With the T-20 world cup going on in England, its the perfect time to review one of the best widgets for catching up on cricket news: Cricinfo Mobicast. Cricinfo is a wholly owned subsidiary of ESPN and one of the top 5 single sports websites of the world. One of the best features of cricinfo has been its live ball by ball coverage of almost all the major test, one day and T-20 internationals. With Cricinfo Mobicast, ESPN (along with Plusmo) is attempting to make its presence felt in the mobile internet world. Lets see how the widget fairs on our 5800s.

Installation

Cricinfo Mobicast can be downloaded for free from ovi store client on your 5800s or the ovi webstore. The installation file is just 0.23 MB making download and installation a swift process.

Features

The widget brings most of the features of cricinfo to your 5800s. The home screen displays all the live matches being played within that day. Users have to just click on the match, to catch up the live commentary or if the match has concluded the match bulletin and match result. As can be seen from the screenshot to the right, users can follow news, podcasts and photos from the widget. Photos do keep up with the high resolution screen of our 5800 and can be viewed fullscreen in portrait or landscape mode depending on the orientation of the photo.

One of the best features of this widget is the flickering alert for boundaries (4s and 6s) and wickets. These alerts are loaded before the scorecard updates, just like listening to a live commentary when the commentator first announces the outcome (boundary or wicket) and then dwells into the details. Job well done, developers of the widget!

Pros

1. Much faster than following on mobile browser
2. Live ball by ball commentary along with the scorecard
3. High resolution photos
4. Links to cricinfo podcasts
5. Well designed alerts for boundaries and wickets

Cons

1. Widget freezes every now and then
2. Clicking on some of the ads, install adware like applications

Verdict

Cricinfo is one of the better written widgets available on Nokia 5800 today. There is no real competition to this widget as there are no other websites which offer better cricket coverage over the internet than ESPN cricinfo. The widget does bring most of the main  features of the website to our mobile devices. With high resolution photos, podcasts and animated alerts, Cricinfo Mobicast is a complete cricket widget and a must have for cricket fans across the world.

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