biNu rebuilds Android app to improve user experience

If you’re one of the more than 100,000 people that have downloaded biNu‘s Android app, you were probably only pleased with the app page load speeds, processing etc.. but likely disappointed with an un-smartphone like feel. Scrolling wasn’t smooth and it felt while the biNu was on a good path turning feature phones into smartphones, they also weren’t doing too bad turning smartphones into feature phones. The latest Android is supposed to fix that.

We downloaded it both in beta and now the live version in the Google Play store and indeed the experience has improved significantly. Responsiveness of the app in general has improved. The app behaves like you naturally expect it to on a smartphone. biNu apps like Twitter and Facebook app (apart from still having the rather plain look) now have great continuous scrolling allowing you to go through more content vertically.

The update also comes with an improved reading experience in the flagship book reading Worldreader app We’re told the company. Instead of just scrolling down and clicking next to fetch a new page, users can now turn book pages by swiping sideways.

The move is probably a recognition by the company that while feature phones running Java apps are still around, the future is in low cost sub $100 Smartphones and that the prices will only get lower. Cheap Android Smartphones however have serious processing issues owing to the lack of memory and processor power that their expensive counterparts have, which is what leaves huge market space still for app platforms like biNu which do all heavy processing in the cloud and only use the device to display the results.

In terms of the whole biNu as a platform, the company recently added biNu Gaming, which basically  introduces a social gaming environment allow users to bet on sport results using biNu credits. We’re told sports already on the platform include soccer leagues; EPL, La Liga, Zimbabwe PSL, Nigeria’s, Ghana’s and the South Africa Premier League. Cricket (The Indian Premier League, test matches, ODIs and International T20s) has also been added to biNu gaming. The biNu credits users win on the platform can be converted into airtime.