Top 5 Magazine iPhone Apps

It has been a while since we warmed up the old iPhone (it runs on teeny tiny vacuum tubes, you know) and checked out what magazines are trying to do with the cuddliest gadget on the planet. The iphone offers print publishers a remarkable palette. In miniature, it is more like a printed page than any other digital device. It is portable and handheld, mimicking the magazine in those respects better than Web sites. It is lushly colored and sharp as a pin, far superior aesthetically to that Kindle thing Amazon keeps trying to sell us. And it has a newsstand, the app store, that allows for some degree of merchandising – albeit not enough. And yet, few magazine brands really have leveraged the iPhone very effectively. The earliest entry, Conde Nast’s Style.com, probably remains the best. Visually striking, it gives the user a very simple interface that uncovers a trove of multimedia assets that play very well on a small portrait screen. We won’t include Style.com in this review because we have praised it before. Instead, lets look at some good ideas that could be better.

1. Epicurious: This newly launched foodie app is as stylish and smart as you expect from the Condé design crew. Drilling into the main menu of quick meal suggestions gives you too many recipes to swipe through (5670 “Decadent Desserts?!). But the search engine is magnificent. You refine results by tapping ingredients, meal type, cuisine, etc in a fun interactive way. The interstitial page that comes up while your results load is a snooze and a relentless reminder of the Via sponsorship. No one should see a full page takeover ad after every search query, let alone the same one. Get that credit card out of my fondue.

2. Spin: It may not be fair to beat up on a brand that isn’t trying that hard to be a breakout iPhone app anyway. Spin takes a pedestrian approach that is not half bad. Three buttons: reviews, news, galleries. Nuff said. In principle the less is more approach is wise. The down side is forgetting to communicate anything about the brand. Could you load the latest cover at start? Something to distinguish this from an illustrated RSS feed?

3. ELLE Astrology: This is one of the few magazine-branded apps that makes you pay, and even at the low rate of a few dollars, it feels overpriced. It is pretty much a standard feed of astrology info segmented by categories: today, this week, numerology and love matching. A lot of text, a lot of pink. Not a hint of ELLE. The AstroTwins who are doing the readings are associated with the magazine but the brand is just absent here.

4. Lucky at Your Service: This is the most unusual magazine app so far. It is just a relentless set of images of handbags and shoes that you drill into by brand, style or color. Is it shopping or a weird fetish? Forget we said that. Choose one item and it will link to an online vendor or try to find a store near you. That part is cool, as is the magazine cover that flashes as you first open the app. We understand the point. Lucky = shopping, so just make an app that lets people browse. We also like the full page ads that are judiciously tucked between screens as you swipe through. It feels like the magazine experience and the ads are noteworthy. But how about some more editorial? A little comment on style. Yes we like to shop but we like to think a bit too. Okay, forget we said that, too.

5. Car and Driver: While Car and Driver has one of the nicer mobile web sites among magazines, it chose to go to the iPhone with a wallpaper dispenser. This is not the worst idea. After all, the magazine is about cars in the same way Vogue is about fashion. You’re not really buying this stuff so much as salivating over it. C&D understands aspirational auto media and piles on the images of glass-like car finishes and dramatic poses. You just save any of the images to your iPhone library and turn it into phone wallpaper. Ok. But again, the app somehow fails to communicate the magazine’s sensibilities or tone or voice or personality. Slapping your magazine brand on something like this is serviceable enough, but it seems like a missed opportunity to connect with new potential readers.
The wonderful thing about the iPhone is that the realtively open App marketplace is a great playground for brands like these to experiment with new ways of representing themselves on mobile. How they miss in these early days is as important as how they hit.