Flipboard’s Phone Flips Beating iPad 2:1

Flipboard’s iPhone application has clocked up a million downloads in the week since it went live, the company tells paidContent.

Interestingly, while Flipboard’s iPad app was previously seeing around 650 million “page” flips per month, the new format addition has brought that on course to two billion flips per month at time of writing.

The iPhone app, which also works on iPod touch, has tripled engagement on this metric, Flipboard says. That means the iPhone app is seeing more flips than the iPad equivalent.

That may not be as surprising as it first sounds…

The industry is coming to acknowledge the iPad is seeing long engagement times and high engagement behaviour from users, because it is considered a leanback device. But Flipboard designed its mobile app to serve up quick-hit content for on-the-go users.

Also, whilst the large-screen iPad version can display multiple article summaries on a single page, mobile Flipboard pages show only one, requiring the user flip more.

Even so, it is noteworthy that mobile content flips essentially outnumber those on tablet 2:1. That ratio is likely to grow as the iPhone installed base grows following week one.

iPad aggregator peers Zite and FLUD also launched on iPhone last week.