If you hadn’t heard that Adult Swim, the adult-centric block of programming shown on Cartoon Network’s channel late at night, offers a universal app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, don’t worry, you aren’t missing anything. Chock-full of bugs, watching a show via the Adult Swim app (its main component) gave me a headache, and until the app’s functionality is corrected, you won’t be using the app much.
OK, Adult Swim is free (mostly), so it has that going for it. Don’t get too excited over the integrated games dashboard though, because you’ll need to shell out a buck per game (most are for iPhone, not iPad), and the page doesn’t load fully in portrait mode, so it looks bad to boot. But you aren’t really here for games are you? No, you want to watch Adult Swim programming.
Although I found the selection of full episodes available in Adult Swim to be adequate (there are many clips available, too), actually watching an episode was challenging. For starters, the quality is ridiculously poor. Using a Wi-Fi-only iPad, I tried several networks to see if the quality was an issue on my end. It wasn’t. Not only did the episode morph into a complete blur often, the stream would randomly go into fast-forward mode, cutting out the sound. I also experienced several crashes and random pausing, even when the episode appeared fully buffered. That’s a significant number of issues to occur during an 11-minute show.
The Adult Swim app is a universal download, but the iPad version comes with a few random extras. When viewing the schedule on the iPad, Adult Swim will detect your location, and show you current weather information (this process is also extremely slow). The schedule is minimally displayed in the lower corner, and — through a button underneath the forecast — users have access to a full-screen clock and a calculator. A song is also playable at the bottom of the page. I don’t know why Adult Swim included these features, perhaps to show how wacky its staff is. I’m sure viewers would have preferred the app to be fully functional rather than mathematically inclined.
Download the free Appolicious for iPad app
