A year ago, I reviewed the ultimate app for keeping track of the “hamsters” in the Big Brother house.  The app has now been renewed for the BB12 season and has some nice feature enhancements.

If you don’t like spoilers, this isn’t the app for you.  If you want up-to-the minute updates and nice recaps of this live event at a glance, you won’t find a better app.  The $1.99 app launches with a popup of a recap of recent happenings in the house.  Tabs across the bottom offer more information.  It offers short biographies of all the house guests with indicators of who is Head of House, who has the POV, who is on the block, and who has been evicted.  Another tab has up-to-the-minute updates from JokerUpdates.com of what is going on via posts from those watching the live feeds.  Daily recaps are offered on yet another tab that shows the posts from The Daily Dish.  A final tab, something new for this year, is an alumni tab that shows you all the prior contestants from prior seasons and links to their twitter accounts so that you can see what former house guests are saying about current ones.  It also has links to the twitter accounts of the current HOH, Big Brother Watch, and Big Brother Scoop.

While there are competing apps out there for this purpose, none (in my opinion) do as good of a job of pulling the best of all of these into one app.  One of the other apps has push notifications, something lacking in this app to date, but is very specific to one source of information and doesn’t offer the live feed access that the Hamster Soup app does.  There is a free competitor out there, but it is ad-supported and doesn’t have the daily recap piece.  So I see this app as the best combination of features, and more features are in the works.  While the app already supports iPhone 4 resolution, the next will support iPad resolution, adjustment of timestamps to your current time or “Big Brother time”, and a way to mark which of the live updates you have already viewed and which ones are new.   The developer wants to make this the best app out there for the BB fans and it shows.  The other apps seemed geared to selling ads or promoting a single web site.  So my recommendation is to check this one out if you are a fan of the “hamster” shenanigans.  As I said before, nothing out there does it better.