Ripe or Rotten Tomatoes?

• Category: Entertainment
• Developer: Cyrus Najmabadi
• Version: 1.4
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I found ourselves with some free time after dropping off our baby boy at my parents, and decided to catch a movie.  I pulled out my iPhone and loaded the local theatre chain’s website in Safari.  Finding a movie using the website was not a pleasant experience.  I had to drill down 3 menus starting from country to get down to my location, and then hit another page to find the showtimes for “Tropic Thunder”.  Even with 3G turned on this took more than a few minute to do.

Needless to say, after I got home I immediately started looking for apps that would speed up that process.  With that I started playing with two apps - Showtimes (review coming) and “Now Playing”.  Both apps take advantage of your GPS to find the theatres nearest your current location and provides showtime information.

The nice thing about the app being reviewed here - “Now Playing”, is that it integrates a number of features that makes a single-source for movie decision-making.  Besides finding the nearest theatre and displaying showtimes of the movies played, there, Now Playing adds a number of value-added features.  Now playing includes the movie synopsis, but more importantly, allows you to view the movies reviews from Rotten Tomatoes which I love.  Rotten Tomatoes is what I use before I decide seeing a movie anyways, so this integrated feature is perfect for me.

In addition to the movie reviews, even provides links to movie trailers.  I think this is a great feature if you are in a wi-fi network when deciding whether to see a movie or not.  The only thing is when I selected “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, the trailer that I got was the one for Sex and the City.  Luckily most of the links with the other movies were correct.

Thumbs Up or Down?

Thumbs Up.  I love apps that do more than the standard and provide you with features that make it the complete package.  For me, the integration with Rotten Tomatoes does it for me; if I just want to watch a movie with nothing in particular in mind, checking the tomato score and reading a couple of reviews makes those decisions so much easier.

App Review Score: 5.0 out or 5

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