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Sportacular for iPhone

What is it?

With an American sports focus, the Sportacular iPhone application keeps fans informed on scores, stats, and standings from MLB, NFL, College Football, NBA, College Basketball, NHL, MLS, PGA and LPGA. While its golf coverage has some news stories, it’s primarily useful for getting statistics from the various leagues.

How much does it cost?

Free.

Who is it good for?

Sports fans, especially sports statistic fanatics, fantasy sports players, people who already have an interest in particular sports or players.

Summary

While lacking a lot of the multimedia functions that you find on other popular applications, Sportacular does a good job of having detailed statistics for each of the sports that it covers. Like PlusMo, Sportacular is lacking individual statistics for College Football, but the application is otherwise throughout and straightforward in presenting game and individual player stats and team standings. One of the coolest features is the ability to track your own custom fantasy team on the application, which can save you some time when trying to track your team’s numbers that day.

Keep it or Delete it?

Keep it (if you’re a sports fan)

Sportacular is most useful for tracking scores and statistics on the fly. This isn’t an application that is going to replace ESPN or CNNSI because of the lack of news coverage, but it’s otherwise really useful for checking numbers, and wins and losses.

As we mentioned, one of the coolest features on the application is the ability to create custom fantasy teams that can easily be tracked with just a few clicks. While there is no fantasy aspect built into the application, it feels like it might not be too far away from becoming part of Sportacular if they can build it. It’s extremely convenient to be able to see how your team did without looking up each individual player’s stats - that alone could be a killer app for big fantasy players.

With the ability to check out standings by conference or division, you can see how your favorite team is actually doing and up-to-date scores give real sports fans the potential to actually leave the house on a Saturday or Sunday without missing “the game.” For football fans, instead of including a full play-by-play, the application shows scoring plays, which is of interest to fantasy players and most sports fans. While it’s nice to see how a drive went down the field, it’s a welcome simplification to just see how each point was scored, which will satisfy most sports fans until they see it on Sportscenter later that night.

That being said, Sportacular is not an application for someone who doesn’t know about sports, much like Style.com’s application is not for someone who doesn’t know about fashion. The application is fantastic at what it does - stats, scores, and standings - but isn’t there to teach you about sports or individual players. It’s a data-heavy application that will be appreciated by those who the application is designed for.

Another part of the application that we really like are the individual player statistics. This part of the application alone can solve a lot of pissing contests in regards to individual player statistics and arguments that are essentially just “I bet this guy is better than this guy.”

For instance, we wondered if Heisman Trophy winner Troy Smith had played at all this year with the emergence of Joe Flacco at quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens (again, not an application for people not interested in sports).

We quickly found out that Smith has thrown two passes, one of which was for a touchdown, and that he hasn’t seen a lot of action this season. Sure, the application doesn’t tell us that he went to Ohio State or when he was taken in the draft, or any of the latest news on the former Buckeye, but for most sports fans, stats pages like these will be more than adequate for casual and in-depth sports conversation.

Sportacular is in essence a stats-driven application for sports fans who care about stats. There is a wealth of data for people who follow sports, not so much for those who don’t, but it’s worth keeping if you’re a big sports fan looking for data.