iPad App Reviews
If you’re a fan of iPad apps, you’ve landed in the right place. Here we cover many of the best apps and games in the iPad App Store, and even some that are not so great, just so you’lll know which to avoid. We cover all the iPad app categories – from iPad editions of newspapers and magazines, to productivity apps, games, eBook apps, utilities, social networking apps, photography apps, and more.
NewsFlash is a relatively new breaking news and headlines RSS reader app for the iPad and iPhone. It uses quite a simple interface and offers breaking news and top stories from around the world and in a number of languages.
I have a clear favorite RSS reader app for the iPad, River of News, and use Twitter and notifications from a handful of news apps to attempt to keep up with breaking news – but I’m always on the lookout for more good news and RSS sources, so I’ve been giving NewsFlash a try over the last several days. The short story here is that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I like this app. Hit the break for the reasons why …
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NFL Kicker HD, as the name suggests, gives you a chance to take on the role of an NFL kicker (and punter). The game has you testing your skills at both field goal kicking and punting in a number of different challenge modes, from belting long field goals in windy conditions to trying angle punts out of bounds just shy of the end zone.
This is the latest iPad sports game from Full Fat Games, who are also the makers of NFL Flick Quarterback HD, Flick Soccer HD, and Flick Golf Extreme HD. All three of those are favorites of mine and excellent iPad games. Hit the break to see why this is yet another stellar game from Full Fat Games …
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LostWinds for iPad, originally a 2008 WiiWare release for the Nintendo Wii, is now available on mobile platforms. Despite the game’s appearance, music and otherwise gorgeous presentation, it appears to be more successful for the Wii than the iPad – primarily in terms of how difficult the controls are on the mobile version.
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Ringier Studios Champions League: True Passion, Big Business is an iPad app to be avoided. It’s one of the very worst iPad apps I’ve seen in any category.
This will not be a comprehensive review because this app turned me off and pissed me off so much that I could not force myself to spend enough time with it to do one. Yes, it’s that bad, and worse.
Strike 1, 2, and 3 against it: when you first open this app (after it has been downloaded and installed from the App Store) you get to a splash screen and a download status bar starts. The app is not ready to go after being installed; not anywhere near ready. The status bar shows that it needs to download 380MB of something, there’s no indication of what. That’s a bad enough start, but then you get the better news – you cannot do anything at all in the app while you wait on the download, and the download is slower than slow.
What’s slower than slow, you might ask. Right around TWENTY MINUTES. Yes, you read that right. You launch this app and there is nothing whatsoever to do in it until you wait 20 minutes to have content downloaded.
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River of News for Google Reader, as the name might give away, is an RSS reader for the iPad for those who use Google Reader to keep up with their favorite feeds.
I’m a big consumer of RSS feeds as a major part of how I keep up with news each day – whether it’s iPad and iOS news, general tech news, or just news in general. I also follow Twitter, Google+, and news magazines like Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and others to keep up with what’s happening – but tracking my 200 or so favorite feeds in Google Reader is still my most used and most effective way to try to keep up with the daily information overload we’re all faced with these days.
I’ve tried other RSS apps on the desktop but Google Reader in a browser has remained my favorite for years on the desktop. It was my favorite on the iPhone for a long while too – even after the App Store opened and many decent native RSS reader apps came along. These days I do most of my reading on the iPad, so finding a great RSS app for the iPad was a priority from Day 1. Happily, River of News hit the iPad App Store a few months after the iPad was released – and it has been my favorite RSS app ever since.
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