France 2010 might be the least essential iPhone app I’ve ever had a chance to review. As an app that would theoretically educate you on the happenings of the 2010 Tour De France, it is nearly completely useless.
The 99-cent sports app has three main buttons: One listing the stages of the tour, another with a tour news feed, and third labeled “Teams” that lists the members of each country’s team in the tour. There’s actually less information under those three tabs than you could even imagine there being, if that’s even possible.
For starters, a team’s button literally just lists a roster of team members. I suppose that’s useful if you meet a guy in a bar who claims he’s on the Great Britan’s Team Sky and he tells you his name is Ned — you have a list handy to check out his story and discover there is no Ned on Team Sky.
There is no other information listed under the team page. Not how long the team has existed, not a single bio for any of the riders on the team — nothing. There is a link to the team’s website, making you wish you would’ve gone there in the first place, which is always great.
The “News Feed” acquits itself the best of the three buttons available, though it’s almost by default. The News Feed consists of a series of links sorted by the time they were published. There’s no search or sort options, and the accompanying pictures for the articles are mostly cut off until you click the story link, making you wonder why they’d include the half-photos at all.
Finally, there is the “Stages” button. It is, of course, a list of each of the Tour De France stages. You’re told the number of the stage, the distance of the stage, the “route” (ie: Cambrai to Reims), and the profile (ie: flat, or hilly).
Clicking one of the links on the “Stages” page opens up an in-app map that maps out the stage, but you won’t see who won the stage, or any other potentially relevant information. You will be able to click a button that pinpoints your location on this map. Which, unless you’re at the Tour De France, won’t exactly be relevant at all. I was actually hoping that the app was going to show you how far you’d have to go from your current location to complete a stage of similar length, but it does not. Of course it doesn’t.
Please, do not download this app. It fails in almost every conceivable way. It offers you no information you couldn’t find yourself within 10 seconds, and the information it does have is barely useful as it is.
