Best Free iPad App of the Week: Reuters

Who doesn’t like free? And who doesn’t like great iPad apps? When the two come together it’s great stuff. With that in mind, we offer up a quick review of an excellent free iPad app each week.

This week’s pick is Reuters, a superb new iPad app from one of the world’s leading news agencies.

The App Store description for Reuters is about as short and sweet as you can get:

Reuters’ iOS app brings you the latest reporting and market data from the world’s most trusted news organization.

I’m not sure why but I expected a Reuters news app to be quite drab, and boy was I wrong. This app has one of the cleanest, most elegant user interfaces for an iPad news app that I’ve ever seen. It’s a real pleasure to use, and I’m finding that the more I use it the more I love enjoy the UI.

The app’s main home page, and the home pages for each of its main sections, have one large image for a lead story and then thumbnails to accompany remaining top stories.

The main sections are Home, World, Politics,Business, Tech, and Market News. All of them offer a strong selection of articles and appear to be refreshed often – and you can use the pull down to refresh feature.

The layout for individual articles is clean and is just expanded out within the articles list – so there’s no need for a back button, you just carry on scrolling through other items when you’re through.

Once you start browsing into sections and articles they’re cleverly stacked alongside each – so again you don’t need a back button and you can just swipe right and left to move through them.

There’s a discrete search button at the top left of the app’s pages and a nav button that pulls up a left sidebar. All the app’s features work nicely in both portrait and landscape mode.

You can save a story with a single tap on a star icon and share them easily via Facebook, Twitter, and email.

Reuters is now among my favorite iPad news apps, and definitely one of the nicest to read in with its beautiful UI.

Here’s an App Store link for Reuters.

If you’re after more great free iPad apps, be sure to check out our previous choices for Best Free iPad of the Week. We’ve also recently put together a best of the best of our selections from the last year in a Top 25 Best Free iPad Apps list.