Zinio Magazine Reader is a Great way to Experience Magazines on Android
by Toni McQuilken
Aug 3, 2011 11:56 AM –
Install
Zinio Magazine Reader is the premier app for magazines on Android, featuring top titles from around the world in pure digital form. With Zinio, you can browse the world’s largest newsstand, download digital subscriptions or single issues of your favorite magazines and sync your library on multiple devices. You can read what you like wherever and whenever you want!
Price: Free App, Magazine Subscriptions Vary
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Medium Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- You can subscribe to and read your favorite magazines on Android.
- Large and growing magazine store with most major titles to choose from.
- Subscriptions can be purchased through the app.
Cons
Features:
Zinio is a new reader that brings magazines to the Android platform as they were meant to be consumed. Like in a real magazine, you flip through the pages one at a time, or there is a scrolling page guide that will pop up at the bottom of the screen when you’re in a magazine to allow you to jump to a specific page. However, Zinio has gone one step further and added a few features that expand on the magazine experience.
First is the interactive table of contents. In it, each story is directly linked to where it starts, so if there is something specific you want to read, you can go directly there, instead of having to scroll through the whole book. Similarly, you can bring up a topic list, which will break out the stories by topic and give you a page number, or allow you to jump directly to the page. This gives you a lot of options for how you consume the content, which is great. You can also zoom in on a specific page and scroll around if you want to see it a bit larger than your screen allows for.
When you first create your free account in the app, you are given a selection of free titles to download to test it out, which I also really think is a great idea. By giving you full access for one issue of magazines in a wide range of subject matters, a lot of readers can see how their favorite content will look and feel. And with a link directly to the Zinio store, subscribing to those or other titles is very easy.
I like that the store has a featured section that you start on, but then it breaks the titles out by categories and subcategories, and there are a lot of titles to choose from. In general, a digital subscription is going to cost less than getting it in print, so in addition to the added convenience of carrying around all your magazines in one place, you spend less for it too. Another nice option is that it will show you magazines you have elected to receive, but until you click on them to tell the app you want to view it, the content will not be downloaded, so it won’t automatically eat up all of your free memory. It is also very easy to delete magazines once you’re done with them by going into the Edit menu at the top of the screen and selecting all the titles you want to delete.
The only problem I had with the app was freezing issues when I was scrolling though a title for a while. So the further I got, the more freezing I experienced. It was easy to fix by using my back key to return to the magazine listing page, then tap on the title again – it remembers your place for you – but it did get frustrating when I was finding myself doing that every few pages toward the back of a title. With luck, this is something the developers will fix in the next update, however.
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Zinio Page
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Zinio TOC
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Zinio Magazine List
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Zinio Shop
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Zinio Delete Files
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Zinio Interactive Article List
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Zinio International Stores
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Zinio FAQ
Usefulness:
If you’re a magazine reader, and you’re still carrying around a lot of heavy and bulky issues with you, then this app is going to be extremely useful. It takes all that content and puts it on your phone or tablet, in addition to giving you more options for reading it and referring back to various sections.
Ease of Use:
Zinio has made it extremely easy to find new titles to subscribe to, and managing your collection is very easy as well. They have even included a pretty in-depth FAQ in the app to walk you through anything you have questions about or need help with, which is a nice touch as well.
Frequently Used:
Depending on how many magazines you subscribe to and how often they publish new content, this is an app you’ll find yourself using quite a bit.
Interface:
I really like the way you can flip through pages like it was a real magazine, or you can skip around to things you’re most interested in with several interactive ways to find content. It’s a very slick, clean interface that brings magazines into this century.
Tags:
Android App,
Android Tablet,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Magazine reader,
Mobile App for Optimizing Magazine,
Zinio,
Zinio Magazine Reader
Categorised in: Books & Reference, Multimedia, Personalization
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