Fanball.com Fantasy News and Updates – Review

Our rating:

By: Fanball.com Fantasy News and Updates

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2008-11-03

Developer: Basem Elsokary

Price: 0.00

User Rating:

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Nobody will convince an outsider to fantasy sports that it can be one of the more competitive and maddening experiences of your life until you field a virtual team and find yourself 1 and 7 going into week 9 of an NFL season where you had the 2nd pick of your draft. Please don’t ask me how I know. But when the entry fees of some fantasy leagues are rumored to be in the hundreds of dollars and the payouts into the thousands, the diehards who plunk down the cash to play have lots of not-so-crazy reasons to focus their routinely obsessive appetites for sports news. And while guys like me are going to claim that even with 24/7 attention to injury reports, rumors and statistics there’s also considerable luck involved in the fantasy game, like in high stakes poker, it’s funny how the same people always end up finishing in the money – year in, year out.

Realistically, Fanball.com Fantasy News and Updates arrives as something between your second and possibly 20th source of information on who’s hurt this week and who’s a safe bet to add to your roster. Like most, the web site that hosts your league will cull the reports from local news outlets to give you a fairly comprehensive first source. And from there, the average team owner can choose to sift through limitless web sites, podcasts and radio shows to suppliment personnel decisions, much of it repeating the same local beat writers’ scoop.

While Fanball.com’s app expectedly makes use of similar sources, I like that it delivers in a concise and timely manner without having to pop open a Safari browser and dig through bookmarks. Sundays you can expect updates throughout the day for the NFL –  before NBC signed off on its Sunday Night coverage this week, it had already pushed out numbers on several key players in the game. The other 3 major pro sports also get daily updates (if you’re wondering, they are all over off-season baseball news). The interface is a no fuss, classified ad format that’s a breeze to flick through. Jumping from NFL to NBA, NHL or MLB news is painless and reveals the same clean layout.

In order to take this app from an afterthought download because it’s free (for a limited time – more on that later) to a must-have, first screen resource, they’ll need to deliver on some promised enhancements, and maybe a few that they haven’t. They currently list updates by player name in the order it was posted, without the ability to organize by team or sort by player name. That hurts. Also, there’s no way to designate favorite teams or to set your fantasy roster within the app to deliver customized reports or a way to filter out unwanted data. That really hurts.

When Fanball releases v2.0, they say that customization will be possible and it will come at a $1.99 price tag if you’re not already on board for the v1.0 release. Provided they can get that right, and maybe include a way to look back at some of the recent bulletins on a player rather than view only the last update, it would certainly warrant a higher rating and a closer look by the fantasy crowd. As it stands, it’s a good first step, and a nice freebee, but not a must-have yet.

Value: moderate value as a free download – we’ll see if the promised improvements make it worth $1.99
Would I Buy Again: yes
Learning Curve: extremely low
Who is it for: fantasy sports fans looking for a competitive edge 
What I like: clean layout, concise info, timely 
What I Don’t: lacking several sort and organizational features that would make it much more useful 

Final Statement: Grab it as a free download with the understanding that v2.0 promises to build on a nice idea