WSJ app for Android tablet is a nice touch

Richard Lai of Engadget reviews the Android tablet app for The Wall Street Journal, calling it a “pretty good job.”

Lai writes, “The biggest difference between the iPad version and the Android version of WSJ’s app lies in the article layout: rather than splitting the body into multiple columns and spreading them across pages horizontally, the Android version does it all in a single column on a single page. This makes sense in portrait mode given the smaller screen size, but it’s not as pleasing to the eye in landscape mode; that said, if you do have a thing for wider paragraphs, then they’re certainly tolerable if you pick the large text size — you can do so using the button with the larger ‘A’ at the bottom right corner of the page.

“Speaking of which, you’ll also find two more buttons next to the text size keys — one’s for jumping to the top of the page, and the other’s for jumping to the bottom, just like the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ keys on a desktop keyboard. We haven’t been using these four tiny buttons much yet, but they could do with some sizing up to cover more of our fingertip.

“Another big difference between the two versions is the way video clips are embedded in the articles. In short: it’s not for the short-tempered — it’s bad enough that the articles take almost twice as long to load, but you’re also forced to watch them in full screen only; whereas the iPad version lets you watch them right inside the article (like HTML5 videos in iOS’ Safari) or in fullscreen mode. In WSJ’s defense, this is probably more to do with certain limitations on Android, so here’s hoping that Google will throw in some useful tweaks in the near future to aid developers on this matter.”