MLB.com At Bat

Developer: MLB.com
Price: $4.99
Version Reviewed: 1.1

MLB.com At Bat was one of the original iPhone OS applications shown at the Apple keynote announcing the iPhone 3G earlier this year. It raised excitement in MLB fans, and rightly so. This is a fantastic application for baseball fans. A great way to keep up to date on the go with scores and video clips.

When you launch the game you will nearly instantly be shown current scores of games in progress. Very quick to check the score of any game. Click on a game to see the box score at the bottom of the screen. You can swipe to the left or right for yesterdays games and tomorrows games.

For most games in progress and yesterdays games there are video highlights. A nice feature and well implemented. This is a killer feature that launches very quickly when using Wifi and fairly quickly under 3G. Another great feature is a preference (accessed from the System Preferences application) that lets you mark your favorite teams. This will make tracking the scores of those teams much easier.

The interface design in this application is nearly perfect. But even with that great design, the price would be a little high if it weren't for the video highlights.

Oddly, the designers have offloaded the game details, play by play, line ups, etc. to a very non-iPhone optimized WAP site that opens in Safari.

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Overall this is a fantastic application and a must buy for MLB fans. On the downside, the future is unknown. There's a note on the application description that the MLB will provide this service through the 2008 season. Does that mean that this application will no longer be of use after the fall classic? Only time will tell and still worth it for the remaining part of the season.