Following on from our series “The 10 Best iPad Applications for News“, we decided to do the same for magazines. Glossies lend themselves so well to the iPad format, with its superb and shiny user experience, and we have played with some superb offerings.
Even more than newspapers, many magazine publishers seem to be pinning their future on the iPad trusting in it is a source of strong, continuous revenue, like the subscriptions of old. And there have been some good early signs, with hundreds of thousands of downloads of some apps. Some apps are simple digital editions of the print version, and some are entirely different; fully interactive and with multi-media content.
The iPad really does offer a superb digital magazine experience, and over the next week or so, we will be publishing our favourites, looking at their value to the user, pricing, and functionality. We will be listing the reviews as they are published, below. So, in no particular order, here we go:
- Glamour Magazine – The Glamour app is a great expansion of the print edition as it offers a multi-sensory experience of the content, with the introduction of the bonus video features. However I am unsure as to whether customers will be incentivised to keep paying 3.99 a month for it… Read more
- Fortune Magazine – FORTUNE is probably one of only a handful of magazines that have truly made a difference in what they have to offer consumers. They used what the iPad can do, and have in turn used that to breathe new life into business and financial news content. Still, it will be interesting to see how audiences as a whole will react to single issue sales at $4.99 each later on… Read more
- Vanity Fair – Vanity Fair iPad App is another chic offering from Conde Naste. Like its sister apps, it offers clear, crisp images and easy navigation. It has got a range of bonus features which match up to Glamour’s bonus features, such as…Read more
- GQ- Conde Nast, the publisher of the famous men’s magazine, has the distinguished title of being one of the first mag to have an iPad version. Needless to say, being a lifestyle genre magazine, GQ has made an impressive…Read more
- Net a Porter – Net a Porter have certainly achieved some innovation for their retail industry by amalgamating their products into a magazine form. The app stands as a competitor to premium magazine apps because of it’s attractive price. Although it doesnt boast as much……..Read more
- TIME Magazine- TIME has released its iPad app, but it has led to split reactions from its consumers. While it offers its usual high quality print issue content, it still seems to fall short of being a great app in terms of…Read more
- Newsweek-At first glance, it seems a bit strange that such a big name in the magazine industry as Newsweek would charge only half of what many other magazines are pricing their own iPad apps (usually on a $4.99 per issue basis). The download of the app itself is free, (and even comes with a free mini mag version featuring Obama), but after a short-lived play…Read more
- Popular Science Magazine- Popular Science’s publisher, Bonnier, greeted the iPad’s launch with the creation of their own magazine platform, Mag+. Popular Science+ is the first application to launch on the new platform. The project of the app was a…Read more
- Wired Magazine- Under the same publisher as Vanity Fair and GQ, Conde Nast has also released Wired magazine as an iPad app, after much anticipation. Despite its early support for an iPad transition…Read more
- Knot Magazine – We move on with the Top iPad magazine app reviews to include newer releases that, in many ways, trump bigger name apps in functionality and ingenuity. The Knot is a wedding magazine that…Read more
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