The weekly app review takes an international turn this week to follow the Volvo Ocean Race, a nine-month round-the-world sailing event currently in its first leg from Alicante, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa. With sailing teams now in the Roaring Forties section of the Southern Ocean, the race is starting to get interesting. Using the Volvo Ocean Race app, users can do things like view boat positions in 3-D, track weather, and watch reality-inspired videos of sailing teams. Despite some untimely crashes, this is a great app for fans of the Ocean Race and nautical nerds in general. Released in September, Volvo Ocean Race for iPad is a joint venture between Mueva el Volante and Virtual Eye. It is a free download with no advertising, available on iOS and Android. This review was conducted on an iPad 2 version 8.1, with Wi-Fi service.
WINDWARD: The Virtual Eye race tracker, providing a world map with tools to visually track the sailing teams, is excellent when it does not crash. Tapping on a boat brings up information like speed, VMG (velocity made good) and location coordinates. Users can also track environment factors around the racers like wind, isobars and sunlight. The race can be tracked in a world map view, or in 2-D or 3-D with zoom functions. Elsewhere, a swipeable content feed tells the story of the race, showcasing video of reality show-esque, behind the scenes action from each team. A watch log, updated three times each day, provides a written update on the race. The app also contains an IPTV channel with 24/7 streaming content surrounding the race and its teams. Live video is offered for select portions of the event, such as leg starts and in-port races. Team profiles include photos and bios of all team members and links to social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and YouTube.
ADRIFT: Unfortunately, this very cool app has some mildly irritating loading issues. It also crashes from time to time. Specifically, the racer profiles are slow to load. Some do not load at all. Some content items, like Inside Track, had no video clip or image attached. Swiping through the content cards in the main feed is not as smooth as it could be -- to move from item to item it takes a few swipes. Further to this, the content feed does not seem to do justice to the intensity of the race itself. A scrolling news feed or ticker could add a more exciting vibe. Being unfamiliar with the race prior to reviewing the app, I felt that the overall “cadence” of the user experience should have better matched the speed of the event itself. Video clips should be sharable, and an explanation of the ranking and performance data would be useful to new fans of the Ocean Race.
BOTTOM LINE: Overall, Volvo Ocean Race for iPad is an impressive product -- like nothing I have seen before. The race tracking tools powered by Virtual Eye are definitely worth a look. Aside from this feature and a 24/7 IPTV channel, the app could use a bit more spunk (and a few less crashes) to make it feel as intense as the Ocean Race itself. A sleeker content feed and more distribution touch points are recommended for future releases. I rate the app 3 stars. iTunes users give it 4 stars.
Amie Sheridan (amie.sheridan31@gmail.com) is a freelance writer in Philadelphia.
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