Author: Philip L. Graitcer

Sometimes something free isn't such a great deal. Let's look at the New York Times iPhone application. It's free, just download it from iTunes at the iPhone App Store.

With the Times application, you can browse selected articles in the paper. Each article is designed to look good on the iPhone's screen - and it does.

However, there is no way to e-mail the article to a friend or to have any idea at what time the article was first submitted to the web (particularly important if you are following current stock market doings!). Plus the application is painfully slow loading each article and updating.

But you can still read the Times on your iPhone by typing in www.nytimes.com in Safari. Up comes the home page - just like on the web.

It's a little more cumbersome to navigate the home page, but you have the same functionality: you can e-mail articles, search the archive, and know exactly when the article was posted. And the web pages seem to load faster than the pages in the application.

This is probably true of of other applications that also have a Web presence too.