Blizzard releases official Armory app for the iPhone
Blizzard Entertainment has released their second application for the iPhone and iPod Touch today: Mobile Armory.
I was one of the lucky people to download a third party Armory application for my iPhone 3G prior to Blizzard getting them all yanked down a few months ago. (As so often happens, the legal folks associated with Blizzard seem to be working on a different page than the rest of Blizzard — why an app like Characters, which pulls World of Warcraft character information to the iPhone is a problem, while countless third party Web sites that do the same are not is hard to fathom.)
Characters was a so-so application — it didn’t display even the raw numbers of achievement points, didn’t display titles, and so on — but it was free and it was there. Until it wasn’t.
This morning, Blizzard Mobile Armory, and it’s really, really nice. (And, like Characters, it’s free.)
First off, it looks like a million bucks. None of the other WoW apps even come close in that regard.
Secondly, it loads faster than the regular Armory Web site, which is notoriously slow. In addition to getting hammered with requests from millions of users, the official side has a lot of scripts and such that make it pretty — and fun to design, I’m sure — but which slow the whole thing down enormously.
Unlike third party apps, which weren’t able to log into Blizzard’s secure servers, Mobile Armory can, so players can check the in-game calendar on the go, even accepting invitations to events on the calendar.
There’s an in-game news page, although, inexplicably, it’s stuck on December’s news, and doesn’t reflect server firsts since then, like the new Glory of the Ulduar Raider achievements.
There’s also a “leaderboards” page, assuming you want to compare the achievement points of bookmarked characters or your guild. One for the server’s overall leaders would be nice, but would be a lot of data. So third-party sites like WoW-Achievements still have a purpose.
Mobile Armory also doesn’t display character titles, although there’s plenty of room on the screen for them. And unlike Characters, it doesn’t have a page for Reputation, which is an odd oversight, since that page is prominent on actual Armory profiles.
Still, a very solid app and one well worth downloading for any iPhone/iPod Touch-enabled WoW player. It would have been nice if Blizzard’s legal attack dogs would have let third party Armory apps stay in the iTunes app store, though. Competition is never a bad thing, and Blizzard’s normal policy toward Web sites and in-game mods encourages innovation instead of squashing it.
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