To start off the show we're going to be looking at Movies & Showtimes. This was my very first movie related application after purchasing my first Android device. I might be partial to this application but we'll see how it stacks up against the other 3 competitors.

You can download it on the Market here.

After opening the application i noticed it was fairly laggy which was usually not the case with any app considering i'm running it on a Nexus One. After about 15 sec. I was taken to an error screen mentioning that my position could not be located. I found this rather odd considering that I had GPS on so i decided to investigate further. I asked my wife for her Sprint HTC Hero (My previous phone) since i knew the app was still installed on hers and everything seemed to start up fine.

After some digging I found out Movies & Showtimes doesn't have the same appreciation for WiFi as I do. It refused to find my location if I turned WiFi on. While in the process of testing the location issue I noticed that every time I switched between landscape and portrait mode, it seemed to refresh the data which took a few seconds before it displayed the home screen again. I didn't mind at first but after a while it became rather annoying.

From the moment the home screen loads you notice how bland the interface is. There are no movie posters, no rating system, no immediate options for trailer or showtimes, just the name of the movie with a brief description of the plot and a Google Ad banner at the top of every page. If you click into one of the selections, you're presented with little more. There is an option for IMDb cast and reviews which if clicked will take you to the IMDb website.

There is a button for a Trailer but if clicked on will run a search for the movie title on YouTube. One thing I did like was the option to pick which showtimes you would want to see times for categorized by day. But again when clicked took me to a 3rd party source (Google) for the information as well. All and all I believe this application took a very bare bones approach to presenting the little information it had. There were no signs of attempting to contain the information within the application, simply providing links to the appropriate sources which I guess got the job done... This is just the first of 4 so we'll see what else we can find.

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