Recently, there has been a surge of applications being released that help to keep track of all the events in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Toughturtle’s Winter 2010 is one of these applications that attempts to provide the user with up-to-date news, schedules and medal counts from Vancouver. With its simple user interface and push notifications, it gets the job done. However, there are other apps out there that do things just a bit better.
There are five main categories to navigate to: news, sports, medals and schedule. The news tab lists the latest articles about the winter games. These may be very general, or specifically about one athlete. Unread articles are in grey, while read articles turn white. Tapping on a story brings up a brief summary of the article with the option to view the full article in the app’s built in browser. While in the app’s browser, you can only view the article in portrait mode. You can also choose to open the article in Safari. One of the biggest problems with Winter 2010 is the lack of features. While reading articles, it would be nice to have the option to share it through email, Facebook and Twitter. However, sharing is just not possible with this app.
The sports tab offers specific information about individual Olympic events. After selecting a sport, you can choose to read news articles specific to that sport, get more information about the sport, check out the schedule of events or get a summary of what medals have been won in that sport. I found it particularly interesting to be able to learn about the rules of a specific sport, such as curling, of which I always wondered about.
The medals tab displays the medals won by each individual country. It will display bronze, silver and gold, and may be listed by country or total medals awarded. Tapping on a specific country will display which sports those medals were won in.
The schedule tab organizes the events by date and time. The actual start time is shown, as well as the converted time for your locale.
There aren’t many ways to customize this application besides setting the article count or toggling the refresh at startup. One of the few things this app has going for it are the push notifications. When a country wins a medal, you’ll be notified immediately. However, do you really want to be alerted every single time a country wins a medal?
Winter 2010 is absolutely a functional application. It will get you the information you want about the Olympic games, whenever you want it. It will let you know exactly how many medals your favorite countries win and it will show you the entire schedule of events. However, even though it’s free, there are other free apps out there that offer so much more in terms of content. There are photos, videos and other great Olympic media that you are missing out on with Winter 2010. There are other apps that have a more user-friendly interface as well. This app is simple, but not very pleasing to the eye. I strongly suggest taking some time to find the better Olympic apps out there. Winter 2010 just doesn’t cut it.
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