Want live streaming news in the palm of your hand that works. Well, Al Jazeera new live streaming app for the iPhone might be the answer.

Hi, everyone and welcome to App Judgment revision3’s new mobile application show. I'm Annie Gaus and I have a confession. I'm a news junkie and in my search to find the best global journalism at my finger tips I came across an app from the Indy-Arabic TV network Al Jazeera from Live Station limited.

The Al Jazeera app gives you 24/7 live streaming of the networks English language channels straight to your iPhone as simple as that. I'm super excited to find this option. Beyond what I might get from the free stand alone apps from the major US outlets like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, AP Mobile or even my fave Hot Post. There are also some cheap apps like news views and iNews which are a $1.00 each that let you browse dozens of major outlets. But truthfully I hate just going to get tiny bonds and I wanted an app that gives me a little more than just headlines or a main stream papers squeezed on to the iPhone screen. I want to just kick back and watch a live broadcast without compromising my already bad vision. So I showed up to $2.99 limited time price for the Al Jazeera live streaming app for my 3G.

[Demonstration]

How cool is it that I can potentially stream live TV from across the world onto my iPhone. Potentially at least to helping me stay on top of what's really going on in the world in real time while I'm waiting for the bus, hanging out to the laundry mat, or whenever there's a free moment throughout the day. So what's the catch? Well, the major problem with the Al Jazeera app is the huge amount of band that it uses particularly when using 3G. You can change the settings so it automatically streams in standard quality of the lowest possible bit rate.

But even then it uses 7.2 megabytes of bandwidth for every 10 minutes of content on my 3G meaning that quite often instead of an informative live broadcast, I get that hastiest could be real and an error message. And it’s probably not that great for your battery life either and by the time it’s done failing to load, my 3G spare moment is over fad. It does stream perfectly over Wi-Fi but isn’t the point of the app to get news anywhere at any time. Don’t get me wrong, I'm retaining faith in what could someday be a great service from a great new source.

I'm not sure if it’s an AT&T issue or an issue with the app itself. But for the time being don’t download this app. For $2.99 you get more frustration than information. So until someone figures out how to improve the efficiency of live streaming to phones we’ll just have to catch Al Jazeera the old fashion way at home, on the old desktop, at English.AlJazeera.net. In fact I haven’t come across too many good live streaming apps but if you know some I’d love to here about it on twitter@twitter.com/anniegaus or send us an email at appjudgment@revision3.com.