^{Photo (c) Tim in Sidney/Flickr}

These days, the things you can follow on the run with your smartphone–your iPhone, your Android, your Nexus–are practically endless.  Weather updates, sports scores and clips, world news . . . heck, there’s even apps for watching your baby in their crib, I bet.  So that got ol’ Doug a’wonderin’–what apps are there that help you keep track of your favorite sport during the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympic games?

(And no, I don’t know why the Vancouver Olympics folks decided to emulate Stonehenge for their Olympics logo–these logos seem to be getting weirder by the year.  But look on the bright side:  at least it’s not as lame as the 2012 London Olympics logo.  [And there's a reason I just linked, instead of inserting a picture.  Ugh!])

Well as you might expect, there’s a plethora.  I downloaded three and tried them out, and looked at a couple more, and here’s what I found.

The iPhone apps I tested were NBC Olympics, 2010 Olympics, and 2010 Guide, all of which are pretty similar in feel and functionality.

Briefly, they’re all designed to help you keep track of the schedule, the events, and the results.  They also have some introductory information about each sport, which is nice.  Here’s how it broke out.

NBC Vancouver 2010:  Honestly, this “official” app was my least favorite.  It contains a lot of ads, and the way they’ve organized the navigation is not exactly intuitive

For example, as you can see in the opening screen, there’s a lot of, well, NBC Olympic “Up Close and Personal” nonsense under the “Now” heading.  I don’t know about you, but when I go to a screen labeled “now,” I expect to find out what’s happening now.  What sports are happening right now?  What medals are being contested?  What races just finished?  You want to know any of that?  Tough darts; you need to look elsewhere.

I was also extremely disappointed with the lack of internal links.  Okay; the Lindsey Vonn story is right on top.  Fine.  But follow the link and you get a story about Vonn’s downhill win, but no links to pictures or video.  And if you tap on that icon near the headline?  It takes you to the NBC social site for the Olympics.  No photos.  No video.

(And I find the enforced NBC blackout of video to be absurd; it’s been 7 hours since this particular even finished, and there’s no video up.  I know they want to force people to watch TV, but this is the internet age, you old media dinosaurs!)

Finally, because of the ads (look at the photo!), the text window for the news stories is tiny–something like a third (or a little more) of the iPhone’s screen.  Now, I’m a big fan of reading stuff on the iPhone despite its tiny screen, but cutting it down to a third?  Please, NBC.

Otherwise, this app is typical of the rest, with the categories of “Sports”, “Schedules,” and the like.  But honestly, I’d give it a miss.

Winter 2010 Vancouver (formerly iOlympics, not to be confused with Olympics Live (iOlympics), which is a completely different app):  In the category of “free,” I can’t decide between this app and  the 2010 Guide (below).  They both have many similar features–news, sports, schedule, and the like.  And at least this app doesn’t have a splash page that pretends to be hip and cool and happenin’ while giving you no real information to speak of:

It just gives you a list of the news.  Not flashy, no, but informative.  And this app allows you to adjust the settings–push notifications and the like–which is quite nice.  But again, the navigation is frustrating.  If you want the results, for example, you have to find your sport, and tap the “medals” option.  You can’t navigate to information from the schedules (which would seem natural), for example.  You can get the list of medals by country, but then you have to search that to find your sport.  On the flip side, if you know your sport, you can get a detailed schedule for that sport at least.

In short, it’s a little bit sparse, but it’s okay.  And at least it doesn’t have as many ads as the NBC app.

2010 Guide (noticing a name theme here?):  This app is quite a bit slicker than the Winter 2010 app above, I must admit.  The first thing that comes up is a schedule, which shows you “What’s on Now,” which is exactly the way I would have designed the app.

Further, the navigation is easy and intuitive; you don’t have to sit there thinking “Well, gee, I think curling is on right now; let’s see if I can find the results somewhere.”  Nope, there it is; tap, and you’re there.  Good work, designers.  Plus, I like the color scheme and (dare I say it) look and feel of this one quite a bit–not overpowering, but colorful, if you know what I mean.

The only thing that really bugs me about this app is the fact that when you tap the “results” for a sport, the results come up (really slowly) in landscape mode and don’t correctly fill up the screen

Oops!

In addition, the “wait, please!” message that you stare at while waiting for the results is in portrait mode, rather than landscape.

A pair of minor annoyances and a coding error, yes, for sure; but the two together are really irritating after a while.  On the other hand, the interface is clean, pretty bug-free, and intuitive to navigate.  So earlier protestations to the contrary, I would have to say that this is your best bet in the “free” category.

In addition to these three apps there’s a kinda neat one called Vancouver 2010 Olympics Guide, that is sort of a “tourist’s guide to Vancouver”, with an emphasis on the Olympics; the aforementioned Olympics Live (MSRP:  $0.99), which looks to be fairly similar to the free apps I’ve discussed here; 2010 Games (MSRP: $1.99, ditto [and notice how much trouble coming up with original-yet-recognizable names is?]; and finally Whistler 3D ($0.99), which bills itself as “the ONLY THREE DIMENSIONAL map app of the Whistler Blackcomb ski area”, and which I love if only for the icon of the goofy Vancouver Olympics logo, but in which it looks more like a loser from “Giant Robot Wars” than a silly clunky logo.  (If you’re bought it and used it, let us know in the comments section!)

^{Talk about taking a lemon and making lemon-aide!}

So there you have it.  My hope is that, by London in 2012, they’ll have worked out some of the kinks, and we’ll have a set of apps that is better at realtime updating, and even more important has links to actual film clips that are within a reasonable distance of being timely.  And of course the iPad will be on version 3 by then, so maybe you’ll even have some kind of live streaming ability.  That would be sweet!  (And honestly, I’m surprised Steve Jobs didn’t go for something like that–give out iPad to some members of the press with an app like that.  Hey, Steve!  I’m an idea guy!  Pay me!)

So download your favorite, and enjoy the Olympics even when you’re in the can at work!  Citius, Altius, Fortius, one and all.