Reading magazines online requires alot of processing power because of the graphic nature of the application. Zinio has released a hardware accelerated application that is living up to the performance we’ve come to expect from Nvidia Tegra 2 applications. In a head to head battle with the iPad 1 which was released way back in April of 2010 the ACER Iconia Tab A500 which is only a few months old is not able to compete and falls several seconds behind when comparing page refresh rates.
In previous testing with the non optimized Zinio application we actually saw quicker speeds, this was using the Motorola Xoom, but the hardware platform remains identical to the Acer Iconia Tab. What is surprising about the Zinio app on the Xoom is that it took 3 reinstalls to get even get it to open with out freezing or crashing. Something is definatley wrong with this update since it was meant to bring greater surfing ease to your magazine subscriptions!
The Android Marketplace is a fragmented ecosystem, if you haven’t been following it, here is my article “6 Reasons Why Android Marketplace could loose Distribution Dominance”that will give you a crash course. Nvidia’s Tegra Zone is one of the app stores that is gaining great momentum because it presents the upto date selection of android applications which are customized for the Tegra 2 hardware platform. All 10″ Android tablets are currently running Tegra 2, so it should be pretty simple for developers to deal with this style of hardware-based fragmentation. What it means is that developers don’t have to worry about all the various devices and designs, they just have to optimize for the platform. Their goal should be delivering a great experience to a select group of people, rather than satisfy the lowest common hardware denominator.
Zinio hasn’t lived up to its end of the deal with its latest release and the fragmentation in the Android ecosystem should have actually helped them rather then hinder them. We’ll keep an eye out to see if or when this app is able to outpace the year old iPad 1 application, Tegra being a newer platform should be able to outpace last years hardware, even if it is Apple.
If you would like to check out this application in action its available for free from Android Marketplace.
