Oh, the timing of press releases. Looks like Zinio, my favorite electronic magazine provider, isn’t taking the Amazon Kindle release lying down. They’ve got a press release for iPhone and iPod Touch owners that piqued my interest when I saw news of it on Mobility Site. The Zino Labs team is now offering a select group of magazines for your device at zero-cost, as in free. I just hopped over to www.zinio.com/iphone on my iPhone and see 18 current magazine titles on the newsstand. The offerings are an eclectic mix, although three of the 18 are shall we say, gentleman’s periodicals, and include popular titles like Car & Driver, Men’s Health, Macworld, Woman’s Day and Kiplinger’s to name a few.Using a WiFi connection, I just tapped the cover of Men’s Health, a magazine I currently subscribe to. That led me to a thumbnail page-by-page view where I could navigate around. Tapping any page causes that page to take up your whole screen. Of course, you can pinch to zoom and read or tap and drag around that page. After that, it gets tricky. You can’t move to another page without tapping a little arrow that appears at either the top or bottom of the page; I had to zoom in on the arrow in order to flip pages. There’s also a button for the magazine contents, which provides a clickable list of the articles and stories. I found that to be a good way to navigate around. It’s not ideal yet, but it looks like an early attempt that should get better over time. Plus, it’s free!
Zinio offers free magazine content for iPhone, iPod Touch
Summary:
Oh, the timing of press releases. Looks like Zinio, my favorite electronic magazine provider, isn’t taking the Amazon Kindle release lying down. They’ve got a press release for iPhone and iPod Touch owners that piqued my interest when I saw news of it on Mobility Site. […]
peaked is supposed to be piqued
pique: transitive verb arouse somebody’s interest: to cause a feeling of interest, curiosity, or excitement in somebody
piqued my curiosity
Noted and corrected; thanks!
Quite a number of websites are formatting their pages for iphone mobile access. I believe the standard format for that would be like
http://www.iphone.zinio.com but what ever works. It is pretty much an open secret that you can access the same content with any pocket browser such as a N810 or N800 also. Now that the N800 is out I want to see a comparison in the browsing experience between it and the Iphone/touch
Hmm, porn on the iPhone, huh?
I have used Zinio in the past and just checked out MacWorld and it looks pretty good. I may even have to stop subscribing and view the magazine this way.
Services like this would be super on a 7 inch iPod Touch/Tablet device!
Doesn’t work on Ipod Touch.
>>>Doesn’t work on Ipod Touch.
Hmmm… that’s odd. Why not? Anyone know?
I don’t have a Touch or I’d try it of course. However, there’s no reason I can think of that it’s not working… unless the WiFi is off. ;) No idea; maybe we can get James to try with his fancy schmancy new Touch?
When I visit that URL on the Touch I see a static page that says the service is “incubating”. There is no way to actually do anything with magazines that I can see anywhere. Must be iPhone only for now, although the page does specifically mention the Touch too.
Interesting. I wonder if there is a different user-agent string between the Touch and the iPhone. I’ll ping Zinio in the meantime and try to get some information…
Very interesting…It looks very much like the texterity iPhone magazines that have been available now for awhile — check out at iphone.texterity.com/iphone/ — they have over 50 magazines and seem to be adding more all the time. texterity magazine system works pretty fast on my ipod touch with wifi, very niceeee