly. Yahoo News Digest is curated content, and it’s generated as a single edition for all of the US (it’s not available elsewhere quite yet).

Each “edition” has only around 10 stories or so, the most important ones at the moment, and when you drill down into one of the items you’ll see a summarized story from all of the news sources — but there is also a list of sources if you want to dig further. Maps, Wikipedia links, and tweets about the topic are in the bottom of the story view. You can swipe from one story to another quickly, and there’s a list of extra stories if you don’t have enough to read.

There isn’t any way to customize what you see in the list of top stories — and that’s on purpose. According to Yahoo, this isn’t meant to be only stories that you find interesting, it is meant to be a list of the most important stories that you should be aware of. And that list isn’t meant to be infinite — in fact, there’s a “Done” box at the bottom that looks a lot like the one in the Feedly app. Sure, you can scroll past to a short list of extra stories, but it’s not meant to be an application that you sit at and read forever — it’s meant to be an app that helps you get caught up with the important news, and then put it down until the next edition.

Overall it’s a slick and impressive application, though only for iPhone at the moment.

Yahoo News Digest [iTunes Store]