My local paper launched a new tablet app this week. The headline claims the app is ‘fully interactive’ and ‘innovative,’ and that was certainly a promising teaser. So, how does the app stack up?
In a word, meh. The life-changing, revolutionary features the article goes on to itemize seem pretty vanilla to me: there are videos, photo galleries and interactive maps, all of which I got in Zinio six years ago when I used their tablet app. This is hardly a ‘new way of bringing news and information to viewers,’ as the tablet claims.
Scroll down to the reader comments, and it gets even worse. There are complaints that it is painfully slow to load content, that it is unresponsive, that the pictures are pixelated and low resolution and that the quantity of ads vastly eclipses the quantity of content. And the Android app is ‘coming soon.’
Sorry, Toronto Star! I’ll read off the website or pick up a free commuter paper. But I am not saddling my iPad with another large, buggy app. I have learned my lesson on that!
Publisher’s note: I briefly tried the app. It’s just as abysmal as Joanna says. – D.R.
