Reposted from MTV Geek [link]
The Viz Manga iPhone app is a smaller version of their iPad app, with much of the same functionality, and it certainly is a convenient way to always have a volume of manga on your person.
The Viz iPad app is one of the nicest comics apps I have seen. It's sleek and simple, individual series and volumes are easy to find, and it works very intuitively. The iPad is a great medium for reading manga because the screen size is slightly larger than a manga page, so it feels a bit less cramped and more luxurious. Because it is a single-publisher app, the Viz app doesn't overwhelm you with a barrage of different comics; they highlight a few and make it easy to find the rest with a drop-down menu that gives you a single page for each series. None of this is all that different from other comics apps; it just is executed a little more elegantly.
I tested the iPhone/iPod Touch app on my two-year-old iPod Touch, which runs version 4.2.1 of iOS. I was given a designer's build of the iPhone app, so I couldn't test how it synced with the iPad app, but overall it ran smoothly on the iPod Touch. The interface is simple, and Viz gets bonus points for putting a Settings button on the main menu, something other comics app developers often neglect.
The app opens up to a store, which took a few seconds to load, and the scrolling was a little jerky. Like the iPad app, it offers featured volumes and lets the user search for any series with a drop-down menu. Each volume has a brief catalog page with title and creator info, rating, and a capsule summary. Downloads were reasonably quick, about a minute for a full volume. Because Viz only publishes translated Japanese manga, and doesn't flip it, the app is set up for right-to-left orientation, which means you swipe to the right to turn pages—the opposite of American comics apps.
The biggest issue with the iPod Touch, as opposed to the iPad, is readability. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to read a full page of manga on the small screen. I read some sample chapters of Bakuman, Arata: The Legend, and Natsume's Book of Friends, and in every case, I could simply read the page on the screen without magnification.
One thing the Viz app handles differently from other apps is blowing up the page. Double-tap on a comic in the comiXology app, for instance, and you go into Guided View, which not only magnifies the page but displays it a panel at a time, with a tap or a swipe taking you from panel to panel, just as you go from page to page. In the Viz app, on the other hand, double-tapping simply zooms you in. If you touch the screen, the page "sticks" to your finger and you can navigate around the page that way. It's a little clumsier than the panel view systems, but since manga has a huge variety of panel shapes and formats, it's a reasonable compromise.
While the iPad app stores all my manga, the iPod Touch allows 500 MB of storage space, not enough for most people's entire library. Like other iOS apps, though, the Viz app allows you to download a book over and over again once you have paid for it.
Prices are the same for the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions: $4.99 for most volumes, although Viz runs frequent specials on individual series or volumes. Right now, for instance, volumes 1-27 of Naruto are marked down to $3.99 on both apps. One big advantage of these apps is that they offer those in-between volumes that are often hard to find in bookstores.
I like my iPod Touch because it's small enough to always carry with me (unlike my iPad), so I'm never stuck anywhere without something to read. It's more comfortable to read manga on the Viz iPad app, but the convenience factor of the iPod Touch/iPhone app can't be beat. I think these apps work best in tandem, but either one is certainly worthwhile on its own.
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