After much fan fare, the new app called The Daily has arrived. I just downloaded this app for my iPad to see what all the hub bub is about. This is a new offering from News Corp (the ones that run 20th Century Fox and Fox TV) to bring new content to all of us that were fortunate to be able to buy an iPad. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with the app yet since I just downloaded it but the concept is pretty awesome, however this has already been done before just not to this level. I have other apps like the NY Times and NPR that also publish news that I consume but I think the selling point they are trying to do with The Daily is that it is all original content. Hmm… I don’t know if that really is a selling point for most people. The iPad is a consumer machine that pulls down all types of data from the web. The best part about the iPad is that I can view the web using Safari and it shows me what I want minus all the Flash content.
I’ve been reading some of the articles here and they are no better or worse than what I read on the web. What gets me is that they want people pay for the content like a regular magazine subscription. This is interesting considering you can do the exact same thing using the Kindle App and you have a great many more sources of content using Kindle than just using The Daily. I do give kudos to Fox and Apple for execution. The app is fully interactive complete with video content and its all seemless. It definitely has the “COOL” factor down pat. It also has interactivity with Sudoku puzzles and ads. The best part that a lot of other magazines have failed at during their implementation of subscription based apps is that you can view the content while it loads. I tried out two digital magazines, one of them I can’t remember and the other was Travel and Leisure. Both magazines had to load the whole magazine before I was able to view the content. I only have a Wifi iPad but I typically use it at home and my connection is pretty fast so it should have taken no time at all to load the content. That would be a big negative on that one, it took almost 30 minutes to load the content, by that time I was already interested in doing something else entirely instead of reading the magazine.
I’m not sure I would ever pay for this but I can see some people going for this kind of app. What is nice is that Verizon gives a two week subscription away for you to try before you buy. That would be awesome if more apps were like this. I’ve been able to do the same thing using apps from Cydia (yeah I’m a jailbreaker :P). I’ll give this more of a test drive later this week and see how often the content updates. In the mean time, I have all my news sites bookmarked and there is always my Flipboard app that has all my RSS, Twitter, and Facebook feeds which by itself keeps me pretty busy.
Wonger's Ramblings 