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I got my sleek, pleasingly-textured and slightly oddly-smelling copy of the new Wired UK through the post yesterday. This made me happy, because… well, we’ve got our own Wired again. It’s a national pride thing, right? Now we can all collectively exorcise Danny O’Brien’s traumatic memories of the previous one. And, for the first time since Select magazine died along with Britpop and New Scientist went shit, there’s a magazine that feels like it’s actually sort-of targeted at me. Well, a more highly-paid version of me, at least.

Anyway, here are some quickly jotted down first impressions. I will probably change my mind about most of this over the next few days.

The design is certainly very pretty; the photography bold and colourful. Perhaps it’s a little over-designed – sometimes, the pretty-making interferes with the flow of information on the page; the text gets a little lost, your eyes aren’t quite sure where to look. But that could just be an early lack of familiarity with the magazine’s rhythm.

But certainly, I’d like to see it be more text-heavy. Currently, too often the copy gets relegated to a stray paragraph which is overwhelmed by the images – which doesn’t give me much confidence in reading something that seems like an afterthought. More text! A paragraph is not enough! But I think that might be me trying to hold back an unstoppable tide of contemporary magazine design, brandishing nothing more than an unread copy of the New York Review of Books. (Unread, of course, because it’s intimidatingly text-heavy.)

The “Start” section (subheaded “News and obsessions”) is probably the strongest area of the magazine, on first browsing. It’s filled with lots of entertaining and intriguing snippets on pleasingly eclectic topics; even when some don’t quite work (the “Inforporn” segment, while a nice idea, tries to cram too much data into one hard-to-read graphic), there’s always another one over the page that will capture your attention, from Jason Freeny artwork and gorgeous pictures of supercomputers to pieces on the papernet and 3D printing. I worry that the magazine’s printing schedule could make its attempts at online culture trendwatching unavoidably dated, but that’s a fairly insurmountable problem. Maybe that could be achieved with a small, photocopied last-minute insert instead.

The feature on the iPlayer in this section has some interesting content, but frustratingly misses the meat of the story – skipping over giving any specific details of several key years in its slow development, and only throwing in right at the end some muddled references to the central debate over what public service means in the digital age.

Less good is the “Play” section, which seems a little confused and perfunctory, unsure if it’s meant to be reviews, cultural commentary or featurettes; few of the pieces are given the space to breathe. It’s also gimmicky, to little effect. Getting actor Jamie Bamber to review the Skate 2 game comes off as awkward, pointless and PR-led; sending Alain de Botton to review JCB theme park Diggerland seems potentially lolworthy, until you read the bland copy, which could have been written by almost anybody.

The columnists are mostly good value. Russell Davies (also a contributing editor) is, naturally, interesting – his amusingly written defence of being distracted is both cute and thought-provoking, and sums up a sort of contrarian enthusiasm that feels both very Wired and very UK. Warren Ellis, of course, is great. He includes the line “…smearing yourself in soy bacon and allowing starving dogs to violate you while sucking an Obama-shaped ‘pleasure toy’…”, talks about the sheer horror of existence and then abruptly stands up for traditional print publishing structures. These are the kind of writers you want to build a magazine’s voice around.

Meanwhile, occasional geneticist and Northern Rock failure Matt Ridley takes an chutzpah-laden, nicely written but somewhat ill-advised foray into the world of economics. It’s an interesting perspective, I suppose, but you can’t help feel he’s not exactly on solid ground. And Baroness Susan Greenfield’s piece on the search for an explanation of consciousness starts well, but loses its way and descends into vague assertions halfway through. She’s a very odd choice for Wired – she’s not an especially good writer, and her long-standing, evidence-free technophobia sits awkwardly with the magazine’s apparent ethos.

The “Fetish” section – focusing on high-end consumer products – is far and away the worst part of the magazine. The photography is lovely; the text seems to have been copied and pasted from PR releases. It doesn’t help that the first issue largely focuses on absurdly expensive audiophile equipment, complete with all its pseudo-scientific technobabble. Sorry, but when someone’s selling £170 audio cables that come with a free CD which “demagnetises the cables, reducing interference”, I don’t expect Wired to just reprint it, prefaced with a limp “according to the company” – I expect them to actually try to find out if it’s true or (as you’d suspect) utter balls. They do this perfectly well with reviews of some expensive headphones in the more no-nonsense “Test” section at the back of the magazine, which has plenty of interesting content; this leaves “Fetish” just looking like the idiot brother.

Of course, I understand that this section is undoubtedly key to attracting advertisers and defining their demographic; I don’t expect them to be featuring Tesco Value crisps in there. But page after page of uncritically puffed-up shinies with price tags in the thousands of pounds strikes a really weird tone, both in the context of the economic climate and the rest of the magazine.

The full-length feature pieces – which, obviously, are the magazine’s meat and potatoes and possibly dessert as well – I haven’t had time to read properly yet, so I’ll leave those for another day. All I’ll say is that the one about the shipwreck looks great, the one about the shift workers who do nightmarishly important jobs looks equally fine, and holy mother of god the 90s-Wired-throwback neon orange on the futurology piece has done terrible, unnatural, violating things to my eyes.

Overall: while I’ve got my gripes, this looks like a solid first effort, and you have to expect that it will take a few issues to find its voice. Right now, it seems a little unsure what it wants to be; it swings between a more technophile GQ, and younger, hipper New Yorker, and a sort of Vice-for-people-who-aren’t-cocks. That will settle down, I’m sure. As it is, the good probably outweighs the ungood, I’ll be reading it in more depth over the next few days, and I’m already looking forward to the next issue. And did I mention that the texture of the cover is lovely?

(Disclaimer: I know and like Ben Hammersley, the Associate Editor of the magazine. But then, probably 87% of the people in the UK blogosphere who’ll write about the magazine’s launch know and like Ben Hammersley, so that’s not really here nor there nor anywhere.)