For those who don’t know, the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing is a series of professional surfing events held in Hawaii every November and December which dates back to 1983. It’s regarded as the second- most prestigious surfing title, and I’m told it’s totally tubular.
While I’m not sure I know enough about surfing to verify that claim, I do know enough about iPhone apps to tell you the event’s recently released app is, in fact, very much tubular.
Vans Triple Crown of Surfing is actually a somewhat limited iPhone app, but it’s still incredibly cool and will occupy plenty of time for any surfing fanatic. Its main feature is bringing live Webcasts of the Reef Hawaiian Pro, the O’Neill World Cup of Surfing and the Billabong Pipeline Masters to your iPhone in very nice quality.
Even if you’re late to the party, the iPhone app has video archives of the events for you to watch, as well as some more standard stuff like news, results and photos. So while Triple Crown of Surfing may not be flooded with features, you’d be hard-pressed to find an iPhone app with more video content.
The iPhone app’s not free, but it’s the next best thing – 99 cents. The only big negative with this release is that to watch any of the videos, you have to have a Wi-Fi connection.
The smaller issue is what I alluded to earlier — that aside from tons of video, there isn’t much going on. Simple things like surfer profiles and event history seem like they would be natural additions, but they unfortunately aren’t.
Also, it has to be noted the iPhone app only provides video and information for the men’s events – those looking for coverage of the women’s events will have to go elsewhere.
Still, I can’t see any surfing fan complaining about getting video access to three major competitions for only $1. I didn’t experience any lag, and as I mentioned, the videos are high quality.
Now that I’ve got a great surfing app for my iPhone, all I’ve got to do is update my surfing lingo.
