
GQ App
Value For Money
GQ App
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User Reviews
Value For Money
This Is The First Full Magazine To Be Brought To T
This is the first full magazine to be brought to the iPhone,(as opposed to a magazine app which offers cut-down or different content from the actual magazine or is just a marketing tool).
It's actually the American version of GQ but it can be bought in the UK iTunes store too. It costs just under two pounds but I wanted to buy it to see what a full magazine experience on the iPhone might look like.
The issue is their annual Men of the Year issue and contains all of the magazine content from the multiple covers to the articles, fashion shoots, reviews and advertising.
Having played with it for a couple of days I am not quite sure how I feel about it. All the content is there but somehow experience feels a little bit disjointed. One of the nice things about a magazine is that you can flick through it and stop and read the bits you like. On the app you have to come in and out of every section to see the content and then make a decision on it. This in portrait mode where the text is big enough to read without having to zoom much. You can flick through the whole magazine coverflow-style in landscape mode which is a much better magazine experience but the text is too small to read. So either is a pay off.
It's actually a magazine-plus experience: there is extra media attached to the magazine like the fact you can visit the websites of all the advertisers' websites and there is some video attached to some stories which is an interesting experience.
I think that the long term future of magazines and newspapers will be in digital editions built to resemble old-fashioned books and magazines rather than massive websites which are a totally different experience so it's interesting to see an early proponent of how this might work. The inclusion of videos and links is a nod to the multimedia future but it enhances rather than distracts from the experience.
The other issue I have with the app is that rather than downloading the whole magazine and storing it locally on your phone when you buy they app (like a TV show for example), it gets downloaded and stored as you browse and you really have to do this over a wifi network which makes reading it on the fly quite frustrating. I would rather have a longer initial download to have the whole thing there when I want it.
Once a full colour, glossy e-reader takes off I imagine digital editions will become huge for now it's an okay experience but you do get bragging rights for being an early adopter.
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