Top 5 BlackBerry Applications - FIFA World Cup 2010
BlackBerry fans aren’t quite as spoiled for choice as iPhone or Android owners when it comes to apps or the World Cup, but there some football-themed widgets worth a look.
Here we offer four great World Cup apps (and one bonus), available direct from the BlackBerry App World store. Check them out and stay up to date with the proceedings in South Africa. The very best part? — they are all free!
1. AP 2010 World Cup Coverage
The Associated Press’s mobile offering is actually available across all major mobile platforms, with the BlackBerry version working like a Flash-based microsite.
The app is supported by VISA (see the banner across the top?), while the homepage gives you one top news story and what it deems “recent matches.” The fact that this section includes yet-to-be-played matches (with appropriately nil-nil scores) might confuse some not familiar with South Africa’s different time zone.
With the option to customize for the team you support, as well as select your preferred language, the app offers news, photos, teams and venues.
The photos and teams sections are basic, and the “previous” and “next” navigation buttons in the gallery don’t work at all (at time of review). The venues section offers a fairly decent summary of the 10 different South African stadiums, although we can’t imagine anyone lingering for long on this option.
Where the app shines is in the news arena, with decent, lengthy, full-fat news stories from the AP on all aspects of the tournament.
Cost: Free
Best for: News
2. WC2010
This colorful app offers a simple interface with a homepage, scores, stats and standings. The homepage gives you a big banner announcing the day’s matches and editorial covering all the news angles you’d expect from the tournament.
Although the score on the matches banner appears to take time to update, the news comes in fairly fast, so you may find yourself looking at a nil-nil score, while the top news story has a half-time update including goals scored.
The standings offer a nice group grid showing the various teams, rank, games played, won, drawn, lost, goals for and against, the goal difference and points.
Stats is where this app comes into its own with a table providing info on goals, yellows cards and red cards, all organized by player and team. The detailed data is there if you need it, and we know that there are those of you out there that do.
Cost: Free
Best for: Stats
3. Goal Mobile
Goal Mobile from Goal.com has the most comprehensive football app here, which is a mixed blessing if you’re just a casual footie fan.
You have to hand over your email address before you can get going, but once you do you’ve got a plethora of options to chose from with a dual layer, tightly packed tab interface.
Unless you are interested in Football Leagues from around the world (there are many covered by this app), then keep yourself on the World Cup 2010 tab on the top menu. From there you can chose to browse the news, live scores, teams, match-results, group stage and knockout stage areas from another menu.
The news is varied, encompassing straight news, comment pieces, previews and reports, all with options to share on social networking site. The stories themselves are in-depth — the previews alone offer team overviews, past results, players to watch, a form guide and current team news.
The live scores section is worth a look as it makes clear which are the pre-match nil-nils, as opposed to final scores, and offers data from the day before and matches from the next day, while the teams section simply offers a list of matches (and results if they’ve been played) rather than any kind of half-hearted, haphazard bio.
However, for us this app was buggy, throwing up a ton of error messages that required some clicks to get past, sometimes multiple times in a row. It averages four stars from over 200 reviews, though, so it’s clearly hitting the right note with some BlackBerry-owning football fans.
Cost: Free
Best for: True football fans
4. ScoreMobile FC
If you’re not interested in the bells and whistles and just want cold, hard, football facts, then ScoreMobile FC is the app for you.
As with Goal Mobile, this is an app that covers a wider football gamut than just the World Cup. Make sure you select “FIFA” from the leagues menu when you first fire it up to get access to the World Cup.
Unlike all the other tab-based apps we’ve mentioned, ScoreMobile works with a drop down menu that offers scores, stats, tables and news.
Each of the options are fairly minimal from a design point of view — which we’d imagine would be good for your data bill — but present the essential facts in a clean and clear way.
The tables are particularly quick to access and easy to read while the stats only really offer useful info on goals scored.
The news here appears to be culled from AP’s stream, but presented without too many bells and whistles. If you have weak cell coverage or are counting the data pennies closely, you might prefer this to the more graphically rich AP offering.
Cost: Free
Best for: Minimalists
5. South Africa on BlackBerry
BlackBerry is pushing this app pretty hard with all manner of integration with your BB phone, such as push notifications, alerts to your inbox, the option to add games to your calendar as well as integration with BlackBerry’s “Messenger” service. Unfortunately the app is not compatible with our test handset — a BlackBerry Pearl 3G — (as this particular phone is not yet available in South Africa) so we were unable to get hands-on, but it looks like it’s worth a look if you own any other RIM-made handset. If you’ve already given it a try then let us know your impressions in the comments below.
