iPhone App: Cooliris

January 8th, 2009

= 3 stars

I’d describe Cooliris as a new front-end for browsing multimedia on the Internet. The UI is essentially a wall of tiled images, similar to that of the Apple TV welcome video. The iPhone app is a simpler version of one that runs in a browser.

The Good

• The image browsing is surprisingly addicting. All you see are images on a black background, without potentially distracting text or ads. The wall of images scrolls left or right with a finger swipe, and also by tilting the iPhone. You can zoom in and out using the “pinch.”
• You can save images to your camera roll, which allows them to be emailed, used as an iPhone wallpaper, or copied to your Mac.
• Works with a variety of image repository websites: Flickr, Yahoo!, SmugMug, Deviant Art.
• Beyond images, you can browse for YouTube Videos, Music (also via YouTube), and current news articles (entertainment, business, tech, news, and sports). The news browsing is an interesting approach — you see a wall of images first, which then link to an article displayed in Cooliris’ own browser. It’s definitely a more visual way to find articles to read, and hence leads one to different articles than browsing by headline.

The Bad

• Using Cooliris over WiFi is great, but over 3G / Edge the app slows significantly. It’s not much fun to see a wall of unloaded images that take a bit too long to fill in, or the app stuck on “Loading Channels.”
• The Cooliris web browser isn’t as responsive as Safari, and at times it got stuck while loading pages.
• The nerd in me would like to see image dimensions in pixels in the info box of a selected image.
• I experienced several freeze-ups and a crash within the first day of use.

Conclusion

Cooliris will definitely be useful for browsing Google images while I’m out and about, the key reason being the ability to save and copy said images to my Mac when I return home. The rest of the browsing stuff is an amusing bonus. The biggest complaint is poor performance over 3G which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having this app on an iPhone, and the occasionally frustrating Cooliris article browser. But ultimately, I can’t complain too much because of the price for this app: Free. That simple four letter word makes a big difference.

iTunes App Store Link: