Archive for category iPhone Sports Apps

Watch the Entire NCAA Basketball Tournament on the iPhone

Want to watch every second of the NCAA basketball tournament? The CBS Sports NCAA March Madness on Demand ($9.99, link) app features streaming video of every single game over 3G and WiFi. Also included are the radio broadcasts for every game from Westwood One.

From the official app description:

LIVE VIDEO STREAMING of NCAA® March Madness® games from the first round to the NCAA® Championship between March 18th and April 5th.
- Video highlights on demand from every game
- LIVE STREAMING OF THE SELECTION SUNDAY SHOW ON MARCH 14
- Westwood One Radio coverage starting on March 16
- Real time graphical bracket with updates on game match-ups, regions, and scores
- Exclusive CBSSports.com Edge Matchup game previews, including team-by-team analysis and matchup comparisons
- Alerts for favorite teams, as well as upsets, buzzer beaters, overtimes, and more
- Breaking tournament news coverage
- Box scores, recaps, and team stats
- Access to CBSSports.com tournament brackets (requires sign-in with CBSSports.com ID/password)
- Log into your Facebook and Twitter accounts to comment on games and talk trash to your friends

CBS Sports NCAA March Madness on Demand is a $9.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball iPhone App: MyFantasyTeam

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.

MLB.com At-Bat 2010: Listen To and Watch Baseball Games on the iPhone

MLB.com At-Bat 2010 ($14.99, link) streams every radio broadcast of every Major League baseball game to the iPhone. And it features both the home and away radio streams, so you’ll be guaranteed to listen your favorite local announcer. The app also streams video of select games to your iPhone. It’s unclear exactly how many games will be shown for the basic $14.99 price; the 2009 version featured one or two select games a day, which ain’t bad. But if you subscribe to MLB.tv ($100-$120), you can watch every game on the iPhone (blackouts apply).

Toward the end of last season, live video of individual games became available for $0.99. It’s unclear if that’s the same deal this year.

This year’s app has added background audio streaming. A lot of other iPhone radio apps have added this feature as well, which launches the audio stream in the iPhone’s browser and allows you to multitask (use other apps while the stream plays).

I had the MLB At Bat 2009 app and found it excellent. If you’ve seen the MLB website during the season, you’ll know they do statistics better than anyone else, and their live GameDay is awesome. But the killer feature is being able to listen to your local announcer—very cool when you’ve moved out of range of local stations. The video quality last year was not very good, I often found it a little too pixelated to pick out details (the score was sometimes too diffiult to read), but maybe they’ll find a way to improve it this year. The pixelation may be too much for iPad users.

MLB At Bat 2010 is a $14.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Watch 7 Days of Free NBA Games on Your iPhone With League Pass Lite

NBA League Pass Lite (free, iTunes link) is a sweet little deal that gives you 7 days of streaming video of live NBA games, for free. You can also watch replays of entire recent games. Yesterday, we mentioned that the full version of the app, NBA League Pass, had its price dropped from $39 to $19.

The quality of the video is decent but not great. We recommend watching over a solid WiFi connection, although it works with both WiFi and 3G. The app also has some nice features like push notifications, live stats, and highlight videos.

The only downside is that the app is subject to “blackouts” for any game being shown on local or national television (ESPN, TNT, local stations, etc). This leaves a lot of great games inaccessible. Maybe we’ll get full live streaming TV on the iPhone one day and it will all be moot.

NBA League Pass Lite is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

NBA League Pass iPhone App Price Drops by $20

The NBA League Pass (iTunes link) app for the iPhone has seen a price drop to $19 (was $39). The app features live streaming video of 40+ NBA games a week, basically any game that isn’t being broadcast locally or on national TV. The video streaming works over WiFi or 3G. You can also watch full replays of games in case you miss them. Not a bad deal, as a similar package on DirecTV cost around $170.

The quality of the video is pretty good—maybe just a tad better than the MLB’s At Bat app. There were some complaints about early versions of the app dealing with voice syncing, but they appear to be ironed out after a recent update. There’s a lite version if you want to try it out.

The app also has other features like push notifications and live stats. Full list below:
Read the rest of this entry »

ESPN ScoreCenter Update Adds Push Notifications

ESPN ScoreCenter (free, iTunes link) has been updated to version 1.5, and among the new features are push notifications, or “Game Alerts,” as ESPN calls them. You can now have notifications pushed to your phone for scoring plays, end of quarter/period/half, and final scores.

The app offers two types of notifications: season-long and individual games. Season-long alerts can be turned on for your favorite teams and will send your specified notifications for every single game. Individual game notifications let you specify alerts for a single game.

Individual game notifications can be turned on by tapping on a game, then tapping the bell icon in the bottom left corner.

Complete list of new features:
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ESPN Introduces World Cup 2010 App

ESPN World Cup iPhone App

The ESPN 2010 World Cup (free, iTunes link) app lets you follow the world’s most widely-viewed sporting event, soccer’s (or football’s, for Europeans) World Cup. My favorite feature of the app is Tournament History, which gives a thorough retelling of past World Cups. It’s worth downloading for that alone.

WorldCup 2010 Usa v England

Besides the usual fare of news and scores, there is also a Bracket Predictor contest with a chance to win $5,000.

List of the app’s features:

  • Exclusive breaking news and analysis from ESPN and ESPNsoccernet
  • Extensive profiles of all 32 countries and the world’s top footballers
  • Full tournament schedule of matches and Group profiles
  • Personalization – select your favorite teams and show your support with ESPN conversations!
  • World Cup tournament history dating back to 1930
  • Profiles of the South African venues and cities
  • Fantasy Bracket Predictor – put your knowledge to the test and choose next year’s World Cup champions

ESPN 2010 World Cup is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Listen to Every NBA Game With Official NBA Game Time App (Best of iPhone Apps)

NBA Game Time Score

NBA Game Time 2009-10 ($9.99, iTunes link) follows in the footsteps of MLB At Bat 2009 in offering streaming radio on the iPhone for every NBA basketball game of the season. This means you can listen to the home or away announcers of your favorite NBA team for every game using 3G/EDGE as well as WiFi. The app also offers push notifications to keep you updated on game scores of your favorite teams as well as a host of other features like a live scoreboard and video highlights.

NBA Game Time iPhone Radio

List of features:

- LIVE Home and Away Radio from Every Game
- Push Notifications for the Teams and Games you choose
- Game Previews and Summaries
- Team Rosters and Player Search
- Detailed Player Cards
- Daily League Leaders
- League News from NBA.com
- LIVE Scores
- LIVE Stats for Teams and Players
- Quarter-by-Quarter Scoring
- Game Clock
- Starting Lineups
- Video Highlights from Every Game.
- Full-Season Schedule
- Schedule Picker by Team
- Conference, Division, and Overall standings
- Twitter™ updates from the NBA’s official feed!

NBA Game Time Scoreboard iPhone

NBA Game Time is a $9.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Game Review: FIFA 10 by EA Sports

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As somebody who is a huge fan of FIFA on the Xbox and Playstation, I was pretty excited when I saw FIFA 10 ($9.99, iTunes link) by EA Sport’s finally arrive in the App Store. After playing the game for a while, I think EA did a solid job translating the game and its features to the iPhone’s mobile platform. We are assigning FIFA 10 an overall rating of 7.8 out of 10, recommended.

FIFA 10 is an immense game that is fully licensed, which means it features over 12,620 real players from 30 leagues and 570 teams from around the world. They’ve managed to package in a lot from the console version for the mobile version, which is impressive.

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The functionality of the game is quite strong. I did not think it would be, but the virtual joystick was easy to use and in many ways I felt like I could control the game just as if I was playing the Xbox version. Also the A and B buttons that reside on the right side are also responsive.

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A feature that I really enjoyed with the Xbox version of the game was the multiplayer mode. EA did a good job including the same functionality for the iPhone, but unfortunately only over Wi-Fi. You have the option to join a game, host a match, and host a penalty shootout as long as a friend also has the game are on the same Wi-Fi network.

Additionally, another great feature of the game is the instant replay. You are able to zoom-in, rotate and fast-forward/rewind the play. This is an incredible feature and really shows off the games’ graphics.

With all of these features, the game is very customizable, and you can change the setting to all of your personal preferences.

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Under the game settings you are allowed to modify the game in a variety of ways. You are able to change the game, display, environment (weather, time of day, and stadium), and sound (where you can also play music from your iPod music library). There are also 6 different viewing angles to choose from.

The sound effects are also quite similar to the traditional version of the game with the constant crowd roaring and the announcer calling the game.

A drawback of the game is that once you select the main team you will be using, it’s a slow process to switch to another team. So if you have a few favorite teams, it might take you some time to reselect a new team. Also since the screen is so small it is hard to control players while on defense (eg, tackling is difficult).

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Conclusion:

Overall, we can recommend FIFA 10 and assign it a 7.8/10 rating. Whether you are a huge soccer fan or not, the graphics and playability of the game make it one of the better sports games on the iPhone.

Pros: Fully licensed gameplay, great graphics, and immense feature set.

Cons: Multiplayer only over the same WiFi network. Defense can be difficult because of screen size.

FIFA 10 is a $9.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Free NFL Pocket Calendars for Your Favorite Team

Bears NFL App Football Schedule

This collection of apps serves a very basic purpose: they list the game schedule of your favorite NFL team. I’ve found myself using the Chicago Bears version enough to recommend it, despite two annoyances: there’s a brief ad when the game launches that you have to close, and all the games are in the Eastern Time Zone. But again, the app’s are free, handy, and don’t require a connection to the Internet:

iTunes links:

49ers
Bears
Bengals
Bills
Broncos
Browns
Buccaneers
Cardinals
Chargers
Chiefs
Colts
Cowboys
Dolphins
Eagles
Falcons
Giants
Jaguars
Jets
Lions
Packers
Panthers
Patriots
Raiders
Rams
Ravens
Redskins
Saints
Seahawks
Steelers
Texans
Titans
Vikings

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