UPDATED: “Route 66” TV show app has an identity problem

About 10 episodes from the original “Route 66” television series were recently released as iPhone and iTouch applications.

Each full episode in the app costs 99 cents, and includes a few screen shots. It gives you the option of watching the episode on a full screen on your iPhone or iTouch that crops a bit of the top and bottom of the image, or you can adjust it to see the entire image as you would have on television.

The apps were developed by I-Mobilize courtesy of Infinity Entertainment, owner of the rights to the show.

Ten episodes were available Saturday night at the AppShopper store. A spokesman said in an e-mail Saturday that additional episode apps would be released if sales were good.

I downloaded what was described as “Route 66 #7” on my iTouch. The app included about a half-dozen screen shots from that app’s particular episode, “Across Walnuts & Wine” from Season 3.

The images of the show looked sharp on the my iTouch’s small screen, and I could clearly hear all of the dialogue on the iTouch’s tiny speaker. Here’s an image from the episode that I shot with my camera of co-stars George Maharis and Martin Milner in their Corvette:

Typical for the show’s high quality, I found “Across Walnuts & Wine” engrossing and thought-provoking.

However, there’s one big problem.

Neither the AppShopper site nor the Apple iTunes site tells you which episode you would get with the app. Other than the basic backstory of the show and technical information about the app, the description tells you nothing about the title of the “Route 66” episode, what date it aired, who guest-starred in it, the plot … zilch.

The identity problem with those apps is something that Infinity or I-Mobilize will have to rectify to prevent customer complaints. Customers, after all, do want to know what they’re getting.

A more minor problem is the size of the app itself. Each one is just under 400 megabytes, which makes it a big resource hog for a typical iPhone and iTouch. If you downloaded all 10 “Route 66” apps, you’d probably have no memory left. So having a sizable collection of “Route 66” episodes on your Apple device probably isn’t practical.

Given its limitations, the “Route 66” iPhone apps are little more than a publicity device to juice sales for the “Route 66” DVD sets, which frequently come priced to $1 an episode and contain more special features.

UPDATE: I passed along my concerns to I-Mobilize, and a spokesman pledged to add more pertinent information to the apps.

UPDATE2: I recently checked the iTunes Apps store, and the “Route 66” apps had been updated with the episode title, which season it aired, and guest stars. So give I-Mobilize credit for responding to the concerns.

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