- The White House, home of America’s President went through many renovations throughout America’s relatively short life up to now but certainly the first 40 Presidents would have gawked at what President Obama introduced into the relationship between the nation and its leaders.

Okay, the economic stimulus not working, failure to block lobbyists, unemployment rates not falling, still don’t see that health care debate on C-Span and even some Democrats are getting tired of this whole Washington business…but hey! A new iPhone app! As if We the People haven’t seen those things around before. Well, since the Obama administration has broken their back for this app, this review will give readers a general idea of what to expect.

An iPhone display of the new 'White House' Application.

Couple of key notes:

1. Don’t misunderstand, it’s just not for the iPhone, it’s also for the iTouch and the White House is of course working on putting out the information for other mobile devices.

2. The Price: Unlike some other White House applications, this application is free and can be found by its name on the iTunes App Store, “White House”.

The app in itself is very simple to navigate. Once you tap the icon of White House, an emblem of the White House will appear with the emblazoned words “WhiteHouse.Gov” below it. Then a blue ‘Downloading…’ bar appears for a second or two.

Blog: The first ‘page’ of the application shows the latest adventures of President Obama, news concerning the President/world/White House/America, along with announcements concerning the app itself as Dave Cole’s gleeful announcement of the White House application, “WhiteHouse.gov: Anywhere”.

Video: Next to “Blog” at the bottom of the screen, is a simple list of videos with display pictures along with the titles of the videos next to them with a little summary and the usual blue-directing allow familiar to those who access YouTube on iTouches/iPhones sometimes. It is also updated on most or what the public is allowed to know because government business is rather hands-off.

Photos: The third section of the app, “Photos” gives a similar looking list to videos except…it’s just photos with captions of the latest White House adventures.

Newsroom: If the Blog was the news, then the Newsroom is basically a list of speeches or comments made by the authorities of the American government or simply readouts of governmental meetings or affairs with some news pretaining to certain announcements made by President Obama.

Live: Really, the only worthwhile feature of the application is the section, “Live”, where once you select an option shown on the list, example being “The State of the Union Address” with the location of the live news below it as of this moment, it allows the users accessing the application to view an event live from their iPhones or iTouches and coming soon to other mobile devices.

Overall Score: 7.0/10

 Recommendations: Depending on where you are, an iTouch might not be very ’good’ for you as they need access to local Internet while iPhones do not have to connect to any available Wi-Fi to access the Internet making them much more convinient.

Seriously, we already have other apps from other media sources. I don’t really see the point in this besides pacifying the American public and assuring people that the White House, according to President Obama’s previous promises, is ”transparent and non-secretive”. So far the rating in the iTunes App Store is 4 stars out of 5.

I’m still waiting for that health-care debate on C-Span.

- G.O Riley

1/20/10

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