Reuters Olympics London 2012 - Photos, News, Stats, FREE!

Reuters Olympics London 2012 (by Thomson Reuters, the international news agency) has created a fabulous Free, iOS Universal, Sports app covering one of the world’s most popular sporting events — the Summer Olympics in London (of course), which kicked off late July of this year. As if photos from the 38 specific sporting events wasn’t enough to garnish plenty of attention, this app also packs an abundance of Olympic-related goodies that are sure to make serious sports fans, casual fans, and patriotic countrymen (and women) stand up and take notice. What you will find in this app are history-making photos snapped daily by a crew of talented Reuter photographers, captions for every photo, photographer info, news articles, a social photo sharing function (Twitter and Facebook) — as well as a bunch of great sport specific information in the form of info graphic photo overlays (Number of competitors, Number of medal events, Venue, and a fact about that sport), along with reference info and medal results information, all displayed in a well designed and intuitive user interface. With so much information to take it, it’s a good thing that this iPad Sports app has a “Tour” option to help the rest of us find our way around.

I chose to view the numerous photos on my iPad, due the size limitation of the iPhone. I just don’t think you’ll get the full impact of viewing photos on the dinky iPhone screen. Upon opening the app, you’ll see the Timeline photos for the current day, along with a countdown number for the days remaining till the close of this huge, international sporting event. The Photostream constantly updates with new photos as they come in, so there’s always something fresh to look at, and you can choose to loop photos or not, as well as choose the time length in between photos. Basically, anywhere you tap while in this app, you’ll encounter interesting tidbits of Olympic-related information and tons of photo options. Perusing through the many inspiring, heartbreaking, and triumphant photos, I’d have to say that (although I love Diving), the Men’s Diving photos were probably some of the most unflattering photos that I can recall seeing in a very long time (caught from every angle of the various dive positions). Aside from the main draw of numerous photos, I particularly liked being able to quickly look through the reference/stats to see how the different countries were doing across the various sporting events, but more importantly — how many medals has the US won so far?

A Medal Table tab in the Reference area gives a break down of all the participating countries by Ranking, Country, (total number of) Gold, Bronze, and Silver (medals received), and an overall Total (for medals won by each country). A nice feature here is that you can drill down even deeper for each country and get even more in-depth information on the number of medals each country won for each specific event — (apparently the strongest areas for the US are in Swimming, Athletics, and Gymnastics) — this is a really nice feature. The last time I checked the medal count, the United States ranked 1st with a total of 90 medals: 39 Gold, 25 Silver, and 26 Bronze. China ranked 2nd with 80 total medals: 37 Gold, 24 Silver, and 19 Bronze. Great Britian comes in 3rd with a total of 52 medals: 25 Gold, 13 Silver, and 14 Bronze. Russia came in 4th with 56 total medals, but not enough Gold to outrank Great Britain. The Schedule & Results tab displays every sport according to a day-by-day format along with the scheduled time of events. For additional details, the Olympic Records section is segmented into 2 categories: Men and Women, with the record breaking event info as follows: Event, Record (score), Name (of athlete), Country (represented), and When (year happened). If you’re a really geeked up about the Olympics, you can set your push Notifications to alert you of the latest results for specific or all of the following: Sports, Records, Finalists, Country, as well get New Content by turning on or off: Daily Round Up, Pre-Olympics, and Post-Olympic.

If you have time, go back on the Timeline and look at the numerous photos and Headline articles spanning from the Pre-Olympic timeframe to currently — I saw photos of athletes training, warming up photos, ariel views of the athletic event facilities, the making of the Olympics Games torch, torch bearers, scenic photos of London, people picnicking in the park, and a vast assortment of other photo subjects — definitely some interesting Olympic-related stuff, as well as a glimpse into the world of Londoners (and visitors).

The only thing that I wasn’t overly excited to see in this app was located in the lengthy Privacy policy regarding the collection of personal information via usage of their website and mobile app, by them and their “worldwide affiliated companies and subsidiaries.” According to Reuters, information is collected in 3 ways: by you (directly), their web server & app logs, as well as cookies. This collected information is supposed to provide you, the user, a better experience — isn’t sold, or shared with others (mostly not). Although this legal jargon seems pretty standard nowadays, it’s more the vast amount of disclaimer information letting you know about all the data collecting that could be a little unsettling. They do allow you to limit the amount of data collected on your usage by turning off Advertising and Analytics and Customization (in Interest Based Advertising Policies), but this “May reduce new story suggestions made to you, or alter the type of advertising you receive while on our sites.” My guess is that most people would be too distracted by the great Free price tag and fabulous app content to even take notice of this — but, whether it’s important to you or not, — now you know. Other than adding a new feature/function with some sort of real-time clock or clock that converts the time of the scheduled events to your own timezone, allowing people to easily be in sync with the events as they’re happening (real-time) or being able to quickly figure out the times of upcoming scheduled events in your own timezone (for all of us not actually at the Olympics) — everything else is great about this Free, iOS Universal, Sports app. Go USA! Check out all of our iPad app reviews. Mrs. CrazyMike