Get Something Shiny and Gadget-y for the Holidays? Download C/D for Your Mobile Device Now!

Not sure if you’ve been paying attention to the television this holiday season, but if so, you probably saw them: ads for tablet devices. Large tablets, small ­tablets, medium-size tablets. Three new screens from Amazon, two from Apple, and one from Microsoft, all being stroked and plied by children and bright-eyed teens of diverse ethnicities over a backdrop of bold color blocks and soft sans-serif type. The future is here, and a toddler is going to show you how to use it. Indeed, the tablet is becoming so enmeshed in modern life that some pundits are saying it is going to replace the desktop. Nice that someone’s not bloviating about the death of print for a change, but of the conventional computer. I digress.

Regular readers might expect me, at this juncture, to rail against all this shiny happiness and huff off, lexically speaking. But I actually like these things, if not the saccharine aftertaste of their marketing. They’re not saviors of humanity, just another product, but I believe they have a lot to offer readers of car magazines. An issue of Car and Driver can be even better on a screen than it can be in print, with deepened storytelling, stunning video, more images, and group conversations that paper magazines can only start. I also like using my tablet (an iPad “classic,” circa 2010) to make my daily sluice through the internet’s various tubes.

Car and Driver is developing content for all these devices, and making it available through all of the major virtual newsstands, including those of Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Next Issue, and Zinio. We are readable in forms ranging from straight reproductions of magazine pages to carefully and beautifully reimagined versions. We are in the process of remaking our website so that it conforms and adapts to your smartphone or your tablet. So you can have your C/D any way you like it, anywhere you like it, even if you left your paper copy on the coffee table­ or—let’s be honest here—on the top of the Kohler tank.

We often talk in our office about “putting the reader’s butt in the seat”—somewhat crass imagery, sure, but it reminds us that our primary job is to give you as much of  the experience of driving a car as possible. Previous to the arrival of the tablet and integrated video, the only way we could do that was with carefully selected words and pictures. Now we can deliver the fuller sensory picture. Our goal here is to give you a great experience, wrapped around a great read. Who could be grumpy about that?  — Eddie Alterman

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/caranddriver/blog/~3/Vb2wTfNj1PY/

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