Manga Rock only reads manga from OneManga.com, but it streams and downloads issues beautifully, and is probably the best comic reader on the iPhone ” bar none.
[Note: I use the words ‘chapter ‘ and ‘issue ‘ interchangeably in this review. I refer to individual manga titles as ‘series ‘]
Lite Version
The app is available for free on the App Store, but it’s really only a lite verison, and you’ll want to purchase the full $1.99 version as an in-app purchase as soon as possible.
Catalog
OneManga.com provides free, translated versions of a ridiculously large assortment of manga. If you’ve been wondering about manga but didn’t know quite how to get into it all, then OneManga.com is the place to start, and Manga Rock is the app you should use as your portal to the site. It’s difficult to count, but the categories list shows over 1000 titles, and many popular series (Naruto, Fairy Tail, Love Hina, etc.) have enough back content to keep you occupied for months. All you need to do is tap on the name of a series and you’ll be taken to a “manga detail” screen.
Manga Rock makes it incredibly simple to start following a series, even if there are hundreds of issues to sort through. The right side of the screen has a special scrollbar that functions like the ones on a desktop, so all you have to do is tap and hold to pan through tens or hundreds of chapters. The only thing that’s missing here is a read and unread count to help you figure out where you left off — especially if you’re trying to track down your position in a manga you stopped reading a year ago.
Tapping on an a chapter (issue) will initiate a download, although the great thing about Manga Rock is that you can start to read as soon as the first page is loaded. It ‘s usually best to let an issue download in full before you turn the page, and loading a standard 26-31 page comic only takes under a minute on wi-fi on my 3GS. Once you know whether or not you like a series, you can add it to your Favourites so that you can see it at a glance within the Favourites tab. I haven ‘t used the app for long enough to confirm how this works, but the app can apparently inform you of updates to your favourite manga series once they ‘re in the Favourites tab, which is a great touch.
Reading
Every chapter you read within Manga Rock is automatically resized to fit the iPhone ‘s screen. Depending on the manga, you can actually get away with reading an entire page in portrait mode without having to pinch-zoom in. However, my preferred method of reading is to tilt the device into landscape mode and simply scroll down. Manga Rock automatically stitches all of the pages together so that you can read an entire chapter by simply scrolling down. This feature is bloody brilliant, and provides the most seamless reading experience I ‘ve had on the iPhone thus far.
Once you finish an issue, you can simply tap on the screen to bring up the controls. The in-chapter display shows you the chapter name, go back to the index, skim the chapter (coverflow display of every page), and an orientation lock. There are also two buttons at the bottom that allow you to move forward or back one chapter, which means you never have to leave the comic to move onto the next chapter. Once you finish an issue, you can tap once to bring up the controls, and tap on the Next button to move to the next issue in the series. It just works.
Managing Manga
Aside from the Favourites tab, Manga Rock also provides Recent and Downloads tabs to help you manage your manga. Recent is pretty self explanatory, and Downloads is split into two mini tabs: queue and downloaded. Tapping on a series name (ex. Naruto or Love Hina) will then show you all of the queued or downloaded issues for that series. There ‘s also a search feature if you have too many series to easily scroll through, and the final app tab, Info, can show you how much space your comics are taking up on the iPhone.
When you choose to download or delete a series, Manga Rock presents you with a context sensitive list of every chapter in that series. Viewing this list from the Catalog, for example, will show only the issues that have not been downloaded, whereas viewing the list from the Downlaods tab will only show the ones saved locally on your device.
Manga ROCKS!
There are really only two gripes I have with Manga Rock: The first is the lack of a read/unread indicator, and the second is the way that the lite version is handled. I don ‘t mind that the lite and full versions of the app are bundled as one app, but I found the lite version not only limiting, but rather annoying. Certain features, such as the download manager, recent tab, rotation lock, and skim (Coverflow) view are only available with the $1.99 in-app purchase of the full verson. However, instead of simply greying out these buttons, Manga Rock will let you tap on them, and then throw you into a ‘upgrade now and get all of this cool stuff ‘ screen. I would have preferred seeing an ‘UGPRADE ‘ button in the Info tab, and could definitely have done without the pop-ups.
However, once you do buy the very reasonably priced full version for $1.99, Manga Rock becomes an unbelievably good app. Not only is it a fantastic manga reader with an inspired approach to landscape reading, but it also features a gargantuan library that offers free downloads for hundreds of titles, and thousands of issues. Developer Not A Basement has made a great portal for new manga fans, and a must-have app for anyone who knows what a Kyuubi is.
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Manga Rock is available as a free download, with the full version available as an in-app purchase for $1.99.
The app was provided by Not A Basement for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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