SportsTap review

Damien McFerran

We review SportsTap, a Sports TV app for the iPhone

Published on Oct 30, 2009

Should you happen to be the kind of person who will happily sit and watch TV sports channels regardless of what activity is actually taking place – be it football, golf, tennis or even tractor-pulling – then SportsTap is going to represent digital heaven.

The app is an information and news resource for several different sports, including baseball, tennis, American football, soccer (or “Futball” as it’s called here) and motor racing.

The main menu is a friendly-looking grid of icons, each relating to a different sporting pastime. This screen serves as a handy starting point; not only is each event easy to access, little icons appears on sports where games are taking place at that present moment in time, which means you can skip straight to the latest up-to-date results.

Once you’ve selected a sport then you’re presented with a main screen which displays all of the recent news and happenings, as well as additional items of interest such as team standings and images from the latest games.

All of these elements can be investigated further if you so wish; for example, if you want to know more about an upcoming match between two football teams you simply tap the game in question and you’ll be able to read previews and check current stats.

The selection of data on show is incredible, but it should be noted that SportsTap favours North American events; sports such as baseball, basketball and American football are the ones that tend to feature the most content. This is to be expected, as the app itself is produced by a US-based company.

Sadly, this North American bias means that us European users miss out on some of SportsTap’s best elements; for example, there’s a home screen widget which displays the most recent news relating to your favourite team, but at present it’s only possible to designate a team that plays in either the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL or NCAA leagues – all of which are US-based.

An alert system is also in place which sends you notifications about your preferred sporting team, but again it’s currently restricted to those sports which occur on US soil.

While it’s disappointing that international users are being treated as second-best with SportsTap, it’s easy to see how well put together this app is. The design is clean, navigation is painless and there’s no annoying stalls or loading. The entire package holds together perfectly, putting similar Android-based programs to shame.

Only the presence of adverts sullies the experience somewhat, although these are bearable when you consider that SportsTap doesn’t cost you a penny.

If the developer can see fit to add better support for sports that take place outside of the United States then this app will become an essential download for armchair pundits the world over.