A digital magazine stand on your iPhone or iPod touch
Those of you who follow Apple’s iPhone web applications list may have noticed a rather popular entertainment app known as Zinio. Released back in November, the Zinio Mobile Newsstand is just that: a collection of digitized real-world magazines all catalogued and each displayed front-page first for easy perusal. Last week, Zinio increased its selection by adding 20 new titles. Periodicals range from a variety of topics and include Popular Mechanics, Men’s Health, Elle, Macworld, and Reader’s Digest, among others.
As a web app, Zinio has done as good a job as any to make the design and navigation efficient and seamless; choosing a magazine will take you to its front page where you can either tap to view a high-resolution version of the page, or simply tap left or right from anywhere to browse thumbnails before choosing a page to read. Optimized for landscape view, you can then zoom-in even further and flip through pages yourself or check out a table of contents with summaries and quick links to all the highlights of an issue. Another neat feature is a handy link that allows you to use the iPhone’s own Mail app to share interesting pages with your friends. Best of all, the Zinio Mobile Newsstand is a free service that has neither fees nor requires a subscription.
Zinio’s free service is similar to Texterity which offers a selection of digital magazines for iPhone and iPod touch, but its niche titles have less mainstream appeal than those at Zinio. The only negative aspect you may notice using Zinio is that content may load a bit slowly, even when using a reliable wi-fi connection rather than EDGE. While you may not get to flip through pages as quickly as you would with a real magazine, it is a small price to pay for a free service that essentially puts an entire magazine rack right into your pocket. Right now, the Zinio Mobile Newsstand is still a young service but has a promising future. With all high-resolution replicas of many top-selling print magazines and new content being added periodically (no pun intended), Zinio gives iPhone and iPod Touch toting magazine enthusiasts good reason to rejoice.
Zinio - Digital Magazines for iPhone and iPod touch
www.zinio.com/iphone
