The Good
- Extensive photo galleries
- Video interviews with Lance Armstrong
The Bad
- Annoying ads
- Few features
The Tour de France is set to begin on July 3, 2010, and there are plenty of iPhone apps that will help you follow the 3,600-kilometer race. Lance Armstrong, of course, will be racing with Team RadioShack, which debuted its new app in June.
Team RadioShack photos and videos
The Team RadioShack iPhone app (Free) boasts "exclusive behind-the-scenes video" from Lance Armstrong and other members of the cycling team. The app is divided into three main sections -- headlines, photos, and videos.
The headlines section is relatively comprehensive, with a good mix of press releases, video news, and articles. At least one picture is included with each article. However, you’ll only get one paragraph before being forced to tap "read more," which takes you to a web-based version of the article. This isn’t a huge deal -- the web-based articles load quickly over a 3G connection -- but I had to do more pinching and zooming than I would have liked.
The Team RadioShack app also contains a big selection of photo galleries, normally from the most recent race or training event. The pictures load quickly and you can share them via Facebook, email, or Twitter. New videos are posted regularly, and I didn’t encounter any buffering pauses or skips when viewing the galleries over a 3G connection. The videos are nearly all brief interviews with Lance Armstrong. The audio quality on some of the videos isn’t the best -- you can hear people talking or televisions in the background.
Most free iPhone apps contain ads, so I wasn’t surprised to see them in this one. However, the ads in the Team RadioShack are more obtrusive than most since they’re displayed at the top of the page. I much prefer to have ads at the bottom (as they are in the individual articles). The ads are constantly scrolling and blinking, which gets annoying fast.
The Bottom Line
The Team RadioShack app is a bit basic and could benefit from some additional content -- how about team schedules, upcoming events, or integration with Twitter so we can see tweets from Lance Armstrong and the other cyclists? The ads are annoying and I would prefer not to launch a web browser to finish reading the news articles. Even so, fans of Lance Armstrong will likely appreciate the video interviews, and the photo galleries are great. Overall rating: 3 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Team RadioShack iPhone app requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later, and you can use it on the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.