The iPhone as we all know, is one of the best smartphones that is out on the market. One of the greatest things about it is its ability to be able to do more than just your standard calling, email, text, etc. Apps and the App Store brought the iPhone from good to absolutely great!
Zinio is one of those apps that contributed to this leap. It is a magazine subscription and reading app for both the iPad and the iPhone. As most people know, who own an iPhone and an iPad, it is definitely a much better reading experience on the iPad. But for the thousands out there that don’t have both, the iPhone is a decent alternative, especially if you have an app like Zinio.
What is Zinio?
Think of Zinio as your digital magazine store and library . You can buy and read magazines from within the app, and they have got quite the lineup of magazine titles and very competitive prices to go along with it. For example, I subscribed to ESPN the Magazine on Zinio and paid $15 for a year’s worth of magazines. When I looked up the price on ESPN, they were charging $25 for the same subscription, plus the iPad app and an Insider subscription. I don’t need the iPad app if I have Zinio, and I really don’t care to pay $10 more for an Insider subscription.
Snapshot of some of the magazines that are offered on Zinio
The selection of magazines is quite impressive as well. I won’t name them all, but they cover a wide variety of popular magazine titles, like National Geographic, MacWorld, Newsweek, O magazine, Esquire, Businessweek and Road and Track to name just a small handful. I have never had trouble finding the magazine I wanted on Zinio and each time I’ve paid either the same price or less than what the magazine subscription originally sells for.
Reading Zinio on the iPhone
Like I had mentioned earlier, reading on the iPhone is not the most ideal experience. That being said, Zinio does a good job of trying to compensate for the fact that you are reading on a smaller screen.
When you first use Zinio you will see all of your magazines that you have ordered and are currently reading or ready to download. Depending on your subscription, a new magazine shows up on your screen for you to read. The tricky part is that in order to read a magazine you have to download it. With an iPhone you should probably use Wi-Fi as it takes a while to download a magazine over 3G.
List of magazines that are ready to read
There are a variety of ways to read your magazine on the iPhone. Because of the small screen when you read in portrait mode you will see only one page at a time and in landscape mode you will see two pages at a time. Also, if you choose to read the magazine as you would a regular magazine by just flipping through the pages, you will want to zoom in to actually read the articles. This is a little cumbersome at times, but Zinio, I believe, thought about this so they also gave you a couple other ways to read through your selection.
Landscape Mode
Portrait Mode
One other way you can read through the articles is through Text mode. This is where all the pictures and unwanted ads are cut out and all you see is the text of the article. For a pure reader, this is a great option to have. It takes out all the clutter and lets you just read. In landscape, for Text mode you can increase and decrease the font size to what suits you best. In both landscape and portrait you can zoom in and out as well.
Landscape Mode for Text View
Portrait Mode for Text View
The third way to read through a magazine is skimming through the Table of Contents. What Zinio has done is give you an option where you can skim through the pages of the magazine and click on the articles that you are interested in reading. They also have a Text mode of this as well, where you will see the title of the article and the first sentence or so of the article. In Text Mode, again, you don’t see the pictures or ads, just the articles and titles.
Table of Contents View (Original and Text View)
Buying and Syncing Magazines on Zinio
Like I mentioned previously, there are a variety of different magazines that you can buy from Zinio, and you can shop for them right in the app. If you don’t want to browse magazines on the iPhone you can also go to the Zinio website on your computer and browse them there as well.
Speaking of using Zinio on your computer, one of the best features is that I can read my magazines on my iPhone, iPad, computer, or any web based device that I may have. All of your subscriptions are synced through the cloud so no matter where you are as long as you have an Internet connection, you can access all of your Zinio magazines. This makes it very handy and easily accessible.
Conclusion
Overall, the Zinio iPhone app itself is very good. It really takes into consideration the smaller screen and how you can still maximize your reading potential on the iPhone. The only things I didn’t like about the app is that it is a little slow when it comes to loading pages. If you have an iPad, I would also highly recommend that you check out the iPad app as well.