Plusmo scrimmages for top place among iPhone sports apps
(Credit: CNET Networks)If you didn't already know that football season was under way, you would after glancing at Yahoo's audacious purple booth at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, where oversize posters and computer monitors advertise Yahoo's fantasy football leagues, and where complementary gelato is scooped into small, plastic football helmets. Across the convention center aisle, mobile widgets company Plusmo has also made a nod to the pigskin with a quiet demo of the beta iPhone app, Pro Football Live.
Released Monday to the iPhone App Store, Pro Football Live beta is a thicket of teams, schedules, seasonal stats, photos, and news. During live games, Plusmo cranks up the social networking features by adding chat, voting elements, play information, and the position of the ball in a virtual stadium. The free app has received mixed user reviews because of known stability issues that hang a screen or crash the app, but Plusmo's team hinted that it wanted to kick out Pro Live Football before the season really took off. Plusmo also expects its college football and pro baseball apps to hit the App Store within the following week, despite the baseball season drawing to a close.
At this stage, Plusmo's battle for sports tracking dominance on the iPhone will be against the free Sportacular, which houses its stats and news in a much neater interface. Sportacular, in Version 1.1, also efficiently shows stats for pro baseball, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, and pro soccer within one app, compared with Plusmo's multiple applications, each specific to its own sport. However, there are enough multimedia extras in Plusmo's football app to keep sports lovers checking back in for improvements. Golf fans can check out the free Plusmo Golf, which debuted in August, and cricket followers should keep an eye out for Cricinfo MobiCast, also forthcoming.
