Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader

Let me just say this is a good start to what could be one of my favorite apps. There is one thing in my mind that sticks out though...We need to be able to delete the whole thing off the iPad. Once we are done reading we need to be able to delete to make room for more. Will happily change the rating when this happens.

Well, besides locking up almost every time it's turned on, it comes with three magazines that I have no interest in and if you click on any other title you get redirected to their website (that is if it doesn't crash first....frequently) and sold at premium price a subscription or single issue. No thanks!

Ohhhhh I had no idea I could enjoy my favorite magazines (US Weekly...um...hello! Can the fashion spreads look any better?) through this Zinio Magazine App. This has sent me into a Nirvana of discovery! I can search through thousands of mags - shop, read and enjoy all my mags without having to shlep them around town with me. I'm in love with my iPad - a mad love-affair! Now that maggies are in the mix I am the happiest camper!

This is great for reading magazines. Especially for those of us who have less than perfect eyes. However, there are some major flaws. Give me a way to delete a magazine and not just the content. I want to delete them completely from my iPad, cover and all. Also, give me a way to search a magazine. I realize it's a free app, so give me more control and charge for it. I'll gladly pay. And for those complaining about the magazines costing almost as much as the printed matierial...you are paying for the content people, not just the paper.

The application crashed almost every time I ran it. I can't imagine i am the only one experiencing this given all the good reviews I am very surprised but these made be friends of the developer who knows. I find the selection mediocre at best. With the notable exception of The Economist there was not a single magazine i would want to subscribe to unless it was given to me on a free subscription and even then I probably would not read it. It is early though and the chance these folks may come up with some better content is certainly a possibility, lets hope so!

This is a good program, but, like my title states, the page rendering speed really kills the experience. I actually have to look away as its rendering because it hurts my eyes. I don't know if the app developer could actually speed this up or if its on the ipad's end, but the rendering speed is killing me.

So, I decided to revisit this app for the iPad. Such a mistake.... I played with the free content that came with the app. This all worked very well, the screen changes were snappy and everything was going great until, I bought a magazine. I actually did a 1 year subscription to Bike, which I usually pick up in the store. Found there to be a few annoyances. One every time you switch pages, there is a hesitation, which re-renders the page a bit clearer. However the cleaned up page is just plain bad. The image quality is very pixilated. One other annoyance is there is no way to remove a magazine from the library, contrary to the help button, which has a how-to delete magazines. There is no edit button on the "my library" to delete the magazines. I'm sure that is just an oversight which will be fixed in the next update, maybe? Okay, while nit picking and providing a public suggestion. How about giving the user the option to open to "my library" or to the sales page.

I eagerly updated the Zinio app for my iPad only to find out that it STILL turns off the music playing on the iPod app when it starts up! Come on! Is it really that hard to fix?! My GoodReader app works fine with music playing! And it's much faster at rendering pages!

So far I'm impressed. After spending some time with this app I was pretty happy. I can see making the switch to digital vs. paper. Sure I wish it was a little smoother and faster but it works well for an early version. Clear, clean pages (most of them) some when zooming in became less clear, maybe they were low res. Yes, a more prevalent delete button would be welcomed along with more magazine choices (which I'm sure are forthcoming). I'm a fan!

Fantastic app. I've already purchased $70 in subscriptions. Yet things should change or no more. 1) screen renders too slow. 2) when I delete, I want it gone from my library, not just offline storage. It's just annoying. That being said, good selection, not much competition and I love it being self contained.

Well it might not be the perfect way to read a magazine, this is the best way I have seen yet and it has great potential. What I like: Links in ads are viewable directly within the app - see something you want more information on an ad and if there is a site link available, you simply click and the companies website comes up. I get my magazines on the plane without having to physically have them with me. Subscriptions are less than the paper versions. To delete magazines you are done with, just hold your finger on an issue and just like moving icons around the main screen, a little 'x' appears next to the downloaded issues - click and delete. What I don't like: The slow rendering when turning pages - it takes about two to five seconds for the page to come up. Of course, I can skip the page if it is an ad that I do not want to see without it fully rendering. The cost of individual magazines is high - they need 'samples' or individual issue prices that are more inline with a digital version.

At the end of the day, tweaking a magazine page to look slick on an iPad is missing the point. These magazine's should be designing original interfaces for the platforms instead of dumping pages designed for a paper experience into a one-size fits all application. Eventually they will figure this out and Zinio will be out of business.

Very buggy at times. Also when you try to make text bigger- to make it normal size- the text is slightly blurry. Why would these magazines allow sub-par performance?

I don't see what anyone could complain about? It works Great and will be even more Awesome when I get my iPad!! As far as it not playing iPod while reading I can see mentioning it but it does do what it's made for well.

I love exploring my magazines with this app. The page clarity combined with zooming brings out a new dimension to my subscriptions - very fun! And they are all there with me!

I cant say that I have been a huge magazine reading fan before this- but now I find myself reading more and more magazines I have never previously considered. Yes it takes a few seconds for the page to show up clearly, but it is so cool I dont mind. I take my iPad averywhere and now i find myself passing the time reading magazines while i am waiting. Thanks for this work. Cant wait to see how it grows.

Looks promising, except for one insanely annoying problem - the opening animation that plays back when you open the app interrupts music playback. There doesn't appear to be a way to shut this off or prevent this. This is a showstopper for me - I like to listen to music when I read. PLEASE fix!

So the great thing about this free app is it includes about a dozen free April issues of popular magazines. Thats a lot of great content, for free. It's not perfect.. Page zooming, loading, and turning can be choppy, navigation not as intuitive as it could be, and the app crashed on me a few times. But, free magazines, (trial?) can't wait until they get this bugs works out for the next upgrade. Grab this app, it's going to take off once in the top 40. Well just have to see how they stand up against the other e-mag readers (presenters).

Love zinio but the iPad app needs more mags. I'd also like to be able to access all my older archived mags, not just the recent 3. I agree with the other comments that the rendering is really way too slow and needs to be corrected. Can we pre render in the background perhaps? Great early offering though and can't wait for the update!

Ok EDIT: I have now changed to five stars because there customer support is amazing and fast....I just hope we see an update to fix the rendering!

This is a much better way of reading magazines than stacks of paper. However, the application has a number of serious problems. Loading new pages is also unnecessarily slow; with modern imaging technologies, magazine pages can pop up instantly. You should be able to scroll through this faster than through a photo album. Slowness makes using the app a taxing experience. The application also needs good support for bookmarking, annotating, clipping, and sharing. Right now, you can't even go to a URL contained in a page. One should really be able to select text or clip an image and E-mail it. The initial browsing page shows very large icons of each magazine, meaning you have to scroll if you have any significant number of them. This problem is compounded by the fact that you can't delete the sample magazines it ships with, which apparently permanently clutter up the library. There's also no search functionality; this makes the slowness of the app even more of a problem. Fix these issue and Zinio could be a spectacular magazine reading experience. (Unfortunately, I suspect one shouldn't hold one's breath; I remember Zinio's desktop versions and they suffered from similar problems: slow display, confusing user interface, etc.).

I used the iPad version and I love. It's almost perfect. Reading books, comics & magazines is the main reason I bought an iPad. Zinio is great for the latter. Worst things first. Refreshing pages can be a little slow. I mean one second slow. It's not ideal and I hope it's remedied in future updates but it's not a deal breaker either. I think it's understandable given they probably developed the app without an iPad and would not have experienced such delays on development macs. As for upsides: The prices tend to be really cheap (unlike most stand-alone magazine apps). The image quality is very good. The range of magazines is wide, though there's always room for more. I also like the fact that a single app can be home to many magazines, rather than one per icon. Sorry if this sounds like a love-fest but Zinio and the iPad are perfect together.

The concept here is just terrific but the execution is a big problem. Instead of just sliding right to left, the pages should flip like a real magazine (like the Apple book application does when turning book pages). It would be so much more elegant that way and give the user a real magazine feel experience. More importantly, after 'turning' to the next page, the rendering is extremely slow making the next page blurry from 2-5 seconds. It is just unacceptable and completely turns me off to reading magazines on the iPad (and frankly, hurts my eyes after a while since everything is out of focus for a bit). Apple manages to have clear next page turns for their book application so I cannot imagine why Zinio can't do it for magazines. Needs lots of work. For now, I'll stick with paper magazines until this is at least as good an experience as real reading.

I read the other reviews and don't know why everyone isn't aware via shop or feature buttons that this app provides access to more than 2K mags. This is a terrific free app and gateway/repository for your library. So much better than a scan of a PDF, enlarging photos and looking at beautiful, full-color spreads. As to pricing comments, sub is the way to go for savings as far as I'm concerned.

This app is great and really allows you to have most magazines right there in front of you. A couple of things I would like to see including deleting magazines completely (as previous reviewer said) and pre-rendering of the pages (at least render the next page while I am reading this one. Otherwise, great app that does exactly what it says. Thanks!

Ok I like the idea but it's slow at rendering the images and I hate that u can't delete the preloaded magazines I constantly have a badge on my app for magazines i don't want? Please update your support site for the iPad so i can find these answers!

Great on the iPhone and even better on the iPad. They dynamic content is amazing, but all the mags are easy and fun to read.

i cant believe that i actually feel like i am reading a magazine, but in a better way. somehow steve jobs and zinio made print photos look better in digital. i am loving this page swipe and the library interface. this is very cool- and could be addictive. especially love the videos and photo slide shows in the featured content. this app is even better than the zinio iphone app - -no zoom needed.

Loving the new magazine app. The ipad + zinio makes e-reading much easier, and better than the normal print experience. Looking forward to using on my commute, especially with so many magazines to choose from.