Positives:
Negatives
Editor’s Note: The St Louis Post-Dispatch just put out a Rams app for the iPhone, and we at RamsHerd were given a sneak preview. Not having an iPhone myself, here’s a guest review from faithful reader Justin Carter (@Th3Carter3).The St. Louis Rams. No matter how bad they’ve been the last few years, as a die-hard fan, I cannot get enough information about the team, the players, and the coaches. When I heard that they were releasing an iPhone application, I was pretty psyched. When Will offered me a code for the App, I couldn’t wait to find out what was on it.
The app itself is pretty plain. There are a few different menus, and each menu has multiple expandable tabs underneath it.
The News menu contains headlines of News, Defense, Offense, Games, and Twitter.
News: Has a latest news tab, along with the main columnists Miklasz, Burwell, and Gordon. Defense/Offense: Lists of the prominent defensive/offensive players, and any articles that the player is mentioned in.
Games: The games tab is one of my favorite features. It has every game listed, along with any articles that each team is tagged in. Since this application is from the Post Dispatch, any and all articles/pictures are from the Post, which limits the scope of this tab, but it is still a pretty neat feature.
Twitter: Has a tab for the Saint Louis Rams (@OneRamsWay), Jim Thomas (@JThom1), Bernie Miklasz (@Miklasz), Jeff Gordon (@Gordoszone), Bill Coats (@BCoats7), and Steven Jackson (@SJ39). Each tab lists the 20 most recent tweets for each account.
The next tab is a photos tab, which has a section for the preseason, and every game for this season. The photos tab glitches up every once in a while resulting in a blank screen with incorrect data at the top.
The last menu is the saved menu. When in a rush, you can click “save” on any article, and the app will put the article in the “saved” menu, and you can view it anytime you please.
One more potentially awesome feature is the ability to tweet any article from the phone, while also putting any comment you’d like behind the link and headline.
However, I never got a chance to use this feature. I tried 3 different accounts, with every password I’ve ever used, and I kept receiving the same error message. I even clicked the link in the app to create a new account and it still did not work. I’m not sure if it was just my app, or just my phone, or if it is even the app’s fault (could be a problem on twitter’s end).
Overall the app is pretty cool. It is the first or second app I open up everyday when I wake up. The biggest issue I have with the app is that at a $2.99 price tag, I would hope to receive something that I could not access anywhere else on the Internet.
That is not true with Rams Football app. There are no exclusive features that I can only get on the app. I can read all of the articles elsewhere. Having all of them in one place is awesome, but is it worth $2.99 to the average fan?
I’d give the app a 6/10. It gets the job done, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
