CBS Sports Mobile – iPhone App Review

CBS Sports Mobile (Free)

Version 1.3

REVIEW - "Full access to CBS sports from your mobile device!"

Are you a sports junkie? Are you into every detail of every sporting event going on around you? Are you constantly looking for the latest fantasy information about your favorite sport to get the edge on your opponents? If so, the CBS Sports Mobile app might be for you!

When you first open this app, you will see a loading screen while current content is downloaded into the app. This is pretty quick on Wifi or 3G, but is very slow on Edge. Once downloaded you are taken to the "Home" page where you see the top stories of the day. The layout of this page is pretty good. You see a list of stories, and then if you scroll down you see thumbnails of some of the featured videos as well.

At the top of the screen is a menu where you can quickly access the top news on any sport that you might be interested in. The individual sport pages are laid out kind of like the home page, but in between the stories and the videos at the bottom, there is a section that shows all of the scores for the current day. You can also view scores from previous days, or view upcoming games by using the arrows at the top of this section.

At the bottom of the screen there are several different options. The "My Teams" tab allows you to select your favorite team in several different sports and have quick access to scores and news on those teams. It will keep track of your favorite MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, College football and College basketball team, and give you all of the latest updates on them.

The next tab at the bottom is the "Fantasy" tab. This tab is one of the things that really sets this app apart from a lot of the other "free" sports apps. This tab will allow you to login to your CBS Sports fantasy teams! At this time baseball is the only sport that is supported, but access to at least their fantasy football leagues has been promised to be coming soon!

The "Videos" tab is a place where you can quickly scan through videos on all kinds of sports, or just view a longer list of videos all around. The video playback in this app is fairly decent over Wifi or 3G. As with most apps I would not recommend trying to play video over Edge for obvious reasons. I did notice some problems with opening and closing videos from time to time. Sometimes a video would open up without warning, or would quit responding for a short time. These problems, for the most part, are not chronic and seem to get better when I restarted my iPhone or if I cleared it's memory with the "FreeMemory" app.

The last tab at the bottom of the screen is the "Full Nav" tab. This is very useful if you are really looking to get detailed information, stats, or standings on a particular sport. One of the things that I found very frustrating with this app, and with this tab in particular, is that the menu at the top that changes the sport that you are viewing always takes you to the "home page-like" view when you change sports. This is very cumbersome if you want to view videos, or get detailed information with the "Full Nav."

All of that said, there are a lot of good stories, videos and pictures in this app and so it is definitely worth the free download to try it out. Unfortunately, the somewhat confusing interface and problems with video playback are enough to keep this from being the elite sports app that it has the potential to be.

- David H.
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