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The Daily Planet for iOS review: Your place to get all the news

If you want a no-nonsense RSS news app, The Daily Planet has a ton of categories to browse from thousands of sources and a simple navigation system that helps you get to the news you want to read quickly.

Jason Parker Senior Editor / Reviews - Software
Jason Parker has been at CNET for nearly 15 years. He is the senior editor in charge of iOS software and has become an expert reviewer of the software that runs on each new Apple device. He now spends most of his time covering Apple iOS releases and third-party apps.
Jason Parker
2 min read

The Daily Planet is an RSS newsreader with a no-nonsense interface that gets you to the latest local and national news feeds for subjects you care about.

8.0

The Daily Planet for iOS

The Good

<b>The Daily Planet for iOS</b> brings you news from thousands of sources using an interface that's easy to navigate. Added extras make the app useful in ways you wouldn't expect.

The Bad

Those with slow connection will end up waiting for pages to convert to Readability mode. The app is sometimes slow to load its thousands of sources.

The Bottom Line

If you want a no-nonsense news app, The Daily Planet has a ton of categories to browse from thousands of sources and a simple navigation system that helps you get to the news you want to read quickly.

There is no fancy graphical interface for this app and you won't be flipping animated pages or looking at big colorful images. What you get with The Daily Planet is a list of top-level categories including top stories, business and markets, politics, sports, and several other common topics, along with localized classifieds and other extras. The app's simple layout lets you drill down to your topics of choice from thousands of news sources in only a couple of taps.

The Daily Planet deals mostly in stories from Web sites, but there are also audio and video stories. If you download Readability, an additional free app, The Daily Planet will convert hard-to-read full Web site stories into cleanly laid out text that's much easier to read on your iPhone screen. But in my testing, when the connection was poor, the app had trouble making the conversion. Fortunately, you can still use the double-tap zoom feature on the iPhone to get a more readable view of most Web sites until a stronger connection comes back.

The Daily Planet is a news junkie's dream (pictures)

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Even without the fancy interface you find in other news apps for iOS, The Daily Planet has a few extras that make it useful for more than just news when away from your computer. Support for MapTrac lets you perform local searches for bars, restaurants, and shops, and you can even read reviews powered by sources like Yelp, Yahoo, and Google Places. MapTrac also has a number of other features for things like finding Wi-Fi hot spots, places near you, and other helpful resources that are determined by your location. While it may seem strange to use your news app as a way of locating bars and shops, MapTrac produces solid results from numerous sources, making it more powerful than most map apps.

For all the good things about the app, The Daily Planet can get a little overwhelming. Fortunately, once you find a source you like, you can create favorites so you can get back to your most read sites quickly.

The Daily Planet isn't the prettiest news app in the App Store by a long shot. But with thousands of sources and an easy-to-navigate hierarchical interface, this app gets you all the news both locally and nationally, while offering extras that will be useful to any iOS device owner.

8.0

The Daily Planet for iOS

Score Breakdown

Setup 10Features 8Interface 7Performance 8