The Daily, News Corps's new digital "newspaper" made its iPad debut this week to much fanfare, representing Rupert Murdoch's vision of the high-tech publication. The Daily, however, isn't the first iPad app to deliver content wrapped in an attractive, easy-to-read package.
Flipboard, the downloadable app that Apple hailed as the App of the Year, was one of the first to bring a print-like format to the wonder-tablet—albeit in a completely different manner than The Daily. Whereas Flipboard lets users create their own virtual papers, The Daily delivers news from a team of traditional news people each morning.
Despite their radically different takes on the digital magazine, or perhaps because of it, the two products are prime candidates for comparison. If you're curious about either of these digital magazines, our feature-by-feature breakdown will help you determine which app offers the best all-around reading experience.
- The Daily: Free to download. $0.99 cents per issue, or $39.99 per year.
- Flipboard: Free download. Free to read.
- The Daily: Non-customizable original content from News Corp's editorial staff that includes interviews, videos, photos, charts, and graphs.
- Flipboard: A customizable "social magazine" that culls links from Facebook and Twitter, as well as from RSS feeds. Partnerships with ABC News, SF Gate, The Washington Post, and other providers.
- The Daily: Video anchor, video clips, slideshows, and 360-degree rotating images, user audio comments.
- Flipboard: Video clips and images.
- The Daily: Magazine-like interface with Cover Flow-inspired section navigation. Table of contents lets users jump to featured stories. Multi-page stories. Finger swipes turn pages.
- Flipboard: Magazine-like interface. Finger swipes turn pages.
- The Daily: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter.
- Flipboard: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter.
- The Daily: Attractive full-page advertisements.
- Flipboard: No advertisements.
- The Daily: Often crashes.
- Flipboard: Rarely crashes.
Price
Content
Multimedia
Design and Presentation
Social Media and Sharing
Business Model
Stability
The Daily is a pioneering, well-designed app (outside of the frequent crashes) that brings subscription-based publications to the iPad while deftly balancing old and new media. The big question is if you're willing to pay for the content. The Daily's straight news content is something you can find for free with the appropriate RSS feed run through Flipboard, so if the bells and whistles aren't particularly appealing (or if you don't find the other non-news stories compelling), the app isn't worth downloading; the free and far more stable Flipboard may be a better choice for now.