Media organisations turn to mobile phone applications to raise revenueMobile phones are going through the same cycle as PCs went through ten or more years ago - for apps read the idea of dedicated clients like AOL/Compuserve and 'portals' being able to generate a 'loyal' following that can generate revenue.
Mobile suppliers have been reluctant to follow the ISP route to be generic comms providers and insisted on 'walled gardens' for far longer than was healthy.
It's not going to last. The real function of these 'apps' is to overcome the current limitations on processor power that make a more generalised solution slow. That and because the general purpose web site has drifted into high bandwidth content for broadband users which is a poor design for the mobile screen. A fully functional caching browser and websites that are designed for the smaller format will make all these content based 'apps' obsolete.
Much as I love my iPhone, it's not the best device to read text - and certainly not a lot of it. The apps I use most often have small amounts of useful data such as Mint, the Weather Channel app or a currency converter. Even apps with large amounts of data such as iPod navigate down to what you're after pretty quickly. A netbook or a tablet would be better, but when I'm on the move, I find the best journal format is the good old print print edition.
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