Author: Damon Brown

Official third-party iPhone apps are being announced left and right, especially now that Apple has released its SDK (software development kit) for easier iPhone development. Announcements are different than availabilities, however, and the most appealing software is still in development. Still, the most interesting ones are the unofficial iPhone apps Web sites are creating on their own.

Magazine and news outlets are giving us many different ways to get our info on the road.

Magazines
I am absolutely love magazines - at one point I subscribed to well over two dozen - but taking more than a couple on the road, or even on a short trip, can take up more space and weight than a small book. (And, unfortunately, can be read through twice as quickly.)

Zinio.com has been offering digital versions of popular magazines for several years now, which, though not as romantic as a traditional print pub, offers exact replicas of what you'd get on the newsstand.

Zinio now has a selection of its magazines on the iPhone. Go to www.zinio.com/iphone on your iPhone Safari browser. Zinio will give you several magazine covers to choose from.

Scroll to peruse the virtual newsstand and then tap on the cover to read. (The current crop we saw ranged from Saveur and U.S. News and World Report to Penthouse and Playboy. In a charming step, Zinio actually asks you to confirm your age before viewing the adult pubs.)

The magazine takes about a minute to load.

Along the top you'll see three options: Newsstand, Contents and Share. Newsstand will take you back to the list of magazines, while Share will automatically set up a Zinio invitation text message to send to your friends. Contents shows you the table of contents, a text-only listing of the major stories in the magazine. You can't tap on the real table of contents page to go to a story, but Zinio's text version is smooth and fast.

It will show a two-page spread from the magazine. Click on a page to read one and, like an iPhone picture, Zinio lets you tap, zoom in and shrink the page. Left and right arrows appear at the top of the screen or on each side so you can flip to the next page.

Zinio for the iPhone was a blast to play with, but there a few things to keep in mind.

Unlike regular Zinio, mobile Zinio isn't offering the whole magazine - just the table of contents and the major feature articles - so don't expect to catch that 100-word front-of-the-book piece your friend was talking about. Also, the initial magazine loading time is super slow - again, about 30 seconds on a Wi-Fi connection - though it does speed up considerably after the download.

The magazines we viewed also seemed to be a couple weeks behind, with May issues available on mobile Zinio when the June issue had been on the newsstand for a bit. And finally, there's no word on if and when the free magazine browsing will end.

Enjoy it while you can.

You can type www.zinio.com/iphone in your computer web browser to read more about the currently-free service.

News Outlets
The iPhones is especially good for getting late-breaking news on the go, and nearly every major news outlet has a mobile site now. Try ABC News at wireless.go.com/wireless/abcnews/, Reuters at mobile.reuters.com or Fox News at http://iphone.foxnews.com/.

All these sites are specially formatted for the iPhone.

My personal favorite is CBS News at http://www.cbsnews.com/iphone/#___1__. The headline organization is clean, the pictures are the perfect size and screen download time is near inexistent.

About a dozen major news areas are listed, one of which can then be selected for the top dozen headlines within that area. Tap the headline and a story, along with a pic, are quickly loaded.

Unfortunately, national heavy hitters like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times still don't have a unique mobile site—expect to put around their huge desktop Web site if you visit with your relatively tiny iPhone browser. Perhaps they are waiting for the iPhone 3G to bring their often-massive front page photos to the mobile.

About the Author
Damon Brown wrote the "Pocket Idiot's Guide to the iPhone" (Alpha/Penguin Books). Available on August 7, you can preorder it at Amazon or your favorite online bookstore. Damon also writes for Playboy, SPIN and The New York Post.