Review: World Cup Mobile 2006
Score:
71%
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Resco are making a lot of noise about their World Cup application. As well as being available for Symbian OS (S60, S80 and UIQ versions), there are Windows versions, Windows Mobile and Palm. Of course, given that the application is just pulling down the latest information about the soccer tournament in Germany this year, the phone is merely a conduit for the information.
And a very nice one it is too. While you can point to the news and sports sites, set up RSS feeds and blog links, these tools are (let’s be honest now folks) primarily for the very technically attuned and the geeks of this world. Using World Cup Mobile 2006 gives the user one icon on the screen (a helpful football over the German flag), and under that is all the information.
If you think of the application as a custom web/wap/xml page browser you would be pretty close to the truth. With five main categories of news and reporting, the application will keep you up to date (on a daily basis) throughout the World Cup. As well as overall tournament news, you have access to the full schedule and results of the matches, and the all important statistics (after all, after mobile phones, the anoraks of this world need to know their football numbers). There's also a comprehensive history section about previous exploits of your favourite teams - enough to get you through a commentary session and look as clever as the BBC!
The key to the application is the daily update – being the sixth option on the screen it’s easy to find. And I love the “this may put up your phone bill” warning. Simple, to the point, and is easily understandable. Going online with the built-in Internet data connection means that the user doesn’t have to search for information, it comes to them. The interface is clean and uncluttered, and surprisingly easy to navigate.
So what we have here is a huge amount of information on one subject, that’s very time sensitive (this isn’t going to sell in nine months time), and that takes much of the hassle out of getting online information. There may be sites and portals that can give you World Cup news, but this package is very easy to use, and with the huge numbers of new users to Series 60, it could do very well.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at