If any of you are as gung-ho about saving money as I am, I'm sure you've heard about dealnews. Their slogan is "Where every day is Black Friday" and as such, they 're constantly trying to give you the biggest and best discounts on anything they can find. Fortunately, for the bargain hunters on-the-go, they've just unveiled their latest offering, the dealnews Android app.
The dealnews app is a fully-featured, mobile dealnews experience. There are four tabs up at the top of the screen: Deals, Saved, Find, and More, respectively. Deals is where the action happens, obviously. Saved contains all of your saved deals, Find is a general product search, and More gives you four more options to find discounts and deals.
When you find yourself on the More tab, you're greeted with Twitter, Facebook, mydealnews, and their Black Friday App as options. Clicking on either Twitter or Facebook opens up a wrapped version of their mobile Twitter and Facebook feeds, respectively, without ever leaving the app or asking you to login. Pressing the back button on your phone brings you back to the app proper.
Mydealnews takes you to a non-mobile version of the dealnews website called mydealnews (big surprise!). It's populated with the standard information about dealnews and what they do and is essentially trying to get you to subscribe/register/join their website so you can have tailored deal suggestions sent to you. While back on the More screen, if you press the Black Friday App link, you're taken to the Android Market install page for the Black Friday App. As of now, too early to be useful, but definitely worth nothing once November rolls around.
Moving off of the top-most menu, you'll see there's categories of products, ranging from Newest and Hottest to Computers, Electronics, and even Office & Supplies. Clicking on any specific category hones your list of items down to that particular thing. At first I couldn't tell if it ended at electronics (you'll notice it cuts off the word a few letters in), but after a couple of attempts, I discovered you can scroll left and right on the category menu, exposing a whole plethora of things to choose from. It's intuitive once you notice it, but I would have liked something more indicative than a word being cut off in the middle.
You can also force refresh the deals via the menu button. The menu button brings up that option as well as your sole way of getting to the (as of now) meager settings menu. Once you find yourself on the settings menu, you'll notice your only two choices are Twitter and Facebook, and the app only gives you the option of automatically posting deals you've found to those two accounts.
Something else I would have liked to have seen is support for landscape mode. Even when you rotate your phone, the app is locked into portrait, which isn't terrible, but is definitely limiting, especially if you want to see more categories to choose from without having to scroll incessantly.
Overall though, the dealnews app is a strong first push into getting an app out there that isn't seasonal. While there's definitely room for improvement, it's free and still fresh (as of today), so I'm sure it'll mature as time goes on. If you're interested in bargains, consider checking it out, as it's one I wouldn't want to go without.
Oodles of pictures and download links are after the break.
