Occasionally I'm approached to review an iPad app and if it's related to blogging, reading, writing, or the publishing world I'm happy to oblige. In the case of PressReader it was a no-brainer.
Every day I read many online newspapers and blogs looking for interesting information to share with you good folks, but I have never read a digitized version of a newspaper.
Everything about PressReader is easy, smooth and bug free. Ordering a paper takes one click followed by a 5 second download. Rather than paging through sections to get to the article you want to read, you simply click on an embedded link and your chosen article unfolds in front of you.
Or, if you simply want to page through the paper quickly to get to a particular section, use the SmartFlow bar at the bottom of the screen. Although the images of each page are about the size of a playing card they are crisp, even on the iPad 2. Of course you can always just flick through the paper page by page. Once you've reached the article just do a reverse pinch motion to zoom in on the text and glide through the article.
What has made me fall in love with this app is the fast, smooth, movement. I've paged through two newspapers now and it hasn't stuttered once, let alone crashed.
Sometimes when I write an unreservedly glowing review of an app one of my readers will write to me and chastise me for being uncritical, so I asked a friend of mine who subscribes to two newspapers to take a look at it. He loved it! His one comment was that he couldn't find a way to view the entire page at one glance. (It could be that there is a command for this that I don't know.)
The next question is: how much? A monthly subscription will run you $29.95 a month but for casual readers--that would be me!--you can download a newspaper for only 99 cents. That's not bad, it's certainly cheaper than buying one.
Has anyone else tried PressReader? If so, what did you think?
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