The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.

Read All About It

The app comes in through the Newsstand feature of iOS 5. All its text and photo content are available offline, and related stories open in a browser view. Readers can swipe back and forth between stories instead of having to tap around through menus. The app offers story sharing through Facebook, Twitter and email.

"The Guardian iPad edition is a new, fresh and appealing form of our newspaper content," says editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. "The single daily download and the hierarchy of articles will suit people who love the Guardian's newspaper content. To that we've added a selection of relevant web articles."

Rusbridger says the app reflects the organization's digital-first strategy. That's a curious remark, considering that this iPad edition mirrors the print paper, but we'll let that one slide, because this app is a first-rate tablet experience.

The Guardian has also offered a free photo gallery app for iPad called Eyewitness, which launched in February.

The Guardian's Moves Across The Pond

Though this app centers around the U.K. edition of the paper, it has plenty to offer international readers. The Guardian has made it clear that it has international ambitions as a news organization, too. In September, it announced the launch of a U.S. homepage and declared that it was hiring U.S. journalists. It also offers a free U.S. version of its iPhone app.

As we reported yesterday, new studies show that tablet owners love consuming news on these new devices. The Guardian's new app is an excellent example of all the qualities highlighted by consumers in that study.

Take the Guardian iPad Edition for a spin and let us know what you think!

Gibson goes to great lengths to downplay the importance of this launch, calling it "very, very beta," but there are some big announcements here beyond just this homepage news. The announcement also says that the Guardian is hiring a whole U.S.-based newsroom. Today's U.S. homepage launch appears to be just one step in the Guardian's transformation into a full-fledged international news organization.

Last week, the Guardian added to its robust suite of mobile apps with the launch of a free Android app. Georgina Henry, head of the Guardian's website, said that this launch was an effort to capture a rapidly growing mobile audience. The paper already offered a free iPhone app for U.S. users, as well as a full-fledged mobile site. The mobile apps are designed to gather maximum eyeballs, with attention-grabbing features like homepage personalization and read-it-later storage.

This gives the Guardian a pretty full arsenal to enter the U.S. market. The New York Times, the Guardian's clearest competitor (Disclosure: and RWW syndication partner), also offers a range of mobile applications, but many of their features require a subscription. While the Guardian's U.K. app is subscription-based, its U.S. products are free so far. If advertising eyeballs is what the Guardian wants in the U.S., it now has a range of ways to find them.

Digital First

The Guardian announced its intentions to become a digital-first news organization in June. Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media (publisher of the Guardian), explicitly declared the organization's intention to "move beyond the newspaper" and focus future investments on digital growth. "Every newspaper is on a journey into some kind of digital future," Rusbridger said. "That doesn't mean getting out of print, but it does require a greater focus of attention, imagination and resource on the various forms that digital future is likely to take."

Rusbridger also noted in June that the Guardian was "expanding into America." Today's announcements make clear the scope of that effort.

Data Journalism

Long before the Guardian made its digital-first intentions clear, the organization was a pioneer of Web technology and big data in journalism. In 2009, the Guardian opened its APIs and data stores to developers (as did the New York Times, the BBC and NPR). The Guardian has also advocated for open data in general, offering a government data search engine that searches across U.K., U.S., New Zealand, and Australian sites. The Guardian has been a partner in publishing Wikileaks information, and the organization has publicly described its data journalism practices in great detail.

What Web-based features do you want from news organizations?

It displays full-screen photo galleries and audio and video content in addition to text articles. It enables browsing by section, topic, or author, and users can save favorites for easy browsing from the app or the phone's home screen. It even allows downloading of the personalized homepage and favorites for offline reading. The feature set reflects a solid understanding of the needs of new media consumers on the part of The Guardian's mobile team, which we've been watching for a long time.

The British newspaper cites record-breaking visits to its mobile site and thousands of downloads of its native iOS apps. Georgina Henry, head of The Guardian's website, also points to Android's dominant smartphone market share as a reason for the launch. "With over 150 million activated Android devices worldwide," Henry says, "the potential audience for this product is huge."

The features of the Android app are comparable to those of the US version of the iPhone app, which is also free. For the iPad, The Guardian offers a standalone photo browsing app called The Guardian Eyewitness, while the browser sends users to the full Guardian site.

Free vs. Paid

The British version of the iPhone app offers more features and is powered by paid subscriptions (£2.99 for 6 months or £4.99 for 12 months). After 509,264 downloads of this app, 86,000 users paid for subscriptions. For comparison, the New Yorker's iPad app, which offers more exclusive in-depth content rather than daily news articles, has seen only a slightly better proportion of users purchase subscriptions.

We weren't sure whether this monetization strategy would work when the subscription-based app launched earlier this year, but The Guardian takes enough pride in the numbers to announce them. It's worth noting that the Android app follows the free model.

The New York Times, The Guardian's counterpart from across the pond, offers its own range of mobile apps, most of which offer some free content but require subscriptions for full access.

Maximum Eyeballs

Offline reading is a standout feature of reading list apps like ReadItLater. Personalization is a sweet spot for news that aggregator apps are racing to perfect. By adding these, plus full-screen multimedia content, all packaged into a free app, The Guardian's new app makes a compelling bid for users' top spots for news reading on Android devices.

Some of us on the team are proud Android users but most of us are still using iPhones. I just discovered how incredibly effective the Genius recommendations on the phone can be, so I've been going nuts downloading new apps. Here are the ones our staff is most excited about this month.

Here are the ten apps we discovered this month and are most excited about.

• Siri - A semantic smart virtual personal assistant, chosen by Frederic Lardinois. "Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow," we wrote in our review.
• OboPay - A mobile payment app, chosen by Dana Oshiro. Lots of big companies are putting millions of dollars behind this startup that they believe could be the future of money transfers on the go.
• Google Voice Mobile Web App - An HTML5 mobile web app for Google Voice, chosen by Richard MacManus. When this app launched at the end of January, we ran a poll asking readers if it was good enough to use as a phone. 65% said it was. A month later, Richard still feels that way.
• iFitness - A mobile fitness app, picked by Richard, who wrote 2 weeks ago: "Described as 'a personal trainer for your iPhone,' the app lists over 260 exercises. It has text and photographic instructions for all of those exercises, with video for 100 of them... iFitness features exercise logging and graphing. In addition it has 12 routines for various goals; including weight loss, strength, golf program, and more. The app also allows you to create your own custom workout."
• Data Logger from Pachube - An "Internet of Things" feed tracker, chosen by Richard. Pachube is an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We covered it in depth this Fall.
• iWriteWords - A much celebrated app to help kids learn to write, chosen by RWW's Production Editor Abraham Hyatt.
• Gowalla - A design-centric location based social network, chosen by me, Marshall Kirkpatrick. I wrote about Gowalla in depth yesterday. I love it, I just with there were more people in Portland that were using it.
• Etsy Adict - An awesome 3rd party iPhone app for browsing Etsy listings. I love this app! I regularly spend hours strolling through listings for ceramic and fiber arts items. If you're not familiar with the wildly popular site Etsy, check out this coverage of the company. The app is built on top of a Mashery-powered API and (disclosure) Mashery is a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.
• SitbyUs - A mobile web app I reviewed last week and am really excited to use. It's a seat-level check-in system for SXSW. It will tell you in which rooms and what sections your Twitter friends are sitting, so you can find them after a panel, etc.
• Guardian iPhone App - This daily news app is the best I've ever seen. It's fantastic. It's like $5 but it's worth it, if only to see how they made it. But it's lots of fun to use too. If you like this kind of thing, see also the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) app.

Those are our favorite new iPhone apps, what are yours? Stay tuned for next month's selections.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Following an era when the quantity of data available online increased in orders of magnitude, thanks largely to easy publishing tools for end-users like blogging and social networks, many people expect the next era of development online to focus on strategic moves to make the most valuable data available in standardized formats that facilitate innovation by 3rd parties independent of the original sources of the data.

If large, standardized data sets are a new language, then it's time for a new period of literature to be written.

Data Store Uses Google Docs

The Data Store and its accompanying blog are more directly aimed at consumers. The Data Store houses a collection of all of the statistics that the newspaper has published. Unlike the New York Times, however, the Guardian does not yet provide an equivalent to the Data Visualization Lab. Interestingly, the Guardian chose Google Docs as its repository for this data. Here, for example, is the Guardian's spreadsheet with the U.S. public debt since 2001.

Future of the Newspaper?

We have already seen a number of very interesting uses of the NYT APIs, and we will surely see a lot of interesting and useful applications that will now make use of the Guardian's data. What is more interesting, however, is that some newspaper are clearly beginning to understand where the future of their business lies (the Guardian now also exposes full-text RSS for all of its sections).  If anything, this feels like a far smarter way to go than the MediaNews Group's misguided attempt to put proprietary printers into readers' living rooms.

But when it comes to newspaper feeds, that ease of reading "everything in one place" has often been plagued by a great deal of clicking, given that traditional publications have opted to remand their posts to partial summaries rather than full-text. Now, The Guardian takes a step to change that by offering full-text through their RSS feed.

According to ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick "The UK Guardian is the best example of a newspaper that understands the opportunities in becoming a broker of machine-readable data, instead of just human readable content." With this move, however, they show that they still clearly understand the human element, as well. Truly, they're taking the lead as a publication that offers the best of both worlds.

For The Guardian, this marks another progressive step forward in demonstrating how traditional media publications embrace the world of online media. But it's not the last. With the influence of the recently acquired paidContent team and continued vision of employees like Matt McAllister - formerly of Yahoo! - we're looking forward to The Guardian's continued thought leadership in this regard.