I can’t stand the USA Today website, greeted by the full page adverts is  there anyone out there who sits and waits for the five seconds to pass without clicking Continue Reading?

Thankfully they have a good selection of RSS feeds and with their iPhone app I have got one more way to read their content without ever having to visit the site.

The USA Today iPhone app is a classic example of how to transport content to the Jesus-phone. All of your news sections are there Latest / Money / Sports / Life / Tech / Travel on a slider bar under the logo and a local weather forecast, with the location taken from your phone.

On each article images can be enlarged and there is a handy ‘Share Article’ button which lets you email, text or twitter it to contacts in your phone directory. But there is no integration with  the likes of Digg, Yahoo! Buzz or Reddit, all of which are available on the main site.

Buttons in the dock take you to sports results (Not real sports like football and rugby but their us alternatives, so NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are all their) Weather, Pictures and Snapshots.

Pictures gives a nice tabbed selection of the days Sport, Celeb, Science and Travel images. Photographs appear in a grid and enlarge to fill the screen on a single tap, a further touch bring up a couple of paragraph caption.

Snapshots is a online voting tool of daily polls, results can be seen instantly and filtered by location but they are also turned into funky graphics at the end of the day.

USA Today App – iTunes Link

I have just been having a quick play with the new(ish) ITN iPhone app and it is not half bad. But what did surprise me was the dire state of the majority of apps in the News section of iTunes.

Most are just custom RSS readers while the ones from major news orgs don’t seem to me making the most of what the device can do.

Take a look at any other category and you will see innovative ideas which use the potential of the iPhone to enhance the experience, not in News, most have just created a native app version of their mobile site.

Prompted by this I am going to start reviewing some of the the News apps here and would be interested to hear what you think about them and any ideas you have about what news orgs should be doing with mobile apps.