Can you read? Yes? Well in that case this app will be right up your street. Zinio is a magazine reader. It lets you read digital versions of popular magazines. My first thought when I saw this was that it was going to be expensive. Then I saw the monthly costs for each magazine and realised it was cheaper than what I was paying each week on my trip to ASDA whereby various magazines would fall into my trolley. The nice thing about this app is that it is cross platform. So you can view your subscriptions on Android, webOS, iOS or your desktop. So here are a few shots of the app on different platforms. First up is Zinio on my TouchPad running webOS.
This is the glossy front end to the app.
This is the library which shows free titles and subscriptions.
This is the shop area. Where you can browse through available titles.
THis is landscape view of a title. You get two pages in landscape.
The Touchpad has a really nice screen which lends itself perfectly to reading in either landscape or portrait. I prefer the landscape view as you get two pages to read through. The only slight niggle I have with this app is that none of the magazine is interactive, ie contents or adverts. But if you could do that how would it be different to a website. I am not sure here it just felt wrong not being able to click on things. Next up we have a few shots of the Honeycomb version of the app.
This is the library view.
This is the shop area.
This is the detail for a title.
This is detail for another title.
Portrait view of an article.
Another portrait view.
The Honeycomb version just did not feel quite as intuitive as the webOS version. I guess it is just button location and menus when it comes down to it though. Last of all we have the phone version of this app. It obviously has to squeeze everything into a much smaller screen and still be readable. So here are the shots.
So as you can see it is not quite as nice on the phone. Various buttons appear when you press menu, some more appear when you tap on the screen. I guess if you have subscriptions and you wanted a quick preview of a magazine before you could get to your tablet then this would be ideal.
So here you can see the double page view in landscape. This was on my Samsung Galaxy S2 and it was not the best experience. On the phone the portrait view is definitely better.
Overall it is a great app. Especially on a tablet. Especially if you spend lots on magazines every month anyway. If this app had newspapers and a wider range of magazines it would be really good. I do like the way that you can download a few trial magazines to see if you like the magazine on a tablet thing.
So if you have an Android phone or tablet, a webOS phone or tablet, an iPhone or iPad or even just a normal computer head over to your app store, market or just the Zinio website and download some of the trial magazines and see how you like it.