Review: ECB Cricket

Score:
72%

Author: Marvellous

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It's not entirely clear whether the ECB initiated this project, whether it was (Be)Marvellous's  idea or Nokia's, but it's certainly good to see all parties working together, in this case to create a useful little information-centric application for Symbian touchscreen phones. 

The first thing to note is that absolutely none of this content is unique to the ECB Cricket application - so S60 3rd Edition owners shouldn't get too aggrieved about being missed out. All the content here is directly sourced from the textual and image content on the ECB web site, right down to paragraph breaks and web page footnotes.

ECB Cricket is written in Qt, which seems especially well placed to handle Internet-facing apps. You'll remember the first few versions of Marvellous's X-Factor application, which were unusably slow and rather hampered by having to run on older S60 5th Edition phones, each of which had to grab and install the full 13MB Qt runtime before anything happened. 

The final version of X Factor was much better though, with more experience and code optimisation at Marvellous's end, and with Symbian^3 phones finally around to run Qt applications without extra setup delays. ECB Cricket isn't lightning fast - an eight second startup phase and a second or two between screens while the next content needed is loaded up, but it's fast enough for the purpose intended, and given the amount of online data it's having to access.

 

 

 

You'll see the basic structure of ECB Cricket from the screenshots, with modules for Scores, News and Photos. What's not apparent from the graphics are the smallish font used for the main text (above right) and the ridiculously small font used for the item summaries (above left). They may look readable on your nice large monitor, but put them on a 3.2" or 3.5" screen with variable lighting conditions and a challenging mobile environment (vibration, being jostled, etc) and the text becomes somewhat eye-straining! 

You'll remember I had a similar complaint with Nokia's Social application, again where the developers simply weren't spending enough time trying the app in the real world, on phones. Nokia came up with an update and bigger fonts and I'd like to see Marvellous do the same with ECB Cricket.

As you'd expect, news stories are brought up full-screen, though only the first photo from the original ECB web site article is displayed - it would have been nice to include all the images. Maybe that's where the Photos module comes in, shown below.

 

 

 

So far, ECB Cricket has just been giving you vanilla content from the main web site. But the Scores module is more interesting - the opening screen of the application gives you an at a glance look at test match scores from around the world, tapping any of these gives a mock 'scoreboard' view with more information - very nicely done.

 

 

 

Even better, tap on 'Detailed score' and you get the full batting and bowling scorecards, nicely laid out, in landscape mode, as shown below. Tap anywhere on the screen to bring up a navigation bar to move to the next section, as needed. And it's all perfectly up to date, since all information is sourced online at the time of viewing.

 

 

Given that you could get access to the full ECB web site fairly quickly in Opera Mini (or more slowly in Web!), it's tempting to question whether ECB Cricket is really needed. I'd argue that it is - it's well branded, nicely presented (font issues aside), offers the un-Web-like scorecard navigation and will save any cricket lover time and bandwidth in the long run.

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 4th Jan 2011

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at 16:28 UTC, January 4th 2011