The aforementioned video is content from ESPN's television programming--largely, 30-second highlight videos from completed games, but sometimes lengthier features from , , and such. The videos appear in a pop-up window that you can blow up into full-screen mode with a tap of a button. (The picture looks less sharp when blown up, though.) Thankfully, you can watch these clips free of the embedded ads that characterize so much of the multimedia content at ESPN's Website.
Like ESPN's other mobile apps, ScoreCenter XL features a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen offering the latest sports news. Unlike with ScoreCenter on the iPhone, however, you can't tap the ticker to call up more information on the story.
By default, the app focuses just on your teams, but if you'd like to see what life is like outside your comfortable bubble, just tap on the My Sports button. That summons a menu of the sports involving the teams you follow. Tap on MLB, say, and you'll get a list of Major League Baseball scores and news, and not just the items relevant to your local nine. If I want to see what's happening in a sport where I haven't designated a favorite, I can tap on Top Events for a generic overview of the wide world of sports that tells me things like who won the Preakness Stakes and whether the interminable NBA playoffs are still going on.
Really, ScoreCenter XL offers what should be an idealized approach to following your favorites via your iPad. So what's the problem? Well, the content itself is pretty pedestrian at this point. Articles don't contain any hyperlinks to related content, and many of the stories are wire copy you can find elsewhere on the Worldwide Web for free. Even ESPN-specific content can be accessed on the company's Website without having to fork over the $5 cost of ScoreCenter XL. The content always doesn't feel that fresh: this past weekend, for example, ScoreCenter's top story for Oakland Athletics fans was Justin Duchscherer's return from the disabled list--even though the pitcher had been scratched from his start with an apparent injury for several hours already. And while you can get box scores and summaries from the latest games, ScoreCenter doesn't appear to give you any way to access team and individual stats for a season.
My biggest disappointment, however, deals with ScoreCenter XL's live-game tracking capabilities, which really should be the app's killer feature. After all, what better use for the iPad when your television set has been commandeered to watch or or some other atrocity than to check on the status of the A's-Angels game? Unfortunately, the ScoreCenter game-tracking interface feels fairly cluttered--at least for baseball anyhow. For baseball games, it's hard to see at glance who's batting and who's in the field. A scrolling play-by-play feed includes every pitch--there's no way to get ScoreCenter to show you only plays involving outs, hits, errors, or runs. And scoring plays appear in the same font as a regular old ground out to second--liberal use of a bold or different-colored font might help make things more apparent.