WIRED Magazine 17+

Wired seem to be listening to complaints about the iPad version of the magazine but there are still a number of problems new users should consider.
- Firstly there are still a large number of ads in the magazine, I found one edition which had about 200 megs of ad content making up the 500meg download...
- There also still seem to be problems with some updates taking away access to back issues, when this happened to me wired support suggested that I removed the app and reinstalling it before trying to re-download an issue. This fixed the problem for me but I'm always really worried about being charged again when i try to re-download issues...

On the bright side the app is now much more polished and the embedded media don't seem to be annoying in the latest issue.

£2.99 for this magazine!!!!!! From where I am sitting this is an absolute bargain - that said I think the price point is exactly right, and I would like to see all magazines at around this price point - not up to the £5 mark!!!!!! We are saving valuable resources by taking the online edition.

Ok, I admit that the features available with an online magazine can easily outweigh those in paper format, live videos, interacting with objects - it really is cool. But then, for the first time in my Life i am actually taken by the adverts. This medium is seriously going to open up some great creative advertising. Interacting with adverts - seeing the new Mercedes Benz video advert within the advert, clicking a link to take me directly to the buy one get one free clothes offer advertised!!! It rocks. Companies should really get in on the act now, and i hope that the magazines get more from the advertisers to keep this medium cheap for us. I will never pay more for an online subscription than getting a hard copy and I hope these companies take note.

Look forward to the next issue!

Slow and cumbersome downloads - June edition was over 500MBs and July is still over 300MBs... this is way too big for a digital magazine download. Supposing we continue to buy the magazine for a year then we'll have maxed out close to 5GBs of our iPad storage just for a single magazine app!... surely this can't be the future of the publishing industry? Considering the sheer number of advertising spots in theses editions too the per-issue price should be much lower than $3.99. I hope Wired are paying attention to these negative reviews because they're more or less spot-on. If August continues like this then I won't be buying again. There's still no indication of a continuation page to each article so readers constantly feel as though they're navigation is all over the place. No zoom, no selectable text, no way to make notes or add bookmarks for future referencing... ie the whole Wired App experience is counter-intuitive to what we've come to appreciate with the iPad. Flattened PNGs via the Adobe InDesign compiler makes for a dreadful digital magazine experience. Also as others have noted below... you have to re-download the previous edition which will burn up another 500MB of your bandwidth. Shameful that a business like Wired could have put out such a shoddy and ill-concevived App.