That hasn't been the case. , a spot-the-differences game the sports giant co-brands with Epic Tilt, was a lackluster offering that hasn't seen an update in more than a year--kind of disappointing for a paid app with a . The scores-and-news app fared a little better with some nice interface touches, but the app makes it difficult to get details about the games you're interested in--ESPN's bread and butter, when you think about it. (To be fair, the news isn't all grim-- has gotten strong reviews, if you happen to be a fan of sports talk radio.)
The arrival of the iPad brings a new app----and the promise that might finally live up to its "worldwide leader in sports" moniker in the mobile world. While ESPN has upped its game to match the iPad's bigger screen in many respects, ScoreCenter XL is marred by some wobbly or missing features.
Like many apps available for download when the iPad first arrived, ScoreCenter XL suffered from crashes--a result of developers having to build their apps without being able to test them on actual devices. Version 1.0.1 of ScoreCenter XL was released a month ago, and seems to have resolved many of those problems--I didn't have any crashing issues during my testing at any rate, so I'm able to judge the app on its own merits.
The app's XL label gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect with this iPad offering--it's a super-sized version of ScoreCenter expanded to make the most of the greater screen real estate. To that end, the iPad app retains one of the best features of the iPhone edition of ScoreCenter--the ability to customize the app to feature your favorite teams and sports. Under the app's Settings pop-up window, you can add teams you want to track via ScoreCenter. (And a lot of teams, too--there's a soccer team in the lower divisions of England's Football League that I'm inexplicably fond of, and ScoreCenter let me add them to my favorites without any fuss.) You can set push alerts for your favorite teams to notify you when a game starts, when someone's scored, or when a quarter, period, inning, or game have ended.
Adding your favorite teams allows ScoreCenter to grab relevant news, video, and scores--tapping a team icon brings up the related content, while another pane shows the most recent and upcoming scores of games involving the teams you follow. (That pane appears at the top of the screen in portrait mode; I much prefer the landscape view where the scoreboard pane runs down the left side of the screen and is much easier to read.) Alas, the scoreboard in ScoreCenter XL retains an unfortunate shortcoming of the iPhone version, at least for us West Coast sports fans--until around noon local time, the scoreboard defaults to scores from the night before, even if games are already underway for today's action. It's a bit annoying to have to scroll downward to see how my team is doing in a game that started at 1 p.m. Eastern if it's not yet noon in my part of the world.