A couple of things in this app need improvements. Although the photos are helpful, they are not very big, and they display only in portrait orientation, not landscape. Since visual identification is such a major feature of this app, the photos should be higher resolution, and better optimized to fill the device screen. It would also be nice if the app included video clips; perhaps a future version will add them.

Also, this app downloads a huge amount of data, storing it all on the SD Card. That is to be expected, but I encountered some problems with the download process. The Settings area has two options: download the data as needed (which works well provided that you have a data connection), or download and sync the entire database. When I selected the option to download the entire database (Wi-Fi is recommended for this task), the app hung and never completed the download. Let's hope that this issue will be fixed in an update.

Regardless, overall Audubon Birds is an excellent field guide and an exciting new tool for bird watchers.

Have you discovered an exciting Android app? Contact or on . You might also like other .