Yesterday Zinio released their much-anticipated Android application that provides access to more than 20,000 magazines.
It even comes with 24 free magazines, full issues too (actually I’m only seeing 22 but the press release says 24). The magazines are free until June 15th and include titles such as Cosmopolitan, ESPN The Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Men’s Fitness, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Us Weekly
I tested the app out on the ASUS Transformer. You can see the Zinio app in action in the Transformer Android 3.1 video that I just posted this morning. The app is demoed at the 3:00 mark.
With the Zinio app, magazines maintain their original layout and form. The app allows you to view two pages at once in landscape mode or one page in portrait. Double-tap to zoom in, or pinch to zoom. There’s a preview window at the bottom of the screen that pops up to show all the pages and lets you scroll through them.
There’s an icon in the upper right corner to jump to the table of contents, which has active hyperlinks added. There’s also an option to view the magazine contents full screen with thumbnails of each page.
According to the tips, some publications have an icon to tap that brings up article view, but neither of the magazines I tested had that option, Rolling Stone and AFAR.
Overall, it is a nice-looking app for magazine reading. It is a little laggy in the pinch-to-zoom department, but otherwise works well.
The Zinio app is available free from the Android Market, but does not support all devices. You’ll need Android 2.2/2.3 or a Honeycomb tablet.