A glimpse at Digg's new iPhone app (images)

Digg's new native iPhone app, which was released this week, brings a handful of Digg.com features to iPhone users, which were previously unavailable through mobile Safari.

Here is what the story pages look like, complete with a summary, time stamp, and quick links to comments and related stories. Users can also quickly up- or down-vote a story with a pervasive toolbar on the bottom of the page.

Along with the top and upcoming stories, Digg mobile users can sort stories by what's recent. Each story can also be expanded, and quickly voted on and bookmarked--all without having to visit the actual story page.

Stories that are saved to a user's profile can sync up between the mobile and normal Web version. So if a user bookmarks a story for reading later on their phone, they can pick it back up when they're back at their normal computer--and visa-versa.

Digg's search engine, which the company revamped a few months ago, can now be used from the app. Previously, users were unable to do searches from the mobile Web version of the site without a lot of scrolling. This also works with Digg's search operators to sort by a particular source site, when the story was posted, and how many diggs it has.

Digg's handling of comments is now improved. In the mobile Web version, users could only see the "top" comments, as voted on by users. Now they can read the entire comment thread. Still missing are some of the ways to sort through them, like chronologically and the controversial view, which takes comments that have received a significant amount of up or down votes in a short period of time.

While mobile Safari users could enjoy simply hopping to another page in the mobile Web version of Digg, it still failed to provide a breadcrumb trail back to the Digg story page, that is, short of hitting the back button. Digg's iPhone app takes care of that by adding a quick back button, along with a link in the top right to jump quickly to the Digg discussion.

The mobile Web version of Digg (m.digg.com), has always had sharing options via e-mail. Digg's mobile app one-ups that by adding quick links to Facebook and Twitter as well.