Taking Russell’s football talk a step further, FIFA and Yahoo have really scored an own goal with their “official” Mobile Matchcast app. On the first day of the tournament, it appeared to be having some teething issues, showing kickoff as 690 days away. That seems to be sorted, with the countdown now showing the time left until the final, but the problems don’t stop there. The application’s taken to rather nastily crashing the Sony Ericsson W810i I’m using (supposedly one of the supported handsets), while on a Nokia 6630, it doesn’t really function at all.
Apart from being mildly annoying, it’s a pretty significant misstep to bungle an application that’s really only useful for a monthlong tournament. One of the big lessons of mobile apps is that things have to work the first time a user tries them — most people don’t have the interest, patience or ability to play with settings, or re-download applications, or keep messing with them. Along similar lines, why is the application still “beta”? When’s it going to full release — in time for the next tournament in 2010?
In other football-related news, Motorola have bagged the services of David Beckham as a spokesperson celebrity endorser-person. It’s good to see he’s got his mind on the World Cup, seeing as he’s, you know, captain of England and all, but this agreement does appear to make a lot of sense. After all, you’ve got two entities seemingly incapable of substantive improvement, instead preferring “fashion”-driven cosmetic changes 
[tags]mobile, motorola, beckham, world cup, razr[/tags]
You aren’t going to bring up Beckham’s red card fiasco, are you? Let’s the bloke alone, with his wife.
Shockingly poor but with some potential.
They’ve made an interface that looks very nice, on a pwoerpoint - but running it on my SE K600 it is simply not usable, and in my experience that’s consistently one of the faster java phones on the market.
Given it’s over 200K and restricted to SEs and Nokia S60s with approx 176×220 screens and fairly unrestricted heaps, you can see exactly how they’ve written it - I’m assuming bloated code fixed to one screen size, but I can guarantee overuse of images. A bit of thought/experience/skill and they could have created an app half the size which moved very fast and looked very good.
No idea how good the content is, because I waited a minute to connect over 3G to be told the next match is 24 days away and then it started trying to reconnect to the server again for no obvious reason, so I staggered round the menus for as long as i could bear (30 seconds, with 2 secs lag between keypress and visible response) and then killed it.
Then again, it’s 2/3rds the size of the last app Yahoo put out and looks nicer if you don’t have to see it move, so give them another couple of years…