1st Impressions

Big Brother Hamster Soup is “the app for that” if you are a fan of the Big Brother reality series.  I confess, watching the “hamsters” is a guilty pleasure of mine.  This $1.99 app is a requirement for any fan of the show.  The app consists of  three main areas.  The first is access to “The Daily Dish”, a daily summary of what all happens in the house.  Clicking on a headline brings you to a full page of the story (the bottom right photo).  The second area of the application is live postings from the Joker’s Updates.  This is basically the play-by-play of those that watch the feeds all day.  The final area is an index of cast members and their biographies.  Little icons in the corner of their photos indicate who has been evicted so far, who is nominated for eviction, and who the current head of household is.  Tapping on their icon brings up a short bio and important recent dates in the house where they were winners of something or did something of note.

Because the feed updates would be constant, I would not want this to have push technology.  I would, however, think it would be cool to have some kind of notification of the major events in the house.  Five or six alerts throughout the week would be nice.  Other than that, the only other thing I would wish for is for the live updates to refresh whenever you tap that icon on the bottom.  Right now, the info is displayed for each of the categories when you first tap on the icons, or tap their heading banner, but it would be a bit more intuitive to me if it also worked on the bottom icons.

Overall, the app is well rounded.  Basic bios give an overview of the characters and a historical recap of their recent activity, the Daily Dish gives you daily recaps between the Thursday live shows, and the up-to-the-minute info from the live feeds provides you with all the detail you could ever want without having to be married to the internet streaming.  Not only is this cheaper than paying $15 to watch a lot of flames and sleeping, but it is also available when you are not at your PC and saves you a lot of time.