Review: Balloons!
November 20, 2009
, Posted by App-reciation Reviews at 9:31 PM
Category: Entertainment
Price: $ 2.99
Requirements: iPhone, OS 3.0 or later
What's good: Are you looking for an app that's original, entertaining, uncomplicated, and worth your money? If so, check out Balloons! The concept is simple, but we've never seen anything like it and we can bet you haven't either. Choose from several colorful balloons, snap a picture to include, add a message, and let everything float into the sky. The app uses location services to determine where you are, and allows you to track where and how long your balloon drifts! It'll keep aimlessly floating along until someone catches it in real time, but the fun doesn't end there, because you can also grab balloons from the air around your current location and even reply to people's notes and photos. Sharing thoughts, reading interesting ideas, and finding new friends have never been more fun! This is one excellent twist on social networking that combines an amazingly unique concept with realistic animations and sound effects, easily whizzing past other apps in similar categories. Take our word for it - we can guarantee that you'll be blown away!
Suggestions for improvement: Provide for attaching pictures from your albums or the camera roll to your balloon, and hopefully update to allow users to manually select balloons they want to catch.
Breakdown:
Interface - 5/5 Creativity - 5/5 Experience - 5/5 Controls - 5/5
App-reciation - 5/5
I've been using this app for almost 2 weeks, and it's tons of fun!
Other update suggestions:
-Map feature
-Ability to add favorites for both launched & caught
-Stats - re: number of popped, launched, caught and number of floating balloons
Not sure about the pic situation. At first I was totally fine with the real-time aspect of here-and-now pic taking, but I've seen a huge increase in the number of balloons without pics. To me the best balloons are those with both a pic and text, and maybe allowing users to add previously taken pics. would be helpful.
Anyway, a great app worth every penny!
Ron
intuitron at twitter
Favorites! How could I have forgotten? That would make an awesome update. =)