Review: ESPN F1
Score:
70%
With the start of the Formula 1 season now behind us (the race yesterday in Australia proving to be an interesting curtain raiser), my eye now turns to keeping up to date with all the news from the F1 Grand Prix scene, and ESPN are hoping their Qt based application, ESPN F1 on Symbian, will be my route to updated news.
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Like most hardcore fans, I’m an F1 news whore, going to multiple sites to make sure I miss absolutely nothing. After watching the fun in Melbourne and seeing what ESPN provides in this application, I think the casual fan who picks this up is going to feel they’re up to date with the sport. It has definitely caught the majority of stories in a timely fashion.
Opening with the main news headlines (and a handy countdown to the start of the next race!), you can click through to read the full story. Unlike a conventional web browser, there’s no zoom function on the text, so hopefully you can make out the chosen font and size. With a lot going on, the full news section is where I spent most of my time in this application, covering the smaller teams in more depth.
You also have calendar information for the subsequent races in the 2011 season (there are seventeen to go at this moment in time), profiles of the circuits, a guide to the corners, and the time and dates of all the practice sessions, qualifying, and races.
Finally the World Championship tables for the Drivers and the Constructors (the teams) are on display, and you can click through for more biographical data and statistics (ESPN is American based, and they love their sports statistics).
This is a nice one-stop shop with a view to getting all you need from Formula 1. While it is replicating the content that’s available from the ESPN website, it is clear why ESPN have gone down the Qt route for this application – it gives them a much finer control over what is displayed on the screen, it allows for rich functionality (even if some of the options haven’t been picked up on, for example in the calendar section, surely “add to my smartphone’s calendar” would be a smart button to have); and it allows them an easy presence in the Ovi Store (and other platform stores).
It’s far easier in the current landscape to market an application than it is to market a website or bookmark to smartphone owners. Part of any content strategy has to be “go where the readers are” and that means be in the app stores. So this is a smart move from ESPN to cover all the mobile platforms.
I do want to see more from applications like this in terms of functionality, but they also need to have as smooth an experience as a web browser. It would be nice if the application cached its pages of data, so when you hit 'Back' you wouldn’t see the spinning loading icon come on screen.
But this is one of the better examples of an “app portal” to information. It’s laid out sensibly, carries unobtrusive branding after the splash screen, and lets you see what is going on in the world of F1 through the eyes of ESPN.
-- Ewan Spence, March 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at