Well, it isn’t exactly the “App of the Year,” or even the “Sexiest App Alive,” but Condé Nast’s launch of the GQ “Man of the Year” issue in an iPhone version brims with intriguing ideas about how to handle deeper magazine content on mobile platforms large and small.

And so far as we know it is the first mobile app to be certified by the Audit Bureau of Circulation as a replica edition that can be counted toward paid circulation. Along with the GQ mobile launch this week, Condé Nast also announced a strategic alliance with digital publishing company Adobe to build the “next generation of digital magazines,” CEO Charles Townsend says.

These new versions of familiar newsstand brands are expected to launch on a range of portable devices, from laptops to netbooks and “electronic color slate devices” the company says will debut next year. Wired will be the first magazine to benefit from the Adobe partnership. CN will develop a digital version of the magazine on the Adobe AIR platform, a runtime technology that operates both inside and apart from a connected Web browser.

For now, the GQ iPhone app seems to be a test ground for some of the ideas we would expect to see in the later digital magazine iterations. The full Table of Contents meets the reader at startup when the phone is in portrait orientation. Each TOC item clicks through to the relevant section which itself can have subsections. All five of the month’s newsstand covers are reproduced here. For articles the default text size is quite small, but the interface lets you adjust type size so that the setting sticks throughout your interactions with the magazine and on subsequent restarts.

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