SportsTap Review : A Great Sports App for Your iPhone

SportsTap Review : A Great Sports App for Your iPhone
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A Sea of Sports Apps

As common as it is for VH1 to release a new reality show, the iPhone is starting to see an onslaught of applications providing sports scores for users. There are some out there that hold their own, while others seem to just hope to cash in. Something to notice though is that some of the better sports applications are free. This is the case again with SportsTap, a well developed, free sports application.

SportsTap Review (3 out of 5)

When you first open SportsTap you will notice a very convenient feature. Instead of having to choose a sport to see if anybody is playing, you are shown icons with numbers by them. What this shows is exactly how many games, matches or races are happening. SportsTap covers the big leagues as well as sports like golf, tennis, auto racing and futbol, even the spell check tried to correct that to “football.” So it is nice to see an open mind to all sports going on and not just those popular in America.

When you click on the whatever sport it is you wish, after you are then directed to another set of icons. This is where SportsTap really shines. Let us for instance, say we want to find out how a golf tournament is going. Well I can choose from a variety of different categories in the golf category. They have the PGA, LPGA, Champions, Europe and even Canada represented. So like I said, they don’t stick to just a single popular category. I was also impressed that they don’t just stick to the Division I college schools either. They go all the way to Division III which is great for smaller school fans. You are also given a feature to select your favorite teams to follow them, however it doesn’t devote a single page for your list. All it does is set that team to the top of the list. So if you’re a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, then it’ll show their game score first in the NFL section. That was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe they can update it later to incorporate a separate favorites section.

When it comes to stat tracking, SportsTap does the job. I especially liked the futbol stat tracking. In terms of bookings, it actually shows a colored square next to the names as a yellow or red card. It’s not much, but it is a nice touch. The stats update every minute so you get pretty accurate scores and plays. You will get recaps, matchups, scoring summaries as well as stats for each player playing. It would have been nice, especially in the football department, to see a play by play update, or at least a possession graphic.

There aren’t many extras with SportsTap, like you see with <em>Sportacular</em>. I also kind of got annoyed with some ads that were built into the application. They aren’t large, but they sometimes place them right above the date you’re looking for. When you try and change the date of the game you’re looking for, you can click on the ad by mistake, thus causing a Safari window to pop up. It’s not a big gripe but the placement of it should be somewhere else.

SportsTap is another well done sports application. When looking at all of these different applications, it’s basically your call which one you feel serves you. There are a handful of good ones out there, but they all seem to differ from each other in some way or another. Some offer things others done. SportsTap definitely fits into that category, the depth of the sports you can view is great, but the lack of a favorites hurts it. This is also another free application so it won’t hurt to download and try. It can be downloaded from the iTunes application store.