Like most travellers and frequent flyers, the Australian Business Traveller team are fans of quality digital media – especially when it comes to newspapers and magazines.

For example, when overseas I enjoy downloading the latest news from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian onto my iPad and browsing it over breakfast, at the airport lounge or en route to whatever press event I’m attending (no matter what timezone I’m in).

And Saturdays are a real treat because of the extra content packed into in the weekend editions. There’s a good few hours in all that, and as the apps let you read offline they’re great for inflight reading.

As it happens, only last month I added The Australian Financial Review to my Saturday reading list at the local cafe for very much the same reason – as well as the fact that only on Saturday do I have time to enjoy a deep dive into the papers.

And while I’m by no means into ‘finance’ or the markets, the AFR’s got plenty else to appeal, from its business backbone to sections on the likes of marketing, technology (featuring John Davidson, one of Australia’s best and most readable tech reviewers), travel, motoring and design.

Now the ‘Fin has woven itself a little more into my week with the release of an iPad app.

A familiar (inter)face

The AFR app immediately looks familiar because it was cooked up  by the same Fairfax team behind the elegant SMH and Age apps.

Like those capital city siblings, the AFR sports a classy made-for-iPad design with an elegant layout, responsive tap-and-swipe interface plus embedded multimedia.

There’s a caveat here: although the app is free to download, you’ll need a subscription to pull down any actual content (apart from the  few articles on the home screen).

Anyone can download the app and view articles from the front screen but to experience the full app they will need to verify they have a Financial Review subscription within the app.

That’s more in keeping with The Australian and many other newspapers and magazines compared to SMH & Age twins, where the content remains free.

A digital subscription to the AFR cost $59 a month, although you can sample the app with full content during a 14 day free trial (which means signing up for a subscription and then cancelling it within a fortnight).

It’s also available for free if you subscribe to the Australian Financial Review in print or the afr.com website.

For more details, click to afr.com/app.

Psst – want a free AFR sub?

We’ve got two digital subscriptions to the Australian Financial Review (valued at $680 each) to give away to two AusBT readers.

Just leave a comment below explaining in 25 words or less what you like most about ‘digital newspapers’. The contest closes at 5pm EST on Tuesday June 5th, 2012.