Windows Phone Thoughts: Movie Reviews in Hand: Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.0 Review

Keeping Your Movies Organized
Now I don’t know about you, but I try to keep my movie collection organized and up to date. On top of that, I really enjoy carrying a list of my collection on my PDA. I don’t know why, but the topic certainly comes up frequently enough. I also find it invaluable to have a list of movies I want to buy or rent on hand. The Movie Guide certainly took this into account.

You have two options for entering movie information. The first is to search through the movie guide for your movie. If it’s found, you can simply select the movie, then from the bottom of the screen you can select Record and Add to My Movies. From there, you can set the category, how many DVDs the movie is on, whether you own it and if you’ve seen it.

The second option is to manually enter the movie, which takes some time since there’s no desktop interface or way to pull the movies information from a secondary source, like IMDB. The end result, in either case, is a rather complete entry. The biggest limitation here is that a single movie can’t be in multiple categories. This was a bit disappointing since the program comes with categories like “Favorites,” “My Top 20,” and “Recorded.” So what do you do if you want to setup a category for movies you own, but you recorded it off TV and it’s one of your top 20 movies? Answer: You have to pick one category or you can duplicate the entry and categorize each one separately. Any way you slice it, it’s not ideal.

Two other short comings I’ve come across are that it doesn’t keep a total of your movie titles anywhere, and if you own a movie collection, you have to enter each movie separately. Meaning, for a DVD collection like the Alien Quadrilogy I have to either add the set as one entry, which means a lot of general data, or enter each movie as separate items.


Figure 4: Keeping your collection organized.

Keeping Up On What’s Coming Up
The last button on the bottom of the main screen takes you to a worthy feature of this application: Movie Events. On this screen you can view upcoming DVD releases, movie releases and film festivals.

This calendar of events is constantly updated as you sync your PDA to your computer. It’s also possible to customize the period you want information from. The only limitations here are that any upcoming event has no information associated with it other than its name and date. If you want to know what features are coming on an upcoming DVD, you’ll need to hop out to a website.


Figure 5: Upcoming releases and events.