With just nine business days between now and the 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, headline-sponsored by Upstream, we continue our preview of the finalists in each category with a look at the entries shortlisted for the Most Effective Tablet Application.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 3 November. If you havent yet booked your place at the event, theres still time – but tickets are selling fast. Right now though, lets take a look at the companies and campaigns vying for the honours in the Tablet app category, in alphabetical order.

Auto Trader – Auto Trader iPad
The Auto Trader iPad app completely rebuilt the Auto Trader reader experience for the iPad. Two major new features helped to bring the car buyers’ media brand to the iPad – Browse, and Compare.

The Browse feature allows users to flick through all the vehicles for sale in one go, or select specific criteria to narrow their search. Results can be ordered by price, mileage, or seller location. Users simply touch a picture to read the full ad.
The Compare feature takes this browsability further, allowing users to compare up to four vehicles side by side, so users can view car specifications and the dealer location for multiple cars at once.

The app was downloaded 105,000 times in its first two months of availability.

BSkyB – Sky News for iPad
The Sky News for iPad app provides an original way to experience the day’s news, delivering an immersive news environment with video at its centre. The app aims to play to the strengths of the Sky News brand – breaking news, live video, and rich content.

The app centres around a ‘timeline’ that is updated as the day’s news unfolds. New technology developed by Sky lets users rewind live video to the start – even if the app was not active when the event commenced.

Each news story has a ‘module’ that includes extra content such as interactive images, stills galleries, graphs, and bespoke HTML content.

DK/AKQA – The Human Body App
AKQA and book publisher DK adapted the much-loved Human Body Book for iPad to wide acclaim. The app offers an interactive version of the Human Body Book, and covers 12 systems of the body, with over 200 images, annotations, illustrations, and four CGI videos showing key processes in the body. There is also a rotatable 3D model of the human body, with removable layers. The app also features a testing tool to aid learning about parts of the body, as well as haptic feedback to illustrate processes such as heartbeats and breathing.

The Human Body app reached 500 daily downloads within two weeks of launch, and looks set to break even within three months of launch.

Financial Times/Assanka – FT Web App
The Financial Times’ new news app is available directly through a mobile web browser at app.ft.com. The Financial Times is the first major news publisher to launch an app of this kind, which allows readers to access its content, even when offline.

The app is built using HTML5 technology, and is optimised for both iPad and iPhone. It allows readers to access FT content on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone with one login and one subscription payment.

This is an important step in the FT’s strategy of providing multi-channel access to content, and offering customers flexibility and freedom of choice, with access to global journalism anytime, anywhere.

Somo/Audi – Audi UK’s Guide to Le Mans 2011
A companion app for the Le Mans motor-racing event, Audi UK’s Guide to Le Mans 2011 offered a host of features for visitors and fans on the iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms.

Designed to take fan participation to the next level, the app was designed to engage Audi and Le Mans fans alike in the event. The app presented information on the teams and track, including video clips featuring two-time winner Allan McNish. It gave users the chance to listen to Le Mans radio, interact with the Twitter feed, and view a calendar of events. Other helpful race-day information included weather updates and directions to events. The app could also monitor the position of cars on the track using geo-positioning.

Tigerspike/Telegraph Media Group – TMG iPad App
Telegraph Media Group’s Telegraph for iPad newspaper app offers another approach to news apps – taking the best journalism from across the Telegraph on a daily basis, with a team of Telegraph journalists collating the content each evening. Designed in collaboration with interactive agency Tigerspike especially for the iPad, the app offers daily editions which can be downloaded over 3G or wi-fi and read offline. The app lets readers choose articles to read via a menu, or you can simply flick through it in order.

Rich content is also available in the app. It includes the best of the day’s images, infographics, and video clips. There are also interactive crosswords and cartoons.

To book your place at the Awards Ceremony, please email [email protected] or telephone +44 (0) 77696 74824. The event is strictly limited to 250 people. Tables of 10 cost £2,050, while individual seats are priced at £225.

And dont forget theres a native iOS app, a hybrid Android app, and a web app for other platforms, for the event. More details on that here.