iPhone App: Time Mobile

November 1st, 2009

Time Mobile

= 4 stars

News app delivering the familiar weekly news magazine TIME to your iPhone.

The Good

Clear navigation. A menu bar at top (that also scrolls horizontally) takes you to subject sections of the magazine (headlines, politics, U.S., world, business, etc.). Buttons at the bottom lead to different app sections (news, lists, quotes, popular, and media). There’s a toggle button at top to switch between a more familiar thumbnail image and text headline view to a more graphically oriented large image, horizontally scrolling “image flow” view.
The media section consists of photographs and videos. Videos display using the familiar iPhone UI.
Button to share articles via email or Twitter.
Can adjust font size.
Can read articles in landscape view.

The Bad

Don’t care for the default “image flow” view, and prefer the more standard thumbnail plus headlines view for articles. Thankfully, you can turn off “image flow” view for all sections by tapping the settings “gear” icon in the upper left corner.
Personally find the “Top 10 Lists” and “Quotes” sections pointless.
One bug: when reading an article in landscape view, and tapping the next article button, the next article’s text width is formatted for the vertical view and therefore too narrow. To get the text to flow to the full width, you have to tip the phone 90 degrees and back to “reset” the view.

Conclusion

Despite occasionally klunky article display and lacking the “wow” factor of CNN app’s videos, TIME Mobile is free, and as such this is essentially a free subscription to TIME magazine on your iPhone. As far as I’m concerned it’s good enough to forgo the TIME magazine “dead tree” subscription.

iTunes App Store Link: