Wall Street Journal Launches On The iPhone

Whilst I may berate the US networks for the less than scintillating range of handsets being flogged out on 24 months contracts (ball and chain?) they are creating some seriously good apps. For the iPhone anyway.

The Wall Street Journal joined in last week with their slant on an on-line news reader to compete with such luminaries as the New York Times and International Herald Tribune.  

Here in the UK, one of Europe’s more sophisticated mobile countries, we have similar apps from the Telegraph and ITN.  

Both are worthy efforts but seem to either lack news (ITN) or dump all news into the UK bit which rather defeats the purpose of having sections (Telegraph).

The WSJ uses the swipe talents of the iPhone in an elegant interface for consuming a variety of articles, video and podcasts.  That level of care in design can be seen in apps from eBay to Facebook to Google.  

Yet the iPhone reaches only a comparatively narrow percentage of users in the smartphone world.  Where are the same elegant apps for Symbian? 

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Small developers such as Mobileways (Gravity) and the Mobler LastFM client appear to be the rarity.  Why haven’t the WSJ, Telegraph, IHT developed Symbian apps for the far larger number of potential readers.  

Is it just because of Apple’s app store, is Symbian just too hard to develop for, or is the US parochial nature preventing investors from seeing Symbian for the iPhone?