25 Jul Win Gold With These Apps For The London Olympics
The 2012 opening ceremony for the London Olympics is fast approaching, and just because you couldn’t get to London doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all of the action!
To keep you up to date with results, event schedules, medal counts and maybe even learn a little something about a sport you’ve never heard of, check out these apps:
London 2012: Official Results App (Free)
iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone
Available for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, the free, Official Results app for the London Olympics will help keep you up to date with news and results from both the Olympics and Paralympics. The app provides profiles of every athlete taking part, a medal table, calendar schedule, details of sports and live scores. You can choose to follow specific countries, which will deliver official news and updates for the country of your choosing.
The app also has a ‘My Games’ area that enables you to add your favourite sports, events and athletes, so you can rest assured you won’t miss a beat of the sports that interest you the most.
Reuters Olympics London (Free)
Android users will be missing out, with the beautiful Reuters app for the Olympics London only available on the iPhone and iPad.
This app offers a different, photo-centric approach to the display of information from the Olympic games. The app is comprised mostly of a photo timeline, which contains regularly updated photos that Reuters Photographers post to the wire service.
The app also allows the user to view the images through the photostream, a slideshow that adds new photos constantly. Tapping on an individual photo brings up a full screen view of the image, which is accompanied by information related to that image. This information is related to the subjects of the photo and even the photographer who snapped the shot. Additionally, many of the photos are attached to full news stories that open in the app’s built-in browser. Trivia is also included via embedded info-graphic content.
The app also brings the schedule, results and medal tally to your iPhone or iPad, bringing important information to your iDevice.
The Olympics deliver some incredibly beautiful and inspiring shots, which makes the app one of the best ways to experience the Olympics far away from the action.
Curly’s Pocket Guide to sports – $0.99
For the uninitiated in a certain sport, you can impress your fellow Olympic fans with your knowledge of the rules and the competition format of any sport with Curly’s Pocket Guide to Sports. You won’t have to ask for minute by minute commentary on what’s going or how the scoring works, with the apps simple yet witty approach to explaining the intricacies of a variety of sports.
If that’s not enough, you can really win gold with sport aficionados, with the app’s trivia feature. You can find out all kinds of interesting things like the staggering fact that Usain Bolt is actually faster than a charging elephant at his top speed (43km/h), but pit him against a kangaroo and he would be left in the dust.
BBC Olympics (Free)
Another ‘all-in-one’ Olympics app, this app by the BBC provides up to 24 hour streams of live coverage making sure you don’t miss anything.
The standard features of an Olympic app are all there: detailed schedule of the events, results page and daily news stories related to the Olympics, in addition to catch-up coverage and highlights, facts, statistics and information for every athlete, country and sport.
A special feature has been included for iOS, which allows users to personalise the app by adding their favourite Olympics sports to the customisable tab bar, enabling quick access to the latest live action.
However, one of the best features of this app is most likely the ability to save stories for offline reading, so you know what’s going on even when you’re not connected