PopSci: PopSci.com does a content dump to the iPhone that is an unremarkable but serviceable way to get to the site from afar. The content is divided into four sections: Main (news), Gear, Green and DIY. All of the articles get a lead illustration and click into full article text on a single page. We should call out PopSci for one excellent move. The designers incorporated a Web browser within the app so click-throughs on any link, including external ones to other sites, keep you within the confines of the app. Kicking people out of an app and into the general browser should be illegal…or something like it.

SHAPE Instant Butt Lift: We hadn’t been aware that our butt needed lifting until we saw the rigor with which Shape’s exer-models work those glutes. This is much more than a compilation of training images and tips. The design is thoughtful and aimed at gym use. There is a timer built into any exercise illustration and a log to record your progress. A thumbnail view of the exercises pops up into view to move you laterally through the routines. Shape has a companion app focusing on flat bellies as well. Oh no, now that you mention it, things are getting a little soft down there, too.

Variety: More polished and selective than most simple content dumps of a Web site (but not by much), the Variety app does feature the latest headlines as well as the most recent media reviews. It is a nice light scrape of news and the images from the site as well as a batch of trailers, which seems gratuitous. The problem with the app is that it can’t get serious and detailed enough to serve the b2b target audience very well and its celebrity eye candy is no match for some of the consumer-facing celebrity trackers out there. One high moment comes from a search tool that does a good job of drilling into older articles. We surfaced Variety content going back several years.

Nylon: Now here is a pleasant surprise. This fashion and culture mag has one of the more attractive magazine-like designs among print brands on mobile. The lead image for every article sets the proper tone and reiterates the Nylon branding in a way that other mag apps do not. It is nice to see multimedia incorporated into a magazine app, including NylonTV video and audio links into iTunes. The problem is that the integration of the AV material is rough. The video links boot you out of the app and into the YouTube player. Returning to the Nylon app resets you to the beginning. The audio links also drop you into the iTunes store. We would prefer to have audio samples embedded into the app. Still, Nylon has gone beyond the usual Web site dump and added some of its signature style to this first good try.

Cliché: Why bother with iPhone application wizardry and design when you can just download the whole damned print issue to the phone? That is the Cliché approach. A newsstand interfaces lets you pick from a recent issue and wait (really wait) for a pure digital facsimile to download. You rifle through the issue page by page, including one-page halves of two-page spreads. There are no hyperlinks in the pages themselves, so the format doesn’t even try to approximate the digital magazine technology we have seen for the last eight years. Despite the overall regressive approach to the technology, Cliché’s iPhone app does one thing very well. When you press on one of these facsimile pages, the view zooms and lets you drag and drop the zoomed view around the page. This is a cool and useful effect.

We've only gotten started. The new apps keep pouring in as magazine brands look to mobile platforms as a way to assert their style and revenue models into our pockets. Over the next few days at minonline we will try to catch up with the oversupply. Keep those smartphones at the ready.

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