The Daily and Sunday Express look set to be among the first UK titles to have iPad applications when the device launches in the UK next month.
Pagesuite has created the app for Express Newspapers and released a preview today on Youtube.
They also visited Press Gazette and let us try out the Express Newspapers iPad app first hand. And the results are pretty impressive.
The user experience is much more natural and fluid than with reading the digital version of a newspaper online using page-turning software. And the iPad screen does seem to lend itself particularly well to displaying tabloid news pages.
The iPad’s screen is about A5 in size (compared to an A3 tabloid newspaper page). This makes it big enough to easily read headlines and sub-heads. It perfectly mimics, and probably even improves, on the casual browsing experience of reading a real newspaper. And obviously, unlike with a web page, the reader has the benefit of seeing properly designed newspaper pages.
Press Gazette understands that Express Newspapers is planning to sell the app for around £1.89 – but will include seven days’ access to the iPad version of the print edition. It then plans to offer iPad subscriptions to the print edition.
The Express iPad edition also features free customisable news feeds of online content.
Pagesuite’s iPhone edition of free daily Metro has already generated 150,000 downloads, of which 50,000 have become daily readers. Pagesuite told Press Gazette that the average iPhone reader of Metro spends 16 minutes reading it, which compares well with print readers and is far more than average newspaper website readers spend on sites.
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