Lumiappaday #20: IMDb demoed on the Nokia Lumia 800

Here’s an application that has had petitions before to bring to the Nokia platforms. It’s IMDb, the Internet Movie Database – find news on the films and those film stars. Being on a phone you have social location features to point you to cinemas and shows near you (a bit like a feature in #18, Poynt)

IMDb is always my one stop shop to find any film/tv related info. The ratings is of great help as that sometimes decides whether I’m going to go get a particular DVD or sometimes heighten or underestimate expectations for a movie. I like using it for those moments where I’m like “I’ve seen her in a movie before…is that…., or that cartoon character’s voice sounds familiar, is it….”

Apologies for delay in posting. YouTube is under maintenance and won’t let us publish the video.

#20) IMDb

Price: Free

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/ff971299-eed8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jENVj0n5wrc

Developer Blurb:

I MDb is the world’s largest collection of movie, TV and celebrity information, and has the leading app for Windows Phone to find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photo galleries, get US TV listings, find latest DVD and Blu-ray releases, explore popular charts and share movie information.

We aim to list every detail about every movie and TV show ever made, including who was in it, who made it, the plot, user ratings, trailers, photos, reviews, quotes, goofs, trivia and much more.

• Over 1.5 million movie and TV titles
• Over 3.2 million celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and other crew member 

View:

• Movie trailers
• User reviews for movies and TV shows
• Critics reviews for movies and TV shows
• Quotes, trivia and goofs about movies and celebrities
•  Your browse and search history on IMDb

Look up:

• Movie showtimes at local theaters near you
• TV listings for your local time zone
• Recaps of TV shows from previous night
• Upcoming movies
• Latest entertainment news

Explore popular charts:

• Best Picture – award winners
• Top rated movies of all time (IMDb Top 250)
• Most popular movies of the day on IMDb (MOVIEmeter)
• Most popular celebrities of the day on IMDb (STARmeter)
• Lowest rated movies of all time (IMDb Bottom 100)
• Most popular movies listed by genre (Action, Horror, Romance, Comedy and many more)
• Most popular TV shows
• US Box office results
• Celebrity birthdays

Rating: 9.75

 Design: 10

The app looks very nice, starting with a golden splash screen and the beautiful colour scheme of black and yellow in flowing panorama. At the back you have a sort of faded scene from random featured movies which is very subtle, not impeding on the readability of text, in fact adding to the classy appeal.

Due to being all about movies, the app is constantly colourful with movie poster thumbnails and star photos.

 Usability: 10

The application is extremely usable. First and foremost you just have three main screens – stuff for today (divided into show times, movie meter and top stars). Pan right from here and you get top news, pan left (or pan right again from top news being panoramic) is your menu. Here you can go through movies, find theatres near you, tv info, celebrities, dvd and blue-ray releases, surprise me (a random shake and get a random IMDB page) and history.

One thing that’s often overlooked – a home button to quickly bring you back to bring you quickly back to the surface (quite apt that Inception is featured in the main view). The IMDB icon is that home button. It’s always visible and pressing it brings you back to the main view. Another really useful thing is having another persistent search button. Just need to look something up? Press that magnifying glass that’s always at the top right corner. I like how it inconspicuously blends but you know it’s there when you want to use it.

I’ll go through just two of the main ways I use this:

Finding out about movie/actors.

To find movie or actor just click whenever they appear or click the search button at the top right corner.

You have metro UI that shows 3 panes. First an overview where you can look at the film poster and pictures of the movie as well as movie details, ratings, options to watch the trailer, show times, plot summary and synopsis, all of which are clickable.

Pan to the right and you can look at the top billed cast, each with a picture and you can click all cast, top billed .

Pan again to the right and you can see reviews, fun stuff like quotes, news related to this film and actions to view on imdb direct or email the link.

The actor page consistently has the same lay out, so pictures of the actor, details about them, a bio.

Pan right and you can see films they’re known for with an option to look at all their films. Pan right once more and you can view fun stuff, trivia, quotes, news etc.

Finding where to watch a movie.

Clicking on a movie  show times. Shows you where its playing – location based showing whats near.

But you can also click the in theatres portion for show times which can be organized based on movies that you want to watch or theatres near by.

Clicking a theatre shows you their movies as well as a map and option for direction. Unfortuantely it opens the bing maps and not Nokia Drive.

 Additional

You have additional features such as movie meter that is ranking the top films or star meter for well, the top “stars”. There’s panel separate for top news.

Going back to menu you’ve also got some great features such as TV , celebrities, DVD/Blueray and surprises me (As well as history for films you’ve been checking out). DVD is pretty good if you’re looking to buy/rent out a DVD it’s nice to see what’s newly available in shops or coming soon.

On the theatre page itself you can view the map directly to look for nearby theatres.

Performance: 9

Start up is about 3 seconds. Not super slow but I’ve grown to be impatient. The rest of the site is as usual, fast and fluid to navigate. You will be needing an internet connection of course to load up content, and surprisingly, without WiFi on average 3G signal it’s still quite fast at loading content.

Videos are high quality when streaming and the full screen button on the player allows you to remove the black bars.

However, there is a portion of the app that makes it crash 100% of the time. When clicking on a movie’s synopsis, it will close. However, that’s a very small portion of the site and it’s completely possible to navigate the whole entire app without ever clicking synopsis (unlike that other instability issue with #16)

Price: 10

It’s free – no ads.

Conclusion:

This official application from IMDb is a must have for any film fans. Not only can you get rich, beautifully presented information on your favourite movies, DVDs, film stars etc, you can also find out where new released films are showing.

Tags: featured

Category: Applications, Lumiappaday, Nokia, Windows Phone