TV Patrol
by ABS-CBN
Are you the type of person who always want to be upated, who always read newpaper, or watch news on TV? Checking news while on the go may be not that easy. You don't want to carry a newspaper or your TV everytime you go around, right? So what's the other way to stay updated? Of course, use your mobile phone! Here I present you the official TV Patrol news application developed for by ABS-CBN. Let's see if it this can make your everyday life easy.
Once you launch the TV Patrol app, you are presented the latest news with their thumbnails in a coverflow style a-la iPod. Scrolling here is not buttery smooth, it has a 1 second delay which may seem not too long but when you have actually tried it, it's not good. It's like the old Symbian^3 homescreen that will only move after the gesture has been made. And then there's the news title above every thumbnail presented in a bold text style for easy reading.
Tapping on a news item will take you here, the description view. What I noticed here is that the description is rather incomplete, it is more of like a script that the TV hosts actually say on-air. There is also a slew of sharing options just below the big thumbnail, which lets you share it on your Facebook or Twitter, via SMS and email.
Tapping on one of the sharing option, in this case via SMS, will open the said app with a text already typed. Another wrong thing here is they did not make it to also include lets say a link to the article on their website, or the video itself. It's just a plain text. It will be only useful to notify people, otherwise it's of no use.
If you try to watch a video, it will result in this error. I don't know why this error shows up but upon checking the user reviews on the Nokia Store for this app, it seems it's not only me. Something's wrong on the app itself. And the error message is not attractive, it looks like the default Qt dialogs.
This is what the video player looks like. There's the progress bar on the bottom left, though I don't know if you can scrub as the videos doesn't play. The volume slider is on the right of it, you can manually slide it to adjust the volume, or tap the icon to mute and unmute the video. I tried to adjust it using the volume rocker on the side of the N8, but it doesn't adjust. Too bad. I tapped the close button in disappointment.
There's also the handy search function which is very useful if you're looking for a video aired on a particular date. Selecting a month is very hard because you have to tap the arrow icon many times, or you can tap the Month name (October in this screen) and you can scroll down and up, which is even more frustrating. Pressing on the Search button will give you the list of videos on the right side. Again, scrolling is very hard. They have included an unintuitive down and up arrow buttons which is also hard to use because tapping those icons will either select the video name underneath it.
The above photos represent the Help section of the app. There are 6 categories and tapping them will show the appropriate topic.
The About screen where it shows the heavily and repeatedly used logo.
Tapping the Close button will show the confirmation dialog box asking you if you really want to exit. It is presented in a not-so-beautiful way.
CONCLUSION
The TV Patrol app has a great potential of helping people easily know the latest news. But alas, it seems the developer hurried and forgot some stuffs here. The app is not optimized. They should release an update soon or else they will continue to receive negative feedback. Overall, I cannot recommend download this app at this moment.
Nokia Store Link: http://store.nokia.com/content/135338
Price: Free
button and tap Pin to Start. Easy!
1 comments:
tooo bad for this app
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