• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, February 13, 2012

Microsoft’s longstanding online content portal MSN comes to the iPad this week in an effort to make the brand all comfy cozy during those prime-time tablet sessions. Versions of the app have been available for European markets for months, but this marks the introduction of the MSN for iPad to a U.S. audience.

According to the company, this design is intended to create a “Lean-back, curl-up experience” for the portal. The signature butterfly logo meets the users at launch, and the home page seems to take its design aesthetic more from its celebrity hub Wonderwall than from the MSN Web page. The design emphasizes tiers of thumbnail images and headlines for most of the portal’s major categories, including editor’s picks, news, Fox Sports, video, entertainment, celebrities, and autos.

Each tier of the design contains a limited number of stories. The app is not aiming for a comprehensive dive into the portal’s full contents so much as a selection of seven or eight top stories from each section. A Bing search engine query box is atop the home page for deeper drills into any topic.

The one truly novel feature in this release is the search “lasso.” In order to search a term in the text well of an article, the user keeps a thumb depressed on the left or right margin to activate lasso mode and then circles the terms in the text. The app responds instantly with a Bing search on the highlighted keywords.

The MSN for iPad app accommodates a range of content types. Tap into a video story and a clip runs in an embedded window on the landing page. Slide shows revert the screen to an all-black background that allows the user to swipe through images with pop-up captions.

The app has tablet use cases in mind. Users can elect to download the full contents of the current selection of stories for offline reading. Each story also has a complement of email, Facebook and Twitter referral links for sharing.

One thing notably absent from the MSN app is advertising. In our use of the app, no banners, sponsored links or interstitials were visible.

MSN comes onto the iPad with its portal app just weeks before it plans to launch a preview release of Windows 8. This next iteration of the Windows operating system was designed with device use in mind.

Ultimately, the company plans to challenge Apple’s dominance and Google’s emergence on the tablet platform with its own Windows-powered hardware. This app and its lasso search perhaps previews some of the functionality the company plans to build into its tablet-friendly OS.