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BBC News app arrives on Android tablets

You can now get your fix of licence fee-funded news and sport on tablets such as the Asus Transformer Prime and Motorola Xoom 2.

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Richard Trenholm was CNET's film and TV editor, covering the big screen, small screen and streaming. A member of the Film Critic's Circle, he's covered technology and culture from London's tech scene to Europe's refugee camps to the Sundance film festival.
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Richard Trenholm
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The BBC News app is now on your Android tablet. As of today, you can get your fix of licence fee-funded news and sport on tablets such as the Asus Transformer Prime, Motorola Xoom 2 and Sony Tablet S.

The BBC News app for Android phones has been downloaded more than 3 million times so far. That works on tablets with screens smaller than 7 inches, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The new tablet version works on slates running Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich, the most recent versions of Android and the first versions designed with tablets in mind.

The app includes video within stories, which you can watch even with a 3G connection, as well as over Wi-Fi.

A future release will let you watch the news channel BBC News 24 live through the app. The Beeb also says it's working on widgets for your home screen, putting the latest headlines right at your fingertips.

An international version is set to follow soon. The app is already available for the iPhone and iPad, as well as Android phones.

Auntie says around 9.7m people visiting BBC News sites and apps now do so on a smart phone or tablet. That's more than a quarter of the total, which just shows the explosion in popularity of mobile devices. Auntie recently reported that BBC iPlayer had a record year for online viewing in 2011, and iPad viewing was up by 600 per cent.

The BBC News app is free from the Android Market in the UK now.

Does the arrival of big-name apps like this suggest Android tablets are here to stay, or is the iPad still the only game in town? Tell us your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.