IMDb review

Movie lovers rejoice! Two and half years later, IMDb (Internet Movie Database) has finally released their official iPhone and iPod touch application which is available for free in the App Store. Now you can browse the millions of movie pages on IMDb from your iPhone or iPod touch with an intuitive and elegant interface that is a pleasure to use.

The IMDb app is broken down into 3 main sections: Movies, TV and People. Movies includes Showtimes, Coming Soon, US Box Office Results, MOVIEmeter, and Top 250 Movies. TV sections include US TV Tonight and US TV Recaps. People breaks down further into STARmeter and Born Today. As an added bonus you can also find anything by keyword using the IMDb search box placed conveniently on the app’s homepage.

Showtimes: If you’ve been looking for a great way to find showtimes and discover new movies to watch in your neighborhood, IMDb blows away the competition with a slew of fabulous features. Using your GPS location find the top movies shwoing in your city, and research them in detail. Watch trailers, see their IMDb rating, view production and cast photos, find showtimes, read the plot & synopsis, discover the film’s top billed cast & crew with links to their full IMDb page, and more. You can also check out reviews and commentary from a wide range of external sources like Rotten Tomatoes, user reviews, and parental guides. For some fun you can even read about goofs and mistakes spotted in the movie. Finally for your convenience, the app links to the full imdb.com and amazon.com pages for each movie.

See upcoming releases and top US Box Office shows sorted by date. MOVIEmeter is a list of titles ranked by Most-searched, and Top 250 lists the highest rated flicks of all time as rated by imdb.com users.

US users will see US TV shows in their local area airing sorted by time. Each TV show has its own detail page, again with a ton of details, pictures, ratings, and fun facts. If you missed a TV show or are trying to catch up on a series, use the TV Recaps section to read the spoiler details.

STARmeter ranks the 25 most-searched stars on IMDb. Each star page is filled with photos, detailed bio, fun trivia and quotes, and the star’s full Filmography.

The IMBb app lacks the ability to log into your account and so that means you can’t rate movies, write comments, or see and update your personal lists. Given the massive amount of data (over 1.5 million movie and TV titles, 3.2 million celebrities, movie showtimes, trailers, photos, and ranked lists) you will need to be connected to a WiFi, 3G or Edge network connection to use the IMDb app, as it downloads the information as needed. As a positive the IMDb app itself is tiny (only 1/2 a MB in size) and won’t clog up your iPhone’s drive space.

Note: Due to the extremely high demand for this service, you’ll find that many other IMDb related apps have been developed (web based and app store versions) before this official release, that tried to give iPhone users the ability to use IMDb, although none will be able to give you what you will get from this official app, since IMDb doesn’t provide developers an API to build upon.

Overall, the initial version of the IMDb iPhone app should be on every Movie fan’s iPhone or iPod touch as it is truly the ultimate reference guide for Movies and TV shows. We hope to see user account features and support for other countries in the next revisions of the app.

AppSafari review of IMDb was written by Joe Seifi on December 10th, 2009 and categorized under App Store, Fun, Local, Movies, Reference, Search. Page viewed 19588 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.