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Time Magazine updates iPhone app to 2.0
Time Inc. has updated the free TIME Mobile iPhone app to version 2.0, building on input from readers of the previous version. The app interface has undergone a huge redesign and is now much faster than before, answering one of the biggest gripes about the earlier version. TIME Mobile now adds podcasts, the video library is optimized for iPhone viewing, and readers are able to customize which sections of the magazine appear on the app home page. You can now save articles for offline reading, search for favorite articles, shake the iPhone to refresh articles in a section, and share articles through Facebook and Twitter. As if that's not enough, TIME also made the app more legible by adding the ability to increase the font size for articles or change the font for the entire app. While it's good to see that TIME has updated the iPhone app, many iPad users are still angry with the magazine's decision to charge $4.99 an issue (through in-app purchase) for the digital version of a magazine that can be had in print for $0.50 an issue. That decision has resulted in close to 74% of all customers giving the free iPad app a poor rating. Time Inc. also has digital versions of Sports Illustrated, LIFE, and the ever popular Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition available in the App Store.
First Look: TIME Mobile, a slick magazine for your iPhone / iPod touch
Instead of sifting through the piles of TIME magazines at your doctor's office, where you don't know who's healthy or unhealthy hands have touched the pages, you now have another option to browse through TIME content on your iPhone. The recently launched TIME Mobile [iTunes link] app provides a better browsing experience and more content than the mobile version of magazine's website. In addition, the app brings with it support for video, which is lacking on the mobile version of TIME's site and not supported for the iPhone on the full version of the site because the videos are encoded in Flash. TIME Mobile also brings a new approach for browsing articles. Like Cover Flow view in the iPhone and iTunes, TIME Mobile's "Image Flow" provides some eye candy in front of the meat and potatoes of the article content. One thing absent in the app is support for offline reading, a useful feature for situations where data connectivity is lacking, such as on an airplane. The USA Today app [iTunes link], which is in the same app genre as TIME Mobile, supports offline reading by tapping on the update button on each section. Perhaps such a feature could be added to TIME Mobile as a paid-for feature, or as for free to those who subscribe to the paper version of the magazine. Update: TIME's app team tells us that offline reading is built-in as part of the app, but for some reason I could not get it to work consistently; we're following up with them to figure out why it's wonky. Powered by Polar, a mobile publishing provider that also powers BusinessWeek [iTunes link] and CNNMoney [iTunes link] iPhone apps as well as a host of other apps on a variety of mobile platforms, TIME Mobile is available as a free download in the App Store.
