Early Reviews of iPad Magazine Apps are Mixed

We're less than a week into the Apple iPad's release and already hearing mixed reviews and reports about the magazine apps. Here's a round-up of various viewpoints.

MediaWeek reports magazine customers are excited about the new format but balking over the prices. On the iPad, single magazine issues cost $4.99, the same as a single print issue. 

Engadget reviews various newspaper and magazine apps including Time magazine and Popular Science magazine and explains the current chaos of pricing and content. From Engadget: "It's plain to see that different publishers have radically different ideas about how you're supposed to buy and consume their content, and everything from pricing to UI is currently up in the air. But while the apps we've seen so far are definitely intriguing, we haven't seen any silver bullets yet -- and to be perfectly honest, in several cases we wondered why an app was preferable to an iPad-optimized web site, or even (gasp) a paper subscription."

Lastly, minonline reviews Time magazine's iPad app, calling the news magazine's approach "workmanlike and easily navigable."

What do you think? Have you bought or seen any iPad magazine apps?

Comments

[Jenn]

I currently use Zinio as a magazine app...looks nice, but the pages take a bit of time to load; they appear blurry at first until it corrects itself, which quite frankly starts to give me a headache after a while. Also, the text is rather small, and when completely zoomed in is also a bit blurry, making it a pretty much useless function.

The nice thing is that you can purchase various publications through the app, but they're around the $4.99 price, which I also find to be a bit pricey for a technology that is far from perfected. They have a good sized library that contains some more unusual titles, like indie gamer mags, which is also a plus. I'd use it more it weren't the problems I've listed, so hopefully updates are in the works.

[miami beach mansion rentals]

If I'm to spend the money, I prefer to get a printed version, because then I can cut or rip out pages of interest and stick them on my board.