The Next Issue App, a Buffet of Magazines Few words fire up the happiness transmitters in your brain more than "free." But "flat-fee unlimited" comes close. Unlimited movies (Netflix). Unlimited music (Spotify). Unlimited train travel (Europass). Unlimited seafood buffet (Red Lobster). And now, ladies and gentlemen: unlimited magazines to read on your tablet. Introducing the Next Issue app. Five big magazine publishers - Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc. - have collaborated to create this service, much the way a collaboration of TV networks started Hulu.com. And, most likely, they did it for the same reason: to fight fire with fire. That is, they figured: "Well, if the Internet is killing off our traditional delivery mechanisms" (in this case, printed magazines), "maybe we should create our own digital service." So here's the deal: For $10 a month, you can read the latest full issues of 27 magazines on your tablet, and back issues to the beginning of 2012. Each downloaded issue includes the full, colorful design, all articles and even the ads that you'd see in the printed edition. There are some great magazines in this collection: Better Homes and Gardens, Car and Driver, Condé Nast Traveler, Elle, Esquire, Fitness, Fortune, Glamour, InStyle, Money, Parents, People, Popular Mechanics, Real Simple, This Old House, Time and Vanity Fair. There are also some slightly less mainstream magazines: All You, Allure, Coastal Living, Cooking Light, Essence, Golf, Health, People StyleWatch, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sunset. Most of those are monthly magazines. For $5 more a month, or $180 a year in total, you can get the Ultimate plan, which adds a nice set of popular weeklies: Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. By year's end, the company hopes to double or triple the number of magazines in its catalog. There are really two new things to review here: the tablet app itself, and the pricing. The main thing to know about the app is that it's available for Android tablets only, and only 7- or 10-inch models, and only those running the 3.0 or 4.0 versions of Android (that's about 6 percent of Android tablets right now). The company says it will submit an iPad version for Apple's approval in about six weeks. That approval isn't a sure thing, however, since Apple offers a rival magazine app. Next Issue is not, of course, the first app to offer digital magazines on a tablet. Most prominent magazines are already available as apps. The beauty of the Next Issue concept, though, is that it puts all the magazines in one place, using a consistent design and a standard set of controls. You don't have to learn a different app for every publication. That's the theory, anyway. In reality, the magazines within the Next Issue app vary quite a bit in philosophy and operation. Most titles work just as you'd expect: swipe your finger across the screen to turn the page. Tap anywhere to summon navigation controls, like the "carousel" scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, which lets you fast forward or rewind through the issue, flipping on-screen pages. But in some, like People and Vanity Fair, you scroll horizontally for some pages, and vertically within an article. And then there's Time magazine, whose designers must have inhaled a little too much of the ink fumes from the old days. Its design is an incomprehensible mess. Sometimes you swipe horizontally to turn pages. Sometimes articles scroll vertically, as though printed on a roll of toilet paper. In those situations, there are no page boundaries, so you can't do a quick "next page" swipe; you must drag the text up by just the right amount. Sometimes there's no text at all, but a redundant "Tap to Read" button. "Scroll to Read More" notes appear at the bottom of each screen - even if you're already at the end of an article. Worst of all, the usual navigation bar and carousel scroller don't appear when you tap, as they do in all the other magazines. E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com