Fox Sports App

I'm planning to take a pass through the available sports score apps for the iPhone/iPod. The apps can differ quite a bit. Sometimes, they provide only scores, sometimes news, and often both.

The FoxSports App is free on the iTunes store (Looked for a website describing it, can't find one). As far as sports news apps go, it fits in the full featured category. When the app starts, you are shown a list of 4 of the top sports stories of the day.

Clicking on the Home button at the top of the page, allows you to drill down into specific sports. At the bottom of the page are additional buttons for videos and scores. Selecting a story displays a text version of the story in portrait mode. Clicking on the News button takes you back to the main page.

Clicking on the Videos button pulls up a list of videos for the day from Fox. The videos are for an assortment of stories and play in landscape mode. The picture tends to be a little pixelated over the 3G network, but are very clear over wifi.

Selecting a specific sport from the Home button provides you news for that specific sport. In addition, a number of new buttons appear at the bottom of the page: scores, teams, standings, and stats. All are pretty self explanatory. The teams option lets you for only news stories about a specific team. All the options work pretty well and are useful.

Sports categories covered include NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Nascar, NCAA Football, NCAA Basketball, NCAA Women's Basketball, Golf, Tennis, and WNBA. No coverage for soccer is a big oversight in my opinion.

Performance is pretty good. Only the stories for the page you see are you loaded. So each time you change categories, a call is made to the sever to fetch more data. This works pretty good and stories generally load fast. However, the stories are not cached. So if you are on airplane or otherwise without a network connection, you are out of luck.

So to sum up, the Fox Sports Apps is a good general sports news application for the iPhone. Well designed with good performance. My only objection being the lack of coverage for soccer.

4 out of 5