Microsoft's Garage applications developing division has designed a news feed on the iPhone with focus on users' business information needs. The Microsoft's app is called News Pro and aims to give business people relevant news feed according to their professional interests.
Nowadays, it seems like everyone comes with a news app on the iPhone. Apple has its own built-in News app, LinkedIn, which has its Pulse news reader, Google has two news apps, Facebook has its Notify app, and Twitter has its Moments feature. Microsoft already has Cortana and Bing that include news stories as well as an MSN News app. Now Microsoft Garage comes with News Pro for iPhone.
According to Microsoft, News Pro allows users to connect their Facebook or LinkedIn accounts and receive a feed of the top stories relevant to their work experience and interests. How relevant is the initial news feed depends on how much time users have spent elaborating their interests on those social networks. Users can use the app itself to specify more about their professional interests.
The interface of the News Pro app is straightforward, showing a list of articles. Similar to other news apps, the interface allows users to scroll through the list, "like" and comment on. Users can choose to read the news in a streamlined "Speedy mode" that provides only basic text or as they would appear on the web.
According to PC World, the Microsoft News Pro app for iPhone is not providing a full-featured consumer experience. However, this is a pretty good app taking in consideration that it is just the first release of a Microsoft Garage project.
Microsoft aims to test various projects with the apps developed by its internal ideas incubator. These ideas and hypothesis testing apps are not as polished as Microsoft's flagship applications.
It remains to be seen what Microsoft's plans are after the launch of this application. Depending on the results of its experiment with News Pro for iPhone, it is possible that the app could become in the future a key feature for Microsoft's products.
