One of the iPad’s main purposes is to read digital versions of newspapers and magazines, making walking to the store to buy a periodical a thing of the past. However, with the iPad’s extensive capabilities, the digital version of these periodicals has to be something different. There should be features that make reading a newspaper on the iPad special. New York Post ($1.99) for iPad is a fantastic way to read the popular publication, but it doesn’t take full advantage of the iPad’s capabilities.
The $1.99 price tag gets you 30 days of access. Being a daily publication, that’s not a bad introductory offer. After that, you can pay $7 per month or $75 per year. You can also select a six-month package for $40. It gets a little pricey, but if you read the New York Post every day, it’s well worth it.
Upon opening the periodical, you are presented with the latest issue’s front cover. You can read the paper in portrait or landscape mode. From the first page, you have a few navigation options. You can simply swipe from right to left to go to the next page, you can tap on the Table of Contents button to view each section’s contents, or you can use the scrubber at the bottom of the screen to quickly navigate to any article.
Each article is well-presented; reading just like it would if it were the actual paper. However, on the iPad there are a few additional features. When viewing a page with multiple articles, you can scroll through each article separately instead of scrolling the whole page. This allows you to really focus on just the article you’re currently reading. Also, there are several articles with photo slideshows. If there are multiple photos pertaining to a single article, you can tap on the photo icon to display a slideshow of each shot with captions at the bottom. However, single photos cannot be enlarged or zoomed into. This is absolutely one of the app’s drawbacks. There is no support for pinch to zoom. The app states you can zoom into photos and articles if you turn on the iPad’s accessibility option to zoom with three fingers. However, this feature will stay on for the entire device, and might become annoying later on.
The app also allows you to save issues for offline viewing. There have been reports that this feature does not work, but it worked perfectly for me. I saved several issues, and was able to turn off my iPad’s wifi and view them without an Internet connection. Once saved, you may view all your saved issues in the Newsstand section of the app. In this section, you also have the option to set the app to always start with the sports section.
A disappointing aspect of this application is that it doesn’t remember where you’ve left off reading. If I quit the app and reopen, it restarts me at the cover page. Other than that, and the ugly app icon, this is absolutely a worthwhile purchase for fans of the New York Post. There are a ton of reports in the App store of the app crashing, and features, such as “save issue,” not working. But, after trying the app for a few days, I experienced none of these issues.
