Advances in smartphone technology have allowed people to read everything from e-mail to romantic novels on their handheld screens. Amazon’s Kindle has been very progressive in developing new e-reader applications for smartphones, with free programs available for iOS, BlackBerry, and Android. Now, kudos to the developers, the Android app also supports newspapers and periodicals, on both a subscription and pay-per-issue basis.

Kindle users can now buy a single issue of a newspaper or magazine, or subscribe to have the periodical of their choice automatically delivered to their Android device. While we hav discussed the use of newspapers on the actual Kindle at our Kindle blog, this is a new development! There are currently about 100 newspapers and periodicals available via Kindle for Android.

Russ Grandinetti, Amazon Kindle’s Vice President, commented that Amazon desired to give customers the ability to download their newspapers and magazines just once, and browse them with any electronic device of their choosing, all while keeping track of the reader’s progress, just as it’s done with Kindle books today. Grandinetti commented further that Kindle for Android was quickly expanding its consumer base and that there would be over 100 newspapers and magazines available for Android users.

Amazon Kindle’s new development is designed to compete with Apple. Several prominent newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have recently introduced iPad applications. The applications are generally free to download, with a subscription required to view an abbreviated version of a newspaper’s full content. In spite of the abbreviated content, the iPad subscriptions can be very expensive – for instance, up to .99 per week for “full” access to the Wall Street Journal (compare to .99 per week for at-home delivery).

Amidst complaints about high prices and cumbersome interfaces, iPad subscriptions have not yet caught on amongst periodical consumers as a viable alternative to the full website subscription, or even to the printed editions. Christian A. Hendricks, Vice President of Interactive Media for McClatchy, who owns The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star, has stated that his newspapers have not experienced significant demand for subscriptions via the iPad. However, handheld Android phones can offer greater convenience for newspaper browsers on the go. As long as newspapers ensure that an acceptable amount of content is available from the Android app and that the prices are competitive, then the Kindle program will undoubtedly offer a great value and convenience to consumers.

Thus far, feedback has been mostly positive: Although users have reported that downloads may take a long time to complete, especially for graphic-heavy publications, but have said that the applications, once downloaded, worked very well.