I have been playing with Virgin's Project magazine on the iPad because issue five was free (it was sponsored by someone, can't remember who). The content is a fairly standard mix of articles that look like they could have come from GQ or Esquire or, at a stretch, Maxim so the standard of journalism is moderate to good; not bad for a free magazine but probably not something I would want to pay for.
Content aside, their are two major problems with Project. The first is the UI, which is inconsistent and difficult to use. Buttons for summoning the menu bars seem to move around, there are quite a few different ways to move to the next piece of content (swipe left, swipe down, tap button, tilt iPad etc.) and it isn't always easy to identify which parts of the screen are UI and which are article. This makes for a generally frustrating experience and I do not plan to buy issue six.
The second problem is that the rendering is, on many pages, horrible. For example, with the iPad in landscape mode the first screen of the contents page is crisp and clear, as you would expect. Move to the second page (swipe up) or rotate to portrait and the images and text degrade significantly, giving you the impression that you're looking at a poorly scanned image. This is pretty unpleasant and makes reading the magazine rather difficult; again, it doesn't encourage me to persevere with the next edition.
It's interesting to compare Project to Flipboard, my Facebook/Twitter/Google Reader client of choice. Flipboard presents your chosen news sources in a magazine format and allows you to tap-down into the story or follow links to new content. It's easy and intuitive with clearly labelled consistent UI elements that make navigation a pleasure. Moving from to the other demonstrates the gulf in the quality of the experience; Virgin have a long way to go to make Project worth buying.
