Archive for category iPhone Sports

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.

Review of 6 iPhone Apps That Provide Sports Scores

One of the best things about the iPhone is being able to keep up with the latest news while on the go. If you’re a sports fan, you’ll want the latest scores too. You’d think there’d be a million great apps by now to pull down sports scores and news, but choices are still pretty slim. We’ve taken a look at six apps for sports scores and news, and our two Editor’s Picks are Sportacular and ESPN ScoreCenter. Check out the reviews below.

Sportacular

Rating: 8.8 out of 10

Sportacular for iPhone and iPod Touch a

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 Game in Progress

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.

Sportacular Team Alert Subscription

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.

Sportacular Facebook chat

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.

Vote on who you think will win the game.

Sportacular My Picks 2

Sportacular Game Picks NFL

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

ESPN ScoreCenter

ESPN ScoreCenter (free, iTunes link) is the best-looking and polished of the sports apps. It mainly useful for getting quick scores of games, as the only news appears in the form of a news ticker at the bottom of the screen. The scarcity of content is disappointing from a sports giant like ESPN. We are waiting anxiously for them to release the ESPN Alerts push notifications app that was shown off at the March 2009 iPhone 3.o preview event.

ESPN ScoreCenter Menu

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.

ESPN SportsCenter for iPhone NFL Scores

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.

ESPN GameCenter on iPhone

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 iPhone News List


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.

Fox Sports Mobile Baseball Scores

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.

Fox News Sports On Base

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 for iPhone

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.

CBS Sports Mobile Scores

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.

CBS GameCenter on iPhone

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 for iPhone

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.

Sports Tap Notifications 1

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).

Sports Tap Scores

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

ScoreMobile

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

ScoreMobile iPhone Edition

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.

ScoreMobile Live Game Coverage

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.

ScoreMobile List of News

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

PGA Championship Streams Video to iPhone, Offers Notifications

PGA Championship ($1.99, iTunes link) offers coverage of the golf tournament of the same name, including live streaming video and push notifications. The PGA Championship will take place August 10-16 at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota.

Follow Tiger Woods as he tries for his first major of 2009. From the official app description:

For four days, watch the PGA Championship’s Marquee Groups live at Hazeltine National Golf Club throughout their entire round, customize your leaderboard, receive personal alerts on your favorite players, and see who’s had the wildest leaderboard streaks each round. Plus, watch instruction videos from PGA of America Course Professionals and Instructors. You’ve never had this much access to on-course action with your iPhone/iPod Touch until now.

LIVE VIDEO
Watch up to 4 Marquee Groups Thurs-Fri. And another 2 groups Sat-Sun. and watch the entire field play through Hazeltine’s Par 3 holes Thurs-Sun.

PERSONAL LIVE ALERTS
Receive alerts for your 5 favorite players, even when you’re not watching. Know when they:
- Begin their round
- End their round
- Score a Double Bogey – or worse!
- Score a Birdie or Eagle
- and know how they score after every hole

Turn alerts on and off whenever you want. Turn some on, others off. It’s all up to you.

Receive Breaking News alerts to know when course conditions worsen, when a club record gets broken, and more.

CUSTOM LEADERBOARD
Search for your favorite players and add them to your custom leaderboard. Add or remove as many as you want. Change them as often as you want.

TRENDS
Know who moved furthest up the leaderboard each round, who fell the furthest, and see who had the longest birdie and bogey streaks of the day.

NEWS, HIGHLIGHTS and TIPS
- Watch key highlights, round recaps, and interviews.
- Replay key moments from PGA Championship history.
- Read Live Reports, Daily Updates, and other key news stories

Plus great features you’d expect, such as:
- Tee Times
- Scorecards in easy-to-read Front 9/Back 9 format
- Player Info
- Top 10 Leaderboard
- Hazeltine National Golf Club Course Overview

COMING SOON: Look for our pre-event update that will provide a finalized field list and final 1st – 2nd round tee times.

PGA Championship is a $1.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

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MLB At Bat 2009 Updated, MLB.tv Subscribers Can Now Watch Every Game

An update to MLB At Bat 2009 ($9.99, iTunes link) has been pushed to the iTunes App Store. Version 1.3.0 allows MLB.tv and MLB.tv Premium subscribers to watch live video of every single game during the regular season (some games are subject to blackout). The video streaming works over 3G and WiFi. All At Bat 2009 users will continue to have access to the “AtBat.tv Game of the Day.” I took a look at the live video of the app last week and wrote up a review.

MLB.tv costs $50 and MLB.tv Premium $70. Both subscriptions offer video feeds of all games, but Premium has extra features like “HD” video, DVR functionality, compatibility with Boxee (pretty sweet for you Apple TV owners), multiple game viewing at once, and other goodies.

MLB At Bat 2009 is a $9.99 download in the iTunes App Store.

MLB At Bat 2009 Gets Live Video (Watch Entire Games)

As promised, MLB At Bat 2009 ($9.99, iTunes link) is now serving live video of 1-2 games a day in addition to offering audio to all MLB games. The video can be streamed over 3G as well as WiFi.

I’ve been testing the video the past two days, and because of the bandwidth it requires, I have a feeling many will find it unusable in mobile situations. Anything but a strong, constant 3G signal and the video is pretty unwatchable–unless you don’t mind severe gaps every 1-2 minutes. And we all know how reliable AT&T’s 3G network is. Over my solid WiFi connection at home, it works like a charm. So, if you’re working on the car outside and want to have the game on in the background, it’s a great app. Maybe not so much sitting at your desk at work.

The games are subject to blackout, so the app will first request to discover the iPhone’s location using GPS before it will let you watch the game.

The video’s quality is not that great–it’s heavily pixelated. But it’s good enough to read the score at the top of the screen. It’s no replacement for watching the game on a TV, but it’s better than no video at all.

MLB At Bat 2009 is a $9.99 download in the iTunes App Store.

Manage Your Yahoo! Fantasy Sports Team With Y! Fan Pro

*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.

MLB.com At Bat 2009: Listen to Every Baseball Game on Your iPhone

MLB.com At Bat 2009 ($9.99, iTunes link) from Major League Baseball lets you listen to every radio broadcast, home and away, of every MLB game this season on your iPhone or iPod Touch. This is $5 less than the same feature, called Gameday Audio ($15), on the MLB.com website. And with the iPhone app version, you won’t get suckered into the autorenewal charges of the website every year like I do. MLB.com At Bat 2009 is a good tool for anyone on the go who wants to listen to their local radio station’s broadcast of their favorite team.

Watch video highlights in MLB At Bat 2009.

Watch video highlights in MLB At Bat 2009.

The app also offer real-time scores, real-time play-by-play, and video highlights. It’s basically the best iPhone app for baseball-info junkies. If you don’t want to pay the premium for the radio access, there is also a free version, MLB.com At Bat Lite.

Box Scores on MLB At Bat 2009.

Box Scores on MLB At Bat 2009.

Links:

MLB.com At Bat 2009 ($9.99)
MLB.com At Bat Lite (free)

Baseball Superstars 2009: Full-Featured Baseball Game

Baseball Superstars 2009 ($4.99, iTunes link) is a retro baseball game that offers an impressively deep list of features, including the ability to play an entire season, increase player skills, and save player stats. This is not a MLB-licensed game. Instead, it takes a cartoony approach that resembles the Nintendo classic Baseball Stars and focuses on giving a full baseball experience.

Baseball fans in particular who are looking for more than just a casual game will not be disappointed. Baseball Superstars offers the following features:

  • Baseball simulator and role playing with custom player creating, team management and trading, skill levelups, equipments, and special items
  • 4 unique stadiums
  • 5 different game modes
  • 12 hidden players to unlock
  • Create and customize your pitcher and batter in the My League mode.
  • Equip players with new items, increase popularity ratings, and groom players into superstars
  • With the new Team Management feature,manage your team and trade players.

The game utilizes simulated console-gamepad controls that work well. There is also a free lite version if you want to try it out before buying.

Baseball Superstars is a $4.99 download from the iTunes App Store.

Chicago Tribune News Reader and Sports Reader (Free iPhone Apps)

Chicago Tribune News Reader

The Chicago Tribune News Reader (free, iTunes link) offers the latest news from the Chicago Tribune newspapers. The app has two kinds of navigation: swipe and list view. With swipe, headlines can be browsed by swiping your finger right to left. The list view shows all the headlines at once in a list and allows for quick scanning. There are 9 categories of news to browse through:

  • top stories
  • entertainment
  • living
  • local news
  • nation/world
  • opinions
  • politics
  • travel

Chicago Sports News Reader

There is a separate app for sports called the Chicago Tribune Sports Reader (free, iTunes link). The app shows the latest scores at the bottom of the screen. You can scan through the latest sports headlines by swiping or in a basic list view. There is a focus on local sports, but the app also shows national headlines. The sports reader only shows today’s news, there is no way to browse previous day’s scores or headlines.

LED Football Free for Limited Time

In celebration of Super Bowl weekend, LED Football is a free download for a limited time. Relive the classic handheld football experience on your iPhone. MacWorld called it one of the top 10 iPhone games of 2008. I don’t know about that, but hey, it’s free. Deal ends February 2, 2009.

LED Football is currently a free download from the iTunes App Store.