Now that Fall is just about here, for sports fans, that means one thing: football! For me as a sports fan, it also means other things. The baseball season is wrapping up, the PGA Tour is heading to the “silly” season, and yes, even the MLS is starting to wrap up.
With not having cable TV in our house and always being out and about, I needed an iPhone app to stay on top of all of my different teams and sports, as well as the latest scores and highlights. Sportacular is an app that does a lot of the things that I need and want and works really well, for the most part. Let me show you around.
What’s the Score?
Any sports fan that is not near a television always wants to know what the score is. It is the universal question that is asked when you first see someone watching a game, regardless of who is playing. Sportacular gives you a couple of different ways to catch up on your sports.
The main page is where you can see the latest scores from any sport that you choose. Sportacular covers just about every major professional sport in America (NFL, NBA, Golf, NHL, MLS, Nascar and Tennis). You can also get scores from a handful of the European Soccer leagues. You pick the sport and Sportacular will display the scores from that sport for a particular day.
Main Page
Sportacular also offers a different way for you to find out what the score is to your favorite game. You can set alerts from within the app to alert you of the score. In fact, not only can you set alerts for the latest score of a game, you can set a variety of alerts. Say you want to know when your favorite team scores or when their opponent scores, or what the score is at halftime or at the end of the game. You can set custom alerts to let you know when just about anything happens.
Setting Alerts for a team and for a specific game
Get Social, Sort of
One of the best things about watching sports is watching it with others — you never want to watch the big game by yourself. Sportacular feels the same way about using their app. They have built in some social aspects into the app with Facebook Connect and a handful of other things to enhance the experience.
When using the app you can create a Sportacular profile, which you can connect with your Facebook account. For some reason when I tried to do this, I was unable to connect and got an error. That’s too bad, because I really would have liked to see how this worked.
A couple of other things you can do to connect socially are called My Picks and My Check-ins. With My Picks, you can pick a winner in just about any game that is on Sportacular and the app keeps track of how many wins and losses you have. There is even a leaderboard that shows the top pickers. With My Check-ins, you can “check in” to a sporting event. You can check-in if you are either at the actual game or if you are just following a certain game, whether it is on TV or on the app itself.
Screenshot of My Picks and Check-Ins Page
Bring Out the Sports Geek In You
As a sports fan, you want to impress your friends with the latest standings, stats and player info. Sportacular has got you covered in this department as well.
You always want to know where your team stands in comparison to the others, and so Sportacular has given Standings its own tab within the app. And it does exactly that: it gives you standings for all of the team sports that are featured on the app.
Sportacular does a great job with stats. They don’t overwhelm you, but they give you enough to get by. You can look up the stats of your favorite team and see what their stats are for the season or for the last game they played. Sportacular also lets you see stats for players on a specific team as well.
Stats for team and for individual players
And lastly, any sports geek always wants to know what else is going on in the world of sports for that day. With the News section you can read all the latest and greatest that is going on for any sport that is featured on Sportacular. You can also click on any sports team and see the latest score, news and schedule.
Snapshot of the News Page
Conclusion
You can get Sportacular in a few different flavors, and the one I reviewed is the free version. There is also a pro version that you can purchase for $1.99, which takes out the ads. In both versions you can also get in-app purchases to enhance the usability of the app. And lastly, there is an iPad app that is free.
My overall feeling is that this is a pretty good app and it has a lot of great features, but it could use some work. For one, I would love to see the app get faster; the app can be very slow at times. Secondly, I would like to see Facebook Connect actually work so that I can utilize the social aspect of the app better. I think if these two things can get fixed, the app will be go from good to great.