I love celebrity news and gossip, but E! isn’t usually in my rotation for gathering meaningless information about people I don’t know. (It is addicting, isn’t it?) However, E! Online for iPhone and iPod touch was an unexpected, and pleasant, surprise.
Launching the app is a bit slow while it updates and gathers new information, but once that’s finished, the app moves quickly, even when streaming video or loading photos.
The app is divided into five sections.
— E! News, for breaking news stories and videos.
— E! Shows is your link to finding clips from E!’s original programming.
— Photos is self-explanatory, although the photo captions are always cut off with no way to view the entire text.
— The Celebs tab lets you choose your favorite celebrity personalities and then creates an updating feed for any and all news related to them.
— More, my favorite section, is is where you can find all of E! Online’s columns like “Watch with Kristin,” “The Awful Truth,” “Ask the Answer B!tch” and Marc Malkin.
Before viewing video, you have to watch a short ad, but it was painless considering the excellent clarity of the clips streaming over 3G. I also like that you can browse clips at the bottom of the screen while your current clip is playing.
One of best thing E! Online integrated in its app is Apple’s swiping technology. You can access next/previous stories by arrows or by swiping back and forth, which makes it quick to get through the day’s news.
You have the option of sharing content via email, but the “favorite” tab also seems to be broken—everything I tested came up expired, even when it was currently displayed on the main page.
But even with its problems, I really liked this app. Sure, you can live without E! Online. But if eonline.com is already a mobile destination for you, or you just love The Soup, you’ll be doing yourself a favor by picking this up.
