GLOBAL – Announced last week as part of the host of partnership agreements revealed at CTIA, The Daily Beast app is already here and loaded up on our Nokia Lumia 710 (it will work just as well on other Lumias, of course). And it’s rather good. 

The premise for the original web version of The Daily Beast was that we’re in danger of information overload and it was deliberately edited and written to give the day’s most important news at a glance.

The publication’s strapline is ‘Read This Skip That’. The assumption is that you’ve got five minutes, not five hours.

That’s a great starting point for a mobile news publication. The Daily Beast’s news stories are often no more than a single paragraph, with a link to the full source if you need to know more. There are feature-length essays and more in-depth analysis as well, of course, but if what you’re looking for is a news fix to get you up-to-date over your morning tea break, then this is ideal.

The app’s designers have not simply plugged the RSS feed from the site into a mobile template either.

Instead, full use is made of Windows Phone’s panoramas and pivots to provide fast, fluid navigation with striking graphical style. Subtle animations, great use of typography and varied use of pictures keep pages alive.

Whether this app is the perfect mobile news publication depends on you. Personally, I’ll be keeping The Guardian and the BBC on my phone: the editorial mix is a little US-centric for me. The lack of a landscape mode is another slight niggle. Bear in mind this is version 1.0.0.0.

However, it’s definitely the case that The Daily Beast raises the bar when it comes to the presentation of news content on your Lumia smartphone, throwing down a gauntlet to a lot of other publications. 

Try it out on your Lumia and let us know what you think. It’s free.