Journalism contents for smartphones: an iPhone applications study

Abstract

As stated in the report The Future of Internet III, the increasing use of smartphones points out mobile devices as the major internet gateway by 2020. This presumption supposes that the future of the press may depend upon multiplatform contents, with particular awareness to devices as smartphones and e-readers. The technical features of smartphones, which are the major issue of this paper, and people’s personal relationship to mobile devices, bring up new and promising opportunities for communication companies.
In this paper we concentrate on the study of Apple iPhone for two main reasons: the extraordinary success of this device, which brought other companies to present similar merchandise (HTC, Nokia, etc), and the development of several original applications to access news from mobile phones. In this paper we analyze iPhone news applications with the purpose to identify some trends in their functions and contents.