There has been a lot of buzz about the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader. I am not an avid newspaper reader so I did not give much of a thought about downloading the App. This was until I saw a sponsored Ad about the App on my Facebook Timeline.
I decided that it won’t be such a bad idea to take a look at the App. The Application is a collaboration between Safaricom and the Nation Media Group, and from experience, the two are among the most innovative companies in Kenya.
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The App is about 23 MB in size, which is a standard for most newsreader Apps. I proceeded to download the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader and gave it its first run on my Tablet. The App is optimized for tablets therefore I was sure that the App will run smoothly on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1.
Additionally, the App also has mobile Phone Support. On the first run of the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader, you will have to sign up for the service. The sign up process is swift and thereafter the app will transition to your dashboard.
I expected a complicated user interface, but to my surprise, the UI is quite simple and is a complete delight. On the upper left corner, is the logo of the service and below are links to the newspaper archives. The archive section gives you the option to read the last six published Daily Nation newspapers.
Just above it, is the Day’s Newspaper. The App will on at 6 AM pop up a notification for you to download the latest digital edition of the Daily Nation.
The newspapers are not automatically downloaded which I think is a superb feature to save your cellular data.
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Downloaded e-newspapers are shown with a green ‘cloud’ icon while yet to be downloaded newspapers are shown with a red ‘cloud’ icon. The download process is straightforward and the day’s digital edition will be downloaded in a swiftly.
The quality of the downloaded newspapers is first rate! I can only imagine how the newspaper looks on the iPad’s Retina Display. The App supports the both the portrait and the landscape display orientations. However, the portrait orientation of the App looks much better.
The App is quite responsive and swiping through the different pages is fast with absolutely no lag while transitioning from one page to the next. I liked the Auto Resume feature of the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader App whereby it will resume to the last page you were on even after closing the App.
The layout the Digital Edition is exactly like the how the Daily Nation print version appears. In addition, includes the extra features and pullout magazines such as Buzz and Zuqka. The App supports the pinch to zoom feature and this will specifically come in handy for devices with smaller displays.
The App will work even when in offline mode, therefore you can download the day’s newspaper and read it later at your convenience. I could not locate where the downloaded digital editions are stored in order to accurately give an estimate on how big is an edition can be.
However, through my tablet’s inbuilt Data Usage App, the downloaded Newspaper could be in the 15-20MB size range. Tabloids report that you can download the newspapers for a period of three months before subscribing to the service. I believe is quite a fair bargain.
One downside with the App is that you can only download it via the Safaricom network. This means that other cellular data networks and WI-Fi will not work on the App. I expected that considering that the App is a Safaricom Initiative.
Otherwise, everything else about the App looks neat and I think that I will really enjoy this service. Surprisingly, the App has a 2.8 star rating on Google Play Market.
However, if you peruse over the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader reviews, you will realize the negative ratings are mainly from users complaining of compatibly issues of the App on their devices.
By the time of writing this, there were less than 50 reviews of the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader App and a couple of reviewers gave the App a 4 Stars rating.
What do you think of the Safaricom Daily Nation Reader App? Share your thoughts on the subject topic in the comment section below.
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Kevin is a tech enthusiast and the lead writer at MobiTrends.co.ke. He has been writing about smartphones and tech related topics since October 2012. About Us | Contact Us
