This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Big-Named Games & Inspirational Apps. Additional details may be found in the original article.
There’s one and only one reason we’re featuring Pour1out (Free) in iPhone Gems, and then, we should note up front that it’s the first “Rated 17+” title we’ve ever covered on iLounge. The reason: it is an amusing, if not especially well-executed demonstration of how a free iPhone app can be used as a promotional tool for companies.
We picked it so that other developers might be inspired by the concept.
We actually laughed at the application description found in the App Store for Pour1out: “Do you ever wish you could pour one out for a homie, but don’t have a 40oz nearby? Wait, you just bought a $200 phone, do you even know what a 40 of malt liquor is?” Well, for those who haven’t heard of 40’s, malt liquor, or pouring one out, the idea is to honor a dead friend by spilling some of a beer or another alcoholic drink on the ground—a tribute sometimes offered to dead rappers and the like. Pour1out uses a digitized bottle of malt liquor, animated like a movie to show the motion of pouring its contents out, all triggered by your tilting of the device’s accelerometer. It’s nothing fancy, and not necessarily as impressive as iBeer, but yeah, it works.
What’s interesting about Pour1out is that unlike iBeer, it’s free. And it’s actually a promotion for the developer’s web site, 40Cozy, which sells decorative temperature wraps (“cozies”) for 40s and other drinks—you can even put a cozy of your choice on the iPhone’s animated bottle. The idea of selling “cozies” for 40s, traditionally wrapped in brown paper bags, is laughable on its face, but the concept of promoting a product with an iPhone app is really smart.