App Review: Prime TV

Alright, I just want to clear something up before going forward with this review: I love television. In this season alone, I am keeping up with seven different shows ranging from comedy to sci-fi to drama. I am the type of person who memorizes their TV schedule and builds their life around it. The condition is more of a curse than a blessing, but at least it's an enjoyable condition. So when I saw how slick Prime TV looked, I realized the app could really help me manage my hectic schedule and simultaneously keep me up with news about my favorite shows. Did it live up to the daunting task of managing my entertainment needs? Find out after the break.

Upon starting up Prime TV, you're greeted by a quick loading screen with a collage of show images in the background before the main panorama appears and your list of shows pop into view. Assuming you've already added a few shows to follow, the panorama is normally split up into four pivots: Shows, Upcoming, Aired, and News. Beginning with the former, the Shows pivot quickly displays all of the shows you're currently tracking and underneath the title presents how many episodes you've missed and what time it usually airs live. Swiping left shows the Upcoming panel, which takes all of your shows and creates a schedule for all of the new episodes in the next two weeks. Pivot once more and you'll get to the Aired panel, which looks very similar to the Upcoming panel but displays what shows aired in the past two weeks. Finally, the last pivot brings up the News screen which streams in TV news from sources like TVGuide and TV.com. Also, the main panorama's background is usually set to display an image from the show that airs next (you can see that in action above with the excellent How I Met Your Mother on our Focus).

From there you can navigate to a few different areas. You can visit a page dedicated to a series or an episode-specific page. The series screen brings up another panorama, offering a ton of information up front. The first panel is basic show information with the number of unwatched episodes, channel aired on, time, genres (which are customizable), cast, and show summary (seen above with the best show on television, Community, as an example). Pivot one over and you're at the Episodes which gives a full episode guide to the entire series, broken down per season. Swipe to the left and now you're at the News panel which is similar to the main screen's news except its dedicated entirely to whatever series you're looking at. Finally the last panel is the Gallery which shows several pictures in a grid collage. Going back to Episodes, once you tap on an episode a third, smaller panorama is shown broken down into three parts: General shows exactly such information, Videos is a beta feature which links to a YouTube video of the episode trailer, and Pictures brings up a scrollable list of images from the episode.

Prime TV does an excellent job with its design, keeping lots of different elements consistent. The app uses an excellent mix of whites and blues to emphasize different areas of the gorgeous Metro UI implementation. The use of slightly opaque background images of your shows is also extremely pleasant to the eye and make the app feel much more personalized than other TV show tracking apps. All of this is great, but did we mention it's also fast? The app packs a ton of content and features downloaded from the web, but in spite of that runs as smooth as butter and responds to every touch. Also, besides the Settings menu, Prime TV breaks down into basically three panoramas which makes the app intuitive and natural to use.

Speaking of the Settings, the app provides a ton of options to customize it even further including manually adjusting the air time of each series, changing the main panorama's wallpaper, organizing shows and episodes based on your own order, and options to tweak the great Live Tile of the app. One feature we really enjoyed in the Settings menu was the ability to pick between different performance options, as we could pick between the effects-less 'Almost None' mode, the 'Basic' mode, the strong mix of performance and visuals in the default 'Premium' mode, a or the animation-heavy 'Full' mode.

Prime TV is quite possibly my favorite new app. I may be biased since I love TV shows, but developer Renfred Law has outperformed most other show trackers in wealth of features, superbly executed design, and no-hesitation performance. The app also promises to include even more features in the future like social integration and a notification system. So if you're a television addict like I am, you'd be an utter fool to miss out on this incredible app.

Prime TV Renfred $0.99 + Trial Version 1.11