Following the demise of his excellent but very short-lived literary magazine Party, China’s favorite blogger Han Han launched an online magazine with Tencent using the same creative team back in June of this year. Earlier this month, the magazine got an official app, announced by Han Han on his weibo account. Now there’s even a pirate Android version out there, although the team says the official Android version is coming next month.
So is the thing any good? I took it for a spin and wasn’t all that impressed. Like the online magazine itself, the content is enjoyable, and in a sense, that’s all that really matters. But it has full-page ads you have to scroll past to get to previous days’ content, and it loaded really slowly for me. That could just be because I’m in the US, but I have a pretty fast internet connection and I haven’t seen any other apps load simple content (a single image) quite that slowly before (including my other Chinese apps). And while the design of the One app is nice enough, it’s not really anything to exciting. I’m not sure exactly what I was hoping for, but this isn’t it.
That said, I enjoy the content so I’ll probably keep the app installed for now. Based on its preposterously high ratings on the app store, it seems other users are enjoying the content too, so take my criticism with a few grains of salt. Magazines can be done better than this on iOS, but if the content is good enough, I guess the design really doesn’t matter all that much so long as it doesn’t get in the way. It sure does make me miss the days of Party, though.
If you’re interested in checking out the One app, you can do that here on the iTunes store. The official Android version is coming next month, but if you don’t want to wait, you can always try to track down that pirated one…
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