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.

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Keep Tabs on New Movie Releases With eTrizzle

As you know, I’m a pretty big fan of movies! Earlier this year I reviewed Movie Mate Pro, an app for tracking theatrical releases. There is another side to the coin though; what about movies out of theaters that are released for purchase or streaming? With the amount of different online options out there, it can get tough to keep track of them all. That’s where eTrizzle comes in.

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eTrizzle helps you decide what to watch while at home. It’s a simple app/website that will aggregate movie listings from several online streaming/purchasing services, including: iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, Redbox, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Redbox Instant, and more. Even better, it’s well-organized and easy to search.

The Home Screen: New Releases

When you first open up the app, you’re taken to a list of the newest releases from across all of the supported services. As you can see from the above screenshot, each listing includes the title, movie poster, and Rotten Tomatos rating. Pressing one of the movies will take you to full listing screen with ratings, synopsis, actors, rating, runtime, the ability to view the trailer, and the list of services on which the movie is available.

Single Movie Screens

As you can see, streaming services will not list a price, whereas downloadable versions of the movie will. Pressing on one of the services will take you to a webpage for that movie; while this is OK for services like Amazon and Redbox (and even Google Play, I suppose), this proves problematic for Netflix and Hulu, where you cannot stream from a mobile browser. eTrizzle should really check for the native app and then if it’s not installed, kick the user to the Google Play store or website.

I also feel that services like Google Play, Netflix, and Hulu should be checking certain devices or OS for a native app, but responsibility here belongs to eTrizzle.

This is really the main/only functionality of eTrizzle (hence the short review). However, the app does have some fantastic organization options I want to talk about.

Stay Organized!

eTrizzle lets you not only do a text search using the bar at the top of each screen, but also allows you to browse movies by a lot of different criteria. There are dropdowns available that let you filter by things like Genre, Service, and even New/Popular.

Dropdown options for Genre and Service

At the bottom of the screen there are also 4 buttons: New, Popular, Services, and Browse. While the first three are self-explainatory, Browse has some pretty nifty lists you can check out, including: Free, Streaming, and Top Movies of 2012. This is followed by a list of all the genres.

The Browse Screen

I thought this was a really nice touch as it gives the user different exploring or discovery options.

Wishlist

While I really do like the service, I think it’s fairly obvious that they are just generating content exactly as it appears on their website. I’d really like to see better native integration by calling on-device apps for faster streaming/purchase. This would make the app incredibly powerful. I’d also really like to see a “Favorites” option that would allow me to keep a list of the movies I want to see, so I could quickly rent or stream when I’m ready to watch them.

Conclusion

eTrizzle is a really nice aggregator that helps you keep track of newly released movies, available for purchase of streaming. While I will continute to use it for that reason alone, I really would like to see some tighter integration with Android to make it feel like a native app. Right now, it feels more like a mobile-optimized website. I’ll hold off on giving it a rating now and look forward to what the developers will do in future builds!

More about → Keep Tabs on New Movie Releases With eTrizzle