Application Review: ESPN ScoreCenter

https://market.android.com/espnscorecenter

The ESPN ScoreCenter application seems to have a variety of uses, not exclusively limited to finding sports scores. It can be a source for news, videos, team standings, and game air dates, times, and what network they are on. This application gives you the option of following your favorite sports in general, or creating "My Teams" pages where you can list your favorite teams to get specific game and score information about them from a variety of the major sports. You can choose teams from Baseball (MLB), Basketball (NBA, NCAAB, NCAAW, WNBA), Cricket (Choose by country or Global Tournaments), Football (NFL or NCAAF), Ice Hockey (NHL), Rugby (Choose by country or Global Tournaments), and Soccer (Premier League, Champions League, La Liga, Underselling, Serie A, MLS, UEGA Europa League, Tournaments, or choose by country).

For each team/sports category you add a score/news page is created that you can flip through like cards if you move your finger across the screen in the direction you wish to go. The myTeams page keeps all of your designated team's most recent scores up-to-date in one place as well as the latest news for those teams. From there, The Lead page has tabs for the top scores of the day and what games to look out for, there is also a news page that has headlines from the latest ESPN news stories as well as the newest sports videos from ESPN.

Each sports page has all of the scores for the season for all teams based on weeks or days that you can scroll through to see listings for future and past games. If you select a specific game from the past, a small information box will pop up and give a more detailed report of the game. If you select a future game it will provide the date, time, and the network on which it will be aired, as well as a link to StubHub to possibly buy tickets for that game if you wish to do so. Choosing an in progress game with give you a pop-up of more detailed score information as well as the current situation of the game, who is in possession or who is up to bat, etc.

Overall, it is a very useful application for a sports fan to easily keep track of scores, standings, news, and game information about their favorite teams or sports in general. Because it is a free application, there are advertisements at the bottom of the screen, but I have not found them to be intrusive or distracting. The application also has some problems with speed because some features take quite awhile to load. There are also two widgets associated with this app, a small score center widget that you can use to scroll through important scores and an ESPN video widget that shows the latest news videos.

This application can be somewhat confusing to navigate on a tablet as it is still formatted for smartphones so some of the buttons are very tiny or unresponsive. It is also very easy to accidentally close the application because it will quit if you press the back button from certain screens. It can also be difficult to find specific pages because they are hidden, for example, the news and scores tabs are hidden unless you touch the small arrow at the top of the screen so that they are revealed. It is easy to add or delete sports and teams from your pages from the settings so that your application can be fully customized to you at all times.

This application has great value for an avid or casual sports fan because it is free and allows you to check just about any scores from your favorite teams and provides a great deal of sports information without charge.