When I first got my iPad, I knew that it would be great for consuming content. But lately I’ve fond myself visiting my RSS reader less and less and focused more on my two favorite iPad Magazine apps. There are a few out there, but there are really two standouts in my opinions. Here are the pro’s and con’s of each – but download either to check out on your next long car trip, flight, or bus ride.
Flipboard is one of the most popular personalized ipad magazine apps.
Flipboard is probably the most popular personalized iPad magazine app – if for no other reason than it’s gorgeous! It pulls in RSS feeds, tweets, and then recommended/curated content pulls in for you to flip through.
Flip has relationships with many very big publishers, so their integration into the publisher experience for many sites is seamless.
My favorite thing about Flipboard is the experience. It’s so easy to navigate through stories and features, and when you want to Tweet or Email a post? SUPER easy. Very simple and straightforward. It’s almost fun to just flip the pages – so much better than a newspaper (no more black fingers), but still satisfying in that page-flipping way, ya know?
Zite
Zite touts itself as a “personalized iPad magazine” app, and so as you tell it what features you liked/didn’t like, it will adjust to suit. Zite’s user experience isn’t as good as Flipboard – often I find the personalization bar where you say what you like/don’t like gets in my way as I scroll with my right hand and it’s on the right hand side.
I also don’t like that Zite tweets all content as if it was from site – e.g. “<link> via @zite” - which isn’t fair to the original content publisher. You can edit it of course, but then you’d have to know their twitter/Facebook handle.
Having said that, I LOVE the content that Zite digs up for me. I like how they organize their content by themes, and while there’s a few themes missing, their coverage is very comprehensive.
Recommendation: I’d suggest that you download and try both of these apps on your next trip to see which ones work best for you. I haven’t decided between the two.
Photo by Johan Larsson
