Time Magazine now has a mobile site, and it looks as if its design was done with the iPhone very much in mind – or that in any case has worked out extremely well for iPhone viewing. It’s been years since I’ve read Time regularly, and I don’t keep up with general and world news nearly enough these days, so I was very keen to see what Time Mobile has to offer.
The short answer is that it’s got a lot to offer, and in a very nice looking package. Here are some of the highlights of the Time Mobile site:
It meets Rule Number 1 of iPhone site design – which is that it provides an easy link to the full site, for all those who hate mobile optimized sites, and I know there are lots of you. There is a nice big button top right of every page that will take you over to the regular Time.com site.
The main sections on the Time Mobile site are: Top Stories, News Channels, Blogs, 10 Questions, ALL TIME 100, Quotes of the Day, and Photo Essays. I spent some time last night having a good old browse through almost all the sections – I don’t think of Time when I think of blogs – so I have to admit I have not checked that one out as yet. Here’s a quick look at some of the blogs that are there to look at:
The Top Stories and News Channels are excellent to spend time in. All the articles are formatted for the iPhone screen so that there’s no need to pinch or zoom, just dive straight into reading. These sections were extra cool for me because I had not even realized that online Time is updated much, much more than the weekly printed magazine. I had expected to see pretty much exactly what would be seen in the print edition, and was pleasantly surprised to see how current everything is. Read a great post on the whole Microsoft Chasing Yahoo saga last night.
The News Channels break down into U.S., World, Business & Tech, Entertainment, and Science & Health. I think that pretty much mirrors the magazine’s content framework.
The ALL TIME 100 section currently lists their Top 100 list of TV shows, with brief profiles of each – and I assume this will change regularly – so it should be a sort of fun section to follow and debate about who was left out that shouldn’t have been, and who never should’ve made it, and all that sort of thing.
The 10 Questions section is another fun one – featuring Q&A sessions with notable people from a range of different areas. Right now there are sessions with Joe Torre, Anne Rice, David Stern, Natalie Portman, Sean Combs, and others.
Photo Essays should be, and is, one of the real calling cards for Time Mobile. Time and magazines like it are known as much as anything for their excellent photography. This section does a good job of showing that off, with a range of topical and ‘classic’ topics for the photos. By classic I mean that, for example, there is currently a section titled ‘JFK Style’ with a number of great photos of John Kennedy. The remaining topic areas are all pretty current. My favorite so far of the current ones is ‘The War At Home’ that had a number of really poignant images.
One thing I did not see on the Photo Essays pictures was a photographer credit on each. I hope I just didn’t spot where it’s at yet, as otherwise that is crappy not to credit them properly.
At the bottom of every page there’s an easy-to-spot button to email the story to a friend or colleague, helpful nav links to cycle back up through the current section home and back to Time Mobile home etc., as well as some Related Stories links. It would be nice to also see some ‘Share This’ sort of buttons, or something that makes it easy to bookmark and / or share a post you like via leading sites for these purposes.
Overall, as this post’s title gives away, I’m an instant fan of the Time Mobile site. It is not super snappy over an Edge connection, but if you’re in a WiFi area this is an excellent site to pass some time and catch up with what the world is up to.
As I said, I have not been a regular reader of Time magazine in a lot of years – not since living at home when my mom was a subscriber in fact, and I would give it a browse most weeks. Since then, I have only looked at it in doctors offices’ waiting rooms or similar places – very rarely ever bought a copy. Now … I can see myself being a regular Time reader again.
Tags: Time Magazine, Time Mobile, iPhone news sites, Time Magazine on iPhone
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