Rugby Arena

According to the iTunes Store the Rugby Arena – The 2011 World Cup Guide (Unofficial) describes Alexandru Halmagean’s application like this:

Rugby Arena is the ultimate app for rugby fans. This guide to the Rugby World Cup 2011 has a complete schedule, live scores, and boards. You’ll be well-prepared for the RWC if you have this app!

Apple rate it as “New and Noteworthy” so who am I to argue? Currently costing $0.99 and rated 4+ it is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

I must confess that I have mixed thoughts about the application though. Of course until the Rugby World Cup starts in September it is difficult to judge how useful the application will actually be. From past experience applications like this ‘live or die’ on the speed with which they get updated. It is all very well being a great aggregator of information and results, and Rugby Arema would appear to do that well, but in this day and age of RSS and particularly Twitter you have to be pretty quick off the mark to get the information out in a timely matter.

Rugby Arena seem to have this covered with the Live Scores feature, and if they have then this could be the killer feature for me.

The application as it stands is content rich, albeit the actual teams at the moment are only predicted teams. I was slightly disappointed initially to find that the majority of the information is provided through links to the likes of Wikipedia and You Tube but …….. in reality you only access this information very occasionally so why go to the bother of duplicating it, and at $0.99 really what should you expect. Upon reflection it makes a lot of sense and is neatly done.

The application comes with a Bonus Game called Logic Rugby which took some working out, but I am no gamer it must be said, but once I had figured the basics out it kept me amused.

Personally I enjoyed the ‘extras’ as much as anything: a convenient montage of information and videos from the past, which brought back memories, and let’s be honest it was extremely unlikely that I was going to go trawling through You Tube to find them, and I suspect you will be able to have fun playing ‘guess the Anthem’ with the Anthems & Chants feature.

In conclusion: there is a lot packed into Rugby Arena, much that you could easily find elsewhere but the question is ‘Would you?’ and I suspect that you wouldn’t be bothered, and it promises to provide a lot of relevant, timely and interesting data throughout the World Cup. It is a well put together application which makes the most of the well know features of the iPhone and at $0.99 it is hard to see how you could go wrong!

The iTunes store is correct when it says that “You’ll be well-prepared for the RWC if you have this app!”

iTunes Screen Shots