ESPN ScoreCenter review

Frances Edwards

We review ESPN, a sports app that will give you results for almost every sports league in the world

Published on Sep 21, 2009

Apple has long preached the message 'there's an app for that' when advertising the phenomenal number of applications that are now listed within the App Store.

The problem with having an app for just about everything though is they all seem to be very specific with, for example, an app for trains, an app for buses, an app for the Tube and even an app for the best Tube exit doors. iPhone homescreen retail estate is precious and sometimes you just wish each app could be a little more wide ranging.

Enter the ESPN Scorecenter, a real time sports score app which potentially allows you to bin almost every other sports app you use.

For example, the Scorecenter covers football, cricket, rugby, Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar, golf, tennis, basketball, baseball, American football, ice hockey and NCAA College football and basketball. Admittedly, many of these are US centric, but ESPN promises there will be "more coming soon".

Remarkably, all these sports also feature live coverage of the latest goals, pitches, baskets, tries, touchdowns, wickets, sets, laps, you name it.

For the all round sports fan, there isn't anything to compete. The problem for the ESPN Scorecenter, however, is an obvious one: it's a jack of all trades and master of none.

If you only want to know the basic score or standings from an event this is the app for you, but should you take one sport seriously - say football - then you won't get the formations, substitutions and deep statistics you'd find on a specialist app like the Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre.

On top of this, the ESPN Scorecenter isn't particularly polished. The days of pop up windows with crosses to close them were meant to be long gone on the iPhone, but they are back out in force here along with a poorly designed layout that features illogically small buttons that certainly aren't finger friendly.

It is also impossible to create a mix and match home screen. Each sport has its own fixed page and often multiple pages that make navigation something of a chore. Tennis is a prime example with individual pages for men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles and women's doubles. Throw in a few football leagues and you're in a real mess very quickly.

So overall the ESPN Scorecenter promises much, but it largely skates over the surface of most sports and suffers from an outdated UI. Given the app is free it's worth having as a back-up but, much as I hate saying this, in its current form you'd be better off installing all those individual specialist apps.