Comparing the blockbuster Wired magazine application for the Apple iPad to other magazines on the device is faintly silly given its far greater size and ambition. You can get an idea of it from the promotional video below.
The Wired app is the closest thing the iPad yet has to a vision of how magazines could be transformed, and it has the bulk to prove it. It contains nearly half a gigabyte of data, including two clips from the new Toy Story film, and took me 10 minutes down download it over a WiFi connection.
But, as the the iPad goes on sale in nine countries outside the US – including the UK, France, Germany and Japan – the Wired app puts its competitors to shame, including GQ and Vanity Fair, two other Conde Nast titles that are more confused and less interesting.
Perhaps that accounts for the fact that Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, sounds so unenthusiastic about his own product.
I predicted in a column on the iPad that the device’s multimedia potential would put many publishers to the test, and the magazines I have seen so far generally fail it. They look like what they are – little more than facsimiles of the print versions with the odd slideshow or video thrown in.
Doing better requires space. The Wired app takes up 544 megabytes, while Vanity Fair is 3.6mb, GQ 2.8mb, and Dwell (an interiors and architecture magazine that looks good in print but has a disappointing iPad app) 3.9mb.
Wired’s rivals are thus less than one hundredth of the size. They also display a fraction of its imagination in transforming themselves into digital artifacts.
As soon as it emerged that the Wired iPad app would cost $4.99 there was a lot of online scepticism about how noone would ever pay that much for a monthly magazine on an iPad. We shall see, but Wired itself reports that 24,000 people downloaded it in the first 24 hours.
The most impressive thing about it is the way that it re-imagines the entire magazine format by integrating words, data, graphics, photos and video into a seamless blend. It is also – in contrast to others – intuitive to navigate. Even the advertisements, complete with videos, seem interesting.
Of course, if others really do emulate it then iPad memories, which are a maximum of 64gb, are going to fill up fast.
