An online subscription to the Wall Street Journal costs around $100, which is why the WSJ iPhone app (free, iTunes link) may be one of the best deals going in the App Store. Besides being a bargain, the WSJ app offers most of the features, such as the ability to save articles for offline reading, that make the New York Times one of our favorite news apps. Overall, content is king, and the Wall Street Journal app does little to get in your way of accessing it (besides a somewhat obstrusive placement of ads), and that is why it makes our Best of iPhone Apps list.

Save multiple stories at one time for offline reading.

Save multiple stories at one time for offline reading.

Besides access to the Wall Street Journal’s excellent content, the app’s best feature is the ability to save stories for offline reading. In fact, it trumps a similar feature in the NY Times app in that you can select multiple stories and save them all for offline reading with a single tap. Simply tap the Save button in the top right, then checkmark each story you want to save, then tap Done. This functionality is perfect for those moments when you’re about to board a plane and want to give yourself a little reading for the trip.

Configure the topics tab by dragging new topics into it.

Configure the topics tab by dragging new topics into it.

The app has a configurable tab at the bottom for skipping to different topics like latest news, market news, editor picks, and your saved stories. To access more specific business topics like technology or world news, tap the More tab. The bottom tab is reconfigurable, so if you have no interest in editors picks, you can replace it with popular stories or other topics.

The app offers access WSJ's video content as well as podcasts.

The app offers access WSJ's video content as well as podcasts.

The app also offers access to videos and radio. The videos are short news stories, usually between 30 seconds to a few minutes long, featuring various hot business topics. Radio is, unfortunately, not streaming radio. It’s actually a podcast that is downloaded in the iPhone’s media (Quicktime) player.

Our main gripe with the app is the obstrusive advertisements. Again, this should be taken in context of getting getting free access to the Wall Street Journal’s premium content, but the ad does a good job of blocking content in the landscape view, leaving only an inch of vertical space for reading purposes. One of my main gripes with reading on the iPhone is how much scrolling must be done on long-form content. My hand starts to ache from reading something that would be only a few columns in a newspaper. Creating even more scrolling by shortening the screen is a big no-no in my book.

Conclusion

The Wall Street Journal iPhone app brings its premium content (a $100 value, if you don’t use the Google News workaround) to the iPhone in an accessible way. The ability to save stories for offline reading and its configurable tab are nice user-friendly touches, and it easily makes our list of Best of iPhone Apps.

The Wall Street Journal for iPhone is a free download in the iTunes App Store.