Valor Econômico – Brazilian financial newspaper now has BlackBerry app

I don’t know how many Brazilian readers we have, if still any at all, but I am Brazilian so I thought I would mention it here. Even if you’re not in Brazil, at least enjoy the pics, it’s a good app.

Valor Econômico is a Brazilian financial newspaper. Of course, they have an online version, with part of the content freely available to all and sundry. Some of the content is available to paying subscribers only. They just announced a BlackBerry app two days ago and I decided to check it out. I was pleased with what I saw…

The application is absolutely free, though it may display ads. You can download it OTA right HERE, but note that Javascript must be enabled, the link will not work without Javascript. Bad design, but that was the only problem I had, and the app is also available from App World. The download is 1 MB, so you had better have 3G or Wifi. After installation, the application runs quickly and smoothly, opening with a very brief summary of indices and news. The news section will display either everything or specific news from a selection of certain topics: Brazil, Finance, Investments, Politics, Businesses and International.

The Indices section should be useful to anyone who works in finance or even a lot of people who don’t. You can get a very quick and broad view of exchange rate values and other indices that are in force in the country, used in many different types of estimates and calculations.

Most users will probably be quite happy with the Stock Quote section. You can get a list of quotes, view any one in more detail and you can customize the overall list to include just the ones you’re really interested in:

Finally, the News section. That was the only part that disappointed me a little bit. Loading the News section is slow, especially when I select “Everything” rather than narrowing it down to one of the topics. The result was not that many more items, it just works slowly. Loading just one topic was kind of slow, too. I also noticed that I could not press T or B to jump to the top or the bottom of the screen while reading a news item, so I just had to scroll, scroll, scroll,scroll…

There are three buttons at the end of each news item: a Favorite button, so you can bookmark items that are particularly relevant to your interests; an email button, so you can send the news item to someone by email; and a tweet button, so you can share the news on Twitter.

I think the application makes very good use of the available screen space. Everything looks very clean, tidy and, most importantly, straightforward. A no-nonsense approach, just the way I like it. All in all, a very nice and well put together BlackBerry app. I think they could even make a sister app in English, I know there are plenty of investors and business people very interested in the Brazilian markets right now.

I couldn’t find any information on what individual or company was responsible for making this app. Whoever you are, congratulations. You just earned the seal of approval of one of the crankiest software reviewers to ever walk the Earth.