FantasyMonster ($3.99, link) is an app for accessing your Yahoo! Fantasy teams (supports baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) on the iPhone, and the best toward that purpose we’ve seen yet. There are other Yahoo! Fantasy iPhone apps available, including MyFantasyTeams and the official Yahoo apps for Fantasy Baseball and Fantasy Football, but FantasyMonster is the best of the bunch by a long shot in terms of usability and legibility. A free lite version is available as well.

While other fantasy apps are adequate enough to check your weekly scores, they aren’t good for serious editing of your team. Tasks such as complex lineup changes or scanning and picking up free agents is frustrating to the point of being undoable.

But FantasyMonster utilizes drop-down menus and vertical scrolling to make it easier and more comfortable to parse information. While viewing statistics on the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen can never be as comfortable as a larger desktop screen, FantasyMonster handles the necessary compromises well. In short, it makes editing fantasy teams viable on the iPhone for the first time.

I’ve always liked the drag-and-drop interface of the official Yahoo Fantasy sites, and FantasyMonster uses it too, allowing you to drag and drop players into qualifying starting positions or to the bench. It’s pretty surprising that Yahoo’s official apps lack this feature, but FantasyMonster has it. Drag-and-drop makes lineup changes so much quicker than the html-based checkbox method used in other apps.

Stats are quite legible—the app doesn’t try to squeeze everything onto the iPhone’s small screen at once (a flaw of the Yahoo apps). Instead, FantasyMonster utilizes side scrolling so you can comfortably swipe through and view a player’s complete stats.

News headlines are shown in a scannable list form, and tapping on them reveals the entire article in a drop-down, which you can tap again to collapse. Player news, MLB headlines, injuries, and scores can be viewed in this way. It seems the developer has studied good iPhone design techniques and has implemented them into the app.

Another area where all the other fantasy sports apps failed was with the process of scanning and adding free agents. Any fantasy player knows that free agents and the waiver wire is the most important part of fantasy sports. FantasyMonster, with its readable text and stats, is the first app with a usable interface for scanning, sorting, and adding free-agent players.

There are a few things we wished the app handled better. One particular annoyance is how it displays messages (or doesn’t) with the loss of an Internet connection. In one particular instance while viewing player news, a lost data signal meant an error screen taking over the entire screen. I could no longer read player news, despite the fact the info had already downloaded. Likewise, while trying to log in, the app asked me to reenter my login information, while the real problem was that there was no Internet connection.

Conclusion

FantasyMonster is the most usable app we’ve seen for managing your Yahoo! Fantasy sports teams on the iPhone. It offers solutions for the limitations of the iPhone’s small screen and makes editing your team, parsing lots of stats, and picking up free agents doable for the first time.

FantasyMonster is a $3.99 download in the iTunes App Store.

Yahoo! has made available an official Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball 2010 iPhone app (free, link) in iTunes. The app is a barebones version of Yahoo’s Fantasy Baseball website, as it strips away alot of features. You can only edit your lineup and view stats, scores, and standings. That’s about it. No trade offers. No message boards. No free agent pickups. What the app does have is a lot slick animated transitions between screens. Still, the app is good for checking your team’s status while on the go or doing some emergency lineup changes.

Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball ’10 is a free download in the iTunes App Store.

Official app description:

Get real-time fantasy score updates with Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball – the official fantasy game of Major League Baseball. View team, league, and player stats, edit your lineups; plus check your standings and matchups in real-time.

Features
• Get real-time fantasy score updates: View team, league, and player stats for all league types
• Manage your lineups: View your lineups, and edit them, on the go
• Track matchups: View your past, present, and future matchups including head-to-head

Coming Soon
• Search for players by name or position; then create your lineups and add or drop players right from your iPhone

Old article:

If you’re looking for an easier way to access your Yahoo! Fantasy baseball team on the iPhone, the MyFantasyTeams ($3.99, link) app gives you almost full team-management access in an iPhone-friendly way. And it also supports football, basketball, and hockey, so you can keep using the app year round.

The app’s main advantage over just accessing Yahoo’s fantasy site is that you only need enter your ID and password once. Every time you launch the app you are automatically logged on.

The app offers almost all of the functionality of Yahoo’s website. You can:

• edit your lineup
• browse and add free agents
• propose and accept trades
• post and read from the message board
• view league standings
• access live scores and news
• supports multiple teams/leagues

I’ve had the app for a while and found is mostly useful for quickly checking out your team’s performance and league standings. The interface is clunky, and it’s frustrating to browse through free agents and sort by stats. The stats are cluttered together and hard to read—the app needs a serious visual overhaul. But it’s fine for keeping tabs on your teams. If you’re playing Yahoo! Fantasy Football, we recommend the official Yahoo! football app instead.

MyFantasyTeams is a $3.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Yahoo! Fantasy Football ’09 (free, iTunes link) lets you manage your Yahoo! Fantasy Football teams wherever you are. With the app, you can you edit your lineup by adding and dropping players and sorting through free agents (a search bar makes finding players easy). Live Scoring lets you follow the score of your weekly matchup in real time. Yes, Yahoo! has finally added it for free after charging for it all these years, probably due to competition from ESPN Fantasy Football, which has offered free live scoring for years now.

Overall, the app has a very slick interface and features some smooth menu transitions. It’s quality of design is a little surprising to me because most of Yahoo’s other official apps are not so great.

Yahoo! Fantasy Football ’09 is a free download in the iTunes App Store.

Want to get a leg up on your ESPN fantasy football competition? ESPN has released Fantasy Football 2009 ($4.99, iTunes link) just in time for the start of the football season. With the app, you can access all your ESPN Fantasy Football teams and:

• Adjust lineups. Start and bench players.
• Propose trades.
• Add and drop players. Claim free agents off the waiver wire.
• Post and view messages to your league’s message board.
• Get push notifications for injuries, substitutions, and scoring updates.
• Get live scores and stats for your fantasy players and NFL games via FantasyCast.

Fantasy Football 2009 is a $4.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Sportacular

Rating: 8.8 out of 10

Sportacular (free, iTunes link) is a our top pick for gettings sports news and scores on the iPhone. It’s fast and easy to use, its interactive features are fun, and a recent update added push notifications. And, the notifications can be configured so you won’t get spammed. Our one complaint about the app is that its graphics and interface need a redesign, as webapps are calling, and they want their style back.

Sportacular‘s interface prioritizes scores over other information. The first screen you see upon launching is the day’s scores. If a game is in progress, tapping on it will bring up live coverage. Once the game is over, the app shows a game summary along with tabs that allow you to see more stats like boxscores and play-by-plays. You can also browse to previous days’ scores.

The app added push notifications in a recent update, and it’s one of the best implementations of the service I’ve seen in an iPhone app yet. The notifications are highly configurable, letting you choose from various levels of alerts, from receiving only a final score to being a updated every inning (or quarter) of a game.

Sportacular has two fun interactive features: Facebook Connect and My Picks. Facebook Connect simply allows you to chat or make smack talk with other Facebook users about during games.

The My Picks feature lets you vote on which team you predict will win. You can view votes by overall total or broken down my region (to weed out the hometown bias). The app stores a personal history so you can see just how horrible you are at picking winners.

Vote on who you think will win the game.

Although not pretty, Sportacular does a good job of gathering headlines and excerpts from various major news sources like SI.com, ESPN.com, Yahoo, etc, and presenting them in an easy-to-scan format. Tapping on a headline launches a browser window within the app and loads the article from its original source. The only downside to this method is it can be slow.

Conclusion: Sportactular isn’t the prettiest of apps, but it’s easy to use and has several unique features, including push notifications, that distance it from the competition.

ESPN ScoreCenter

Rating: 8.0 out of 10

ScoreCenter‘s priority is on scores. A scoreboard is the first screen shown upon launching. Scores for only one sport are shown at a time. To view other sports, you must swipe your finger across the screen in an interface similar to how the Palm Pre uses “cards” to switch between applications. An options menu in the app lets you change which sports are shown and their order. For example, if it’s football season, you can rearrange the order of cards so that football scores are the default view upon launching.

Tapping on a game brings up more detail. If the game is live, the app will show a summary of live stats. From there, you can go to ESPN’s MobileWeb GameCenter, which offers even more detailed play-by-play coverage.

A news ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolls headlines. Tapping on a headline launches a browser window with the full article. However, that is the only way to access news in the app. There are no videos in the app.

Conclusion: ESPN SportsCenter is easy on the eyes but lacking in content. If all you want is easy access to the day’s scores, it’s a solid choice.

Fox Sports Mobile

Rating: 5.0 out of 10

Fox Sports Mobile (free, iTunes link) has a barebones style that seems more worthy of a web app than something you’ll want to download onto the iPhone. The focus is on news, as a list of articles is the first thing that pops up. But even that is done sparingly, with only 8 news stories for each topic shown at a time with no way to retrieve more.

Also featured in the app are videos and scores. Like the articles, the number of videos is limited, with only around 5 available at a time. The videos are also kind of worthless, as they are not daily news stories so much as tiny featurettes. And the user interface could use a little polish: selecting a video causes the app to seemingly freeze for a few seconds without any indication what’s going on.

Scores are displayed in a ho-hum manner with a basic white background and very little graphics to speak of.

Conclusion: Fox Sports Mobile is an average app in just about every way. We recommend taking a pass.

CBS Sports Mobile

Rating: 6.0 out of 10

CBS Sports Mobile (free, iTunes link) is one of the better-looking sports apps, but that’s about all its got going for it. It’s slow, buggy, and filled with poor design choices. It could be one to watch though if they fix all of its issues, as it offers an impressive range of information, including news articles, scores, videos, and, in what should be a killer feature, access to CBS Fantasy sports.

The app has a weird interface glitch that occurs whenever you select an article or score to view. Instead of the item you’ve selected becoming highlighted, the whole screen seems to indicate its been highlighted instead.

Overall, the app has a long laundry list of problems. Scores are buried in submenus. It’s not economical with screen space, as too much precious real estate is taken up by menus and ads. The quality of its news coverage is not bad, but the app only loads 4 news headlines at a time.

The app offers full access to your CBS Fantasy Sports team, which should be a killer feature if it was reliable. I tried several times to edit my lineup over a period of three days, and it worked only once.

Conclusion: CBS Sports Mobile‘s slick graphics can’t overcome poor design and a horribly buggy interface.

Sports Tap

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

SportsTap (free, iTunes link) might as well be a web app for what little work that’s gone into its interface. Its one saving grace is push notifications, but the notifications are spammy and you can’t edit the type of information you receive.

Other than notifications, the app is unremarkable in every sense. The app’s home screen consists of icons for the major sports, and tapping them brings up either a barebones scoreboard or even more icons for individual leagues (eg, English Premier League, MLS, etc). If you scroll down from the scores, you’ll find top headlines, news, standings, league stats, and more. The news is standard fare from Sports Network (see the ScoreMobile review below for our complaints about Sports Network).

Conclusion: SportsTap offers spammy and unconfigurable notifications, an amateurish interface, and bland content.

ScoreMobile

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

ScoreMobile (free, iTunes link) offers barebones sports news and scores. It has a no-frills design that, while delivering content in a economical manner, is also quite dull. Its interface is cumbersome to navigate, with many features buried in levels of submenus.

The app supplies a news feed from Sports Network, but the news coverage is somewhat bland, only offering news blurbs with no in-depth reporting. The articles do not feature photos. There is also no video in the app.

Conclusion: ScoreMobile is an also-ran for iPhone sports news apps. Don’t waste your time.

*Update 7/6/2009* The name of the app has been changed to MyFantasyPro due to trademark claims from Yahoo!

Want to change the lineup of our Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball team at work but the Yahoo! Fantasy website is blocked? Y! Fan Professional ($3.99, iTunes link) lets you do just that. With Y! Fan, you can manage your Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball, Football, Basketball, and Hockey teams and do things like check your league or team stats, pick up free agents, make trade offers, and change your daily lineup.

Feature list:

• Access to NFL Football, MLB Baseball, NHL Hockey and NBA Basketball pools (including Plus editions)
• Supports Head-to-Head and Rotisserie style pools
• Ability to manage your roster, moving players from active to the bench and vice versa
• Ability to view your team’s performance for any day of the year or for last week, last month, the current or previous season
• Ability to track your team’s progression up your pool’s standings
• Ability to view Head-to-Head match-ups and season schedule
• Ability to post and read messages on your pools message board
• Access to your team’s player notes
• Transaction support for adding/dropping players
• Offer and accept trades
• Access live scores, news, and league standings, and injury reports for NHL, NBA, MLB, and NFL

Y! Fan Professional is a $3.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

If you want to check your ESPN Fantasy League scores, ESPN has an iPhone/mobile-friendly version. You can view team scores and individual point totals for players, get news, and look ahead at the schedule, but you can’t change your lineup, post to message boards, or anything else that would involve user input.

Here are the links to take you directly to the fantasy main page or individual sports. Bookmark them on your iPhone’s home screen for quick navigation:

ESPN Fantasy Sports main page

ESPN Fantasy Football

ESPN Fantasy Basketball

ESPN Fantasy Baseball

For more iPhone-optimized websites, check out our A World of iPhone Links page.