Review: GQ Magazine iPad App

This is part of the Top Magazine iPad series

Conde Nast, the publisher of the famous men’s magazine, has the distinguished title of being one of the first mag to have an iPad version. Needless to say, being a lifestyle genre magazine, GQ has made an impressive headstart in maximizing the offerings of the iPad in order to enhance the magazine experience.

Our ratings:

1) Usefulness/Value to User
-Make no mistake- GQ looks amazing on the iPad. Its images look incredibly vivid and crisp on the screen, with its photo spreads and text layouts looking very at home with both horizontal and vertical flips. There is a table of contents feature, which can be appreciated the more you experience other magazine apps which exclude it. It serves as a kind of ‘You are here’ sitemap right there on the screen. That being said, you can’t help having a bit more fun flipping through the graphics than actually reading the content. 6/10.

2) Useability/Interface
-On top of the great look of photographs and images, GQ also does slideshow features, as well as videos which add to the whole experience. To view articles, you have to click on each article, which zooms up as a portrait orientation. Apart from that, there isn’t that much else that you can play around with. Yet it is interesting to see what GQ aspires to do with the iPad, such as scaling the content down to also suit the iPhone format. 5/10

3) Price/Business Model
-The price tag on the GQ iPad app is noticeably lower than other magazines, at $2.99 an issue. Like Newsweek, that’s 50% less than at the newsstands, but surprising statistics have revealed that the iPad app has seen only 365 downloads since launch. However, GQ released a statement saying they’ve actually experienced 57000 Apple apps…that is, across the iPad, iPhone, iTouch etc. Still, compared to other magazine apps that have thousands of apps downloaded for their iPad alone, it doesn’t really make it look any better for GQ. 6/10

4) Additional Functionality
-One interesting feature of the GQ is the ability to buy not only individual issues but back issues as well, all of which can be inserted into a ‘GQ library’ storage. 4/10

Summary:

GQ looks like a poster example of how much better a magazine can look in the transition from print to iPad; probably more so if you prefer flipping through the images more than seeking portable journalistic content. With its decent pricing and offerings of back issue sales, it does remain a bit of a downer that it hasn’t made as much an impact as expected. This only further highlights the notion that it remains to be seen just how much the iPad has saved or is saving the publishing business. It also remains to be seen if that will push its publisher, Conde Nast, to have a second think before pushing out its other big names for the iPad versions, such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.

This is part of the Top Magazine iPad series