Movie Mate Pro Makes Finding and Tracking Movies a Breeze

Summary 8/10

Movie Mate Pro is a simple yet informative app that helps you keep track of all kinds of informatiom about movies.

• Movie Mate Pro 2.0.1  |  
• Free or $0.99  |  
• TGOMEWS

I love watching movies. I have a pretty decent collection, reference movies often, and always have a list of movies I want to see — both old and new. Just recently I noticed my brother updating a list on his phone of movies he’d like to see while we were watching previews in the theater. He was using a simple text file, but I started to wonder what kind of apps existed to do just that. Then Rita told me about Movie Mate Pro [Editor note: you're welcome!].

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Movie Mate Pro is a simple yet informative app that helps you keep track of all kinds of informatiom about movies.

Movie Mate Pro intro and Box Office screen

Clean Interface

The first thing you’ll notice about Movie Mate Pro is how clean the interface is. It follows Google’s guidelines for designing apps and employs the Holo theme. There are several screens with different movie listings to view, including Box Office (or current films), Opening, Coming Soon, and even DVD Releases. You can swipe left or right to see each of these screens. They each look like the above Box Office screen.

The icons that go across the top are pretty intuitive as well. The first icon is the layout icon which allows you to switch between just two different layouts: movie posters with titles (pictured above) and movie posters with titles and ratings (pictured below).

Alternate listing layout and search results

The next icon is for Search. This functionality is available on every screen, which I thought was a fantastic move by the developers. Searching for a title will display the posters, titles, and ratings for the results, seemingly sorted by rating. If I had one request here, it would be to allow to sort by title or at least change the rating rankings. Right now it seems Rotten Tomatoes takes precedence, followed by Flickster, then IMDB.

The last icon is the Menu icon, which reveals three items: Favorites, Watchlist, and Settings. These are all pretty standard screens. Both Favorites and Watchlist allow you to remove movies as well as sort the list by either release date or title. I do wish there was more of an archiving feature for the Watchlist. Instead of just removing a movie, you should be able to mark it “watched,” much like the way you do on IMDB. The Settings screen includes some ability to clear your lists and search history, as well as customize movie results.

Favorites and Watchlist

Movies

Now onto the important part – viewing movies! This area is certainly the most impressive section on the app, including a lot of information laid out in a very navigatable way.

Movie Overview and Reviews

There are four screens to swipe through: The Overview, Synopsis, Reviews, and Tweets — which is a list of tweets mentioning the movie. On the Overview screen, you will find a lot of information about the movie:

• Three different ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, Flickster, and IMDB
• Rotten Tomatoes’ short general review which is based on the reviews
• Basic information about the movie including the Director, Cast, Runtime, Release Year/Date, Genre, Studio, and DVD Release.

You can also easily watch the trailer on YouTube. While I do wish it launched the native YouTube app and not the mobile website, I was very surprised by how well this worked.

Trailer for the greatest story ever told.

There is also a way to “share” the movie you’re looking at, however it only allows you to comment with a hashtag for the movie title and restricts you to an @reply directed at the app’s own Twitter handle. This area should really be relabeled to “Tweet” or changed to share a link to the movie’s IMDB page.

Conclusion

Movie Mate Pro is a really nice, well designed, informative app that is a must for movie people. It’s a great reference tool and incredibly useful for keeping track of your Watchlist. While there are a few things that I think should be fixed — like an archive and better sharing — the app is well worth the $0.99 price it asks for.