The Internet Movie Database or IMDB is easily one of my favorite websites on the internet. For those who don’t know it, it’s simply *the* reference to find any movie, any actor and recently any TV series ever made or about to be made. It shows you the movie credentials with the main cast, directors, writers, as well as genre, synopsis, ratings, reviews. Basically, it’s every movie lover’s holy grail, and I use it quite regularly to get more information about a movie before watching it.
The problem is that IMDB don’t have an official mobile website til this day and age, so consulting movie information on the go, while waiting at the ticketing counter is annoyingly long and complicated. I have searched around and mainly found two “web applications” that were built for the iPhone and that work quite well on the Symbian browser: Nolan Brown’s IMDB Mobile (left screenshot) and Zeddy’s IMDB iPhone Client (right screenshot). Below are screenshots of the search result for the movie 2012, as displayed by both sites.
Both are functional but, unfortunately, remain very limited in the information they display (there’s no ratings for example), and look quite outdated in the browser. There’s also one annoying bug in the fact that the Back button doesn’t work on both, so you have to reload the homepage each time you click something by mistake.
What I would like to see is a true IMDB client for Symbian devices, with search by Movie or TV series title, Actor, Characters, Genres, Year, and maybe even TV episode title, keywords, plots and companies, and advanced search with the ability to specify several search parameters should be there.
If my search result is a movie, I’d like to see the poster displayed, as well as the user ratings. Those are definitely essential. Then I’d like to see all the information with the full Cast, Fun stuff, Additional details, as well as User Comments. If my search result is an actor or director, then the least I can get is a picture, a list of movies they worked on, a full biography, with maybe the latest news and their nominated and won awards. The movie and artist databases should be linked, so when I click on John Cuzack’s name while reading about 2012, I am taken to John’s page, and vice versa.
I would also love this IMDB client to have a History pane that memorizes the latest actors/movies I searched for, and a Favorites section where I can store movies and actors I like to keep an eye on or maybe would later like to get on DVD.
What about you? Do you like checking movie-related information on the go, and if so which website or application do you use? And do you agree with me that an IMDB client is essential for Symbian?
