I’ve been a huge user of the guardian’s mobile portal m.guardian.co.uk for a few years now and have always been impressed with the way I could easily navigate around the site on whichever mobile I use as the platform is designed to adapt to each phone’s capabilities.

The Guardian iPhone app which was launched this week, is specifically designed to take advantage of advanced iPhone features, and includes extra features, such as offline browsing. I downloaded it today and have found that it’s a really easy way to access the Guardian’s content on the move if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app has been optimised for Apple’s mobile devices and offers a range of features to help you stay in touch with guardian.co.uk content.

• Offline mode which allows you to stay in touch even if you don’t have a signal
• Easy access to audio and podcasts (including ‘download for listening later’)
• Personalisation of display
• A topic-based search engine
• The ability to follow all your favourite Guardian authors and contributors
• Picture galleries presented within an interface specifically designed for the iPhone and iPod Touch

There are a number of things that aren’t yet available, such as video but the Guardian hopes to add these in the future.

The app is currently priced at £2.39 - not bad, considering the print edition costs a quid a day. At the moment you can use the app to read or listen to as much Guardian content as you like at no extra cost. The publishers are committing to offering a core level of service for the one-off charge but that doesn’t rule out the possibility of charging for extra functionality at some point in the future. Watch this space is all I can say – with one eye on what Murdoch will be doing with his media portfolio.

Given the Guardian’s popularity in North America (particularly its online content), the app will be available in the UK, US and Ireland. More regions are expected to follow in due course.

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“What we are finding is that people find content in a different way from their web approach, it was our intention to open up the archive, and the initial reaction seems quite positive about the application being an enhancement to the Guardian web experience. But it is a version 1.0 and we have some exciting plans. So we will be listening very closely to what our readers will think of it.”

Jonathon Moore, The Guardian’s Mobile Product Manager

What I like…

Automatic refresh: The app will check for the latest content every time it is opened or after every 15 minutes of use. That means you get the latest content at all times with no need to refresh.

Customisable Home Page: Click on the customise icon in the top right hand side of the home screen to see the full list of content you can display on your start page. Simply drag items up or down to rearrange the content as you would like it.

Saving articles: Click on the star icon to save links for later or to save individual items of content to your favourites area. Click on the star icon again to remove items or links. You can store subject pages in your favourites so that you can quickly find out the latest on your football team, or topics that matter to you.

Related stories pop-up: To see related stories from your home page or any other section front, simply click on the tag icon that sits beneath every story headline. This will launch a popup listing the top related subjects for that item. Click on one of the subjects for more on the topic, and click the star to save this subject to your favourites list.

User-friendly search: The search engine allows you to find the latest stories for any of the subjects or contributors in the online database. Click the search icon at the top left of the home screen, then type the name of a subject or contributor – “Climate change”, say, or “Mercedes Bunz” – to get the relevant latest content.

Accessing content offline: The app will start to download content as soon as it opens and will automatically work through the things you look at most first. To download specific areas of content, touch the ‘offline reading’ link at the bottom of your home screen and select the content you want; this is especially useful if you’re about to lose data connection, for instance when entering a tunnel or travelling by air.

Ability to share articles: Open an article and click on the icon in the lower left corner of your screen. That will give the option of sending a link to the article via email or Facebook (requires Facebook log-in).

This is a fantastic step in the right direction for The Guardian and will hopefully nudge other content publishers to do the same.

You can download the app directly from the Apple App Store here