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Breaking News app

OldRoman

OldRoman

Member
I have Sprint Hero and was wondering (and yes I have done a search of the Forums and found nothing that meets my needs) if anyone knows of an app for Breaking News. I have one from CNN on my iPhone and when breaking news happens it pops up on the lock screen in a bubble with the headline. The iPhone app is made by CNN itself. Everything I've found on the Market is not made by CNN and so won't work the same way. I'm not looking for RSS feeds. I want something that will pop up on the lock screen for me to see when something news worthy happens.
 
I don't know of any specific app like you describe, but I love to come up with work-around's to situations like your describing. However, this workaround has limited characters.

I just signed up for the CNN Breaking News Mobile Alerts, and I don't think it should cost anything extra since the Sprint Hero is on Sprints unlimited text message plans.

Breaking News Mobile Alerts sent via text mesage to your phone.
Standard Message & Data Rates May Apply. Available on most carriers.
To subscribe: Text keyword Alerts to 26688
To unsubscribe: Text keyword Stop to 26688
For Help: Text keyword Help to 26688
Click to expand...

Since I want a popup alert for these CNN Breaking News Alert text messages, I setup a contact with this 26688 number, and used the Text Message app 'SMS Popup' which I setup to display this contact's text alerts to me as a popup message with the default setting for all other text messages not to be displayed. I have other contacts setup in the SMS Popop app that do different alerts already, including popup alerts so in theory, it should work, but I have not received a CNN Breaking News Alert text messages yet to know what text information it is composed of.
 
BBC News by Jim Blackler has breaking news alerts, but they don't pop-up on the lock screen, you get a notification in the notification bar.
 
If you go to your local paper and or news stations, they often have such a service. I subscribe to the local Atlanta paper (AJC.COM) and when stuff happens, boom - I get a lot of instant emails!
 
I went looking for a breaking news app a while back, too, and never found much.

As a compromise, what I did was create a new Twitter account specifically for news feeds, and then add a Twidgit Lite window for it on my home screen. Not exactly what I wanted, but I do like the result.
 
Well, seeing is believing. This is what SMS Popup looks like after I setup a contact with the phone number of 26688 and CNN's logo as the contacts picture.

Oh, and I got the 'red' CNN logo from CNN's Facebook album page.
Welcome to Facebook | Facebook
 

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