Pocket Bracket Offers Some Anger Management For Your March Madness
PocketBracket: 2011 March College Basketball To... ($0.99) by Pure Concepts, LLC is a rare March Madness dedicated app that isn’t a remake of an internet client. Following in the tracks of the 2010 app of the same name, PB 2011 claims to eliminate the tedious aspects of managing a bracket while keeping it in your pocket for quick access to the spring tournament.
Since we are still several weeks away from knowing the bracket seeding, the data from 2010 is automatically loaded into the app. This enables you to familiarize yourself with the app until 2011’s data is available. Not only can you create more than one bracket, but you can also organize pools, join unlimited pools and, of course, get all of the scores as they occur. The pool organization can take place before the tournament seeding.
The touch screen is a natural medium for setting up your bracket and the remainder of the interface feels right. There is a unique feature called “SmartPick” where you can pick a team to win in a later round and it will automatically pick them to win the previous games. Faithful fanatics, you have not been forgotten. This means you can select Villanova to win it all from the very beginning, just don’t come to me when your bracket immediately gets trashed. You can also share you brackets via Facebook and Twitter.
Obviously any March Madness app has to share the stage with big name competition such as CBS and ESPN who have millions of viewers to cater to. Jason from Pure Concepts addressed this issue:
“…we’ve been around the block and are experienced handling the demand of March Madness. We pride ourselves on being nimble and able to respond to our user’s. We respond heavily to user feedback. I personally read each App Review and email from our users. We discuss them as a team each season and determine how best to address each. In the end, we’re not looking to be an “all in one” app or an ESPN. We could never compete with them. We believe we provide a different experience.”
Future updates include revisiting the network tab (which offers multiple views between recent brackets, top brackets and network stats), beefing up the scoreboard tab (hopefully to add more than just scores) and a very interesting iOS versus Android bracket pool. Apple/NCAA fanboys, here is your chance to kick some fandroid fanny.
For $0.99, both serious and casual college basketball fans alike should check out this application. It won’t feature the depth of ESPN but it will enable a quick and smooth method to create your brackets and take them on the go. Pure Concepts also seems committed to being nimble and sensitive to any issues that may arise which, in itself, is probably worth the price of admission.
