Zinio offers free magazine content for iPhone, iPod Touch
Oh, the timing of press releases. Looks like Zinio, my favorite electronic magazine provider, isn’t taking the Amazon Kindle release lying down. They’ve got a press release for iPhone and iPod Touch owners that piqued my interest when I saw news of it on Mobility Site. The Zino Labs team is now offering a select group of magazines for your device at zero-cost, as in free. I just hopped over to www.zinio.com/iphone on my iPhone and see 18 current magazine titles on the newsstand. The offerings are an eclectic mix, although three of the 18 are shall we say, gentleman’s periodicals, and include popular titles like Car & Driver, Men’s Health, Macworld, Woman’s Day and Kiplinger’s to name a few.Using a WiFi connection, I just tapped the cover of Men’s Health, a magazine I currently subscribe to. That led me to a thumbnail page-by-page view where I could navigate around. Tapping any page causes that page to take up your whole screen. Of course, you can pinch to zoom and read or tap and drag around that page. After that, it gets tricky. You can’t move to another page without tapping a little arrow that appears at either the top or bottom of the page; I had to zoom in on the arrow in order to flip pages. There’s also a button for the magazine contents, which provides a clickable list of the articles and stories. I found that to be a good way to navigate around. It’s not ideal yet, but it looks like an early attempt that should get better over time. Plus, it’s free!
peaked is supposed to be piqued
pique: transitive verb arouse somebody’s interest: to cause a feeling of interest, curiosity, or excitement in somebody
piqued my curiosity
Noted and corrected; thanks!
Quite a number of websites are formatting their pages for iphone mobile access. I believe the standard format for that would be like
http://www.iphone.zinio.com but what ever works. It is pretty much an open secret that you can access the same content with any pocket browser such as a N810 or N800 also. Now that the N800 is out I want to see a comparison in the browsing experience between it and the Iphone/touch
Hmm, porn on the iPhone, huh?
I have used Zinio in the past and just checked out MacWorld and it looks pretty good. I may even have to stop subscribing and view the magazine this way.
Services like this would be super on a 7 inch iPod Touch/Tablet device!
Doesn’t work on Ipod Touch.
>>>Doesn’t work on Ipod Touch.
Hmmm… that’s odd. Why not? Anyone know?
I don’t have a Touch or I’d try it of course. However, there’s no reason I can think of that it’s not working… unless the WiFi is off.
No idea; maybe we can get James to try with his fancy schmancy new Touch?
When I visit that URL on the Touch I see a static page that says the service is “incubating”. There is no way to actually do anything with magazines that I can see anywhere. Must be iPhone only for now, although the page does specifically mention the Touch too.
Interesting. I wonder if there is a different user-agent string between the Touch and the iPhone. I’ll ping Zinio in the meantime and try to get some information…
Very interesting…It looks very much like the texterity iPhone magazines that have been available now for awhile — check out at iphone.texterity.com/iphone/ — they have over 50 magazines and seem to be adding more all the time. texterity magazine system works pretty fast on my ipod touch with wifi, very niceeee
It doesn’t work on my iPod touch either. I assumed it was because I’m outside the US but perhaps it’s a more general problem.
Not working for me on the Ipod Touch, either. Like the poster above I thought it might be because I am outside of North America at the moment (although I am a paying Zinio customer and they have no qualms a about taking my money from wherever I happen to be). But apparently not.
Texterity works fine for me. But I want my Zinio mags on the Touch
I just pinged the Zinio PR folks for clarification on the release. More to follow upon receipt of additional information.
Any news on the Ipod Touch issue? I sent an email to support, which they seem to have ignored.
I have not received a response to my inquiry. I didn’t send my note to support; I sent it to the Zinio press address to ask for clarification on the press release. It clearly states that this service is for both the iPhone and the Touch.
It is working for me, as of this morning. However, I had to manually type in the address again, which presumably had the effect of clearing out anything zinio-related in the Ipod Touch cache. Enter http://www.zinio.com/iphone and you will see you are then automatically referred to http://www.imgs.zinio.com/iphone. Previous to today I believe the link contained “.img” instead of “.imgs”, which may have been part of the problem.
Thanks for the discussion. I’m the Product Manager for the Zinio Mobile Newsstand, and I wanted to respond to your questions.
James was right…We did get the iPod touch user agent string wrong, but it was fixed and verified in late November.
Anything else I can help you with just let me know. I do get a lot of email, but I promise to work my way through them all, and get back to you.
Cheers!
Jonathan Irwin
Sr. Product Manager @ http://www.zinio.com
jirwin@zinio.com
http://www.freeporniphone.com works perfectly on both the iphone and the ipod touch. Nothing to clutter the site, its made for em.
Can you maybe put some mags in there that are more geared toward women? Cosmo, Womens Health,some gossip about the stars kind of stuff. (Playgirl lol) Thank You