This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Every Movie Finder + Trailer App, Reviewed. Additional details may be found in the original article.
The final two movie applications for the iPhone are Trailers ($4) and Trailers Lite (Free) by xTeo. Though it’s tempting to dismiss Trailers out of hand because of the limited functionality it provides—it’s just a trailer display application—a large database and some novel features help it do a good job of providing access to what are otherwise freely available movie trailers and posters on the Internet.
Unlike the other programs shown here, Trailers is sort of like a front end for Apple’s official QuickTime Trailers web site, including not just individual trailers for individual movies, but also downloadable movie posters and—potentially, at least—multiple trailers for individual films if they’re available. Interestingly, Trailers lets you save posters to your photos collection, using a higher resolution than the standard iPhone screen capture, and also includes trailers for both upcoming and current movies. It lets you e-mail trailer links to someone else, as well.
The problems with Trailers are several in number.
First, and not discussed anywhere in its program description on the App Store, it only works when an iPhone or iPod touch is in Wi-Fi mode; it doesn’t work with the iPhone or iPhone 3G in either EDGE or 3G data mode. Additionally, besides its overly high price, it’s very bare on film details, doing little more than referring you to Apple’s trailer web page or the movie’s official site for more. All the details and links it provides are all basically just captured from Apple’s own trailers web site, and reformatted hastily for the iPhone—Apple could and probably should have done this itself. Similarly, while Trailers has a more visually-focused widescreen poster browsing mode that lets you pick films by image rather than text, it then doesn’t rotate the rest of its informational interface into the widescreen format. This is all putting aside the fact that you don’t benefit from any of the movie ticket, theater finding, and other features found in trailer-laden apps such as Movies and Now Playing.
Overall, Trailers feels like it’s not quite finished yet, but thanks to its database, there’s more to be seen here than in KickScreen above, and serious potential for this application to provide considerably more value than a mere YouTube database search could offer. We look forward to seeing what the developer does with upcoming versions, and hope that the price will become more reasonable. iLounge Rating: C.
Trailers Lite is the free version of Trailers, offering similar but slightly stripped down functionality as a teaser of what’s in the full version of the application. In addition to working only on Wi-Fi networks, Lite is limited to showing 50 trailers rather than the over 300 found in the paid version, makes it a little less convenient to play each trailer, and lacks the ability to save movie posters to your photos collection. Practically speaking, this means that Lite gives you the ability to see most of the trailers for films currently in theaters—plus some that aren’t—and get basic details and art for the movies in the directory.