Windows Phone 7 App Pick: IMDb

Date: March 27, 2011
App type: Entertainment
Publisher:  IMDb.com
Release date: October 18, 2010
Price: FREE
Phone features used: Location services, data connection, sensors, media library, push notifications

Download IMDb for Windows Phone 7

IMDb, or the Internet Movie Database, actually dates back to the late 1980's when a movie enthusiast named Col Needham made his first movie list-related post to USENET. This grew into a basic movie and TV database, according to all-powerful and all-seeing Wikipedia, and changed, in turn, into THE LIST, the Actress List and Actor List, and then rec.arts.movies movie database.

Over time, this effort morphed to include information, or features, we now associate with the main IMDb web site, such as trivia, biographies, plot summaries, and user ratings, of over 10,000 movies and TV series. And then it moved to the web, first as Cardiff Internet Movie Database (named after Cardiff University in the UK, where its servers were located), and then finally as a commercial venture called IMDb. Online retailing giant Amazon.com purchased the site in 1998.

Today, IMDb is the web's leading resource for information about movies, TV shows, actors and actresses, directors, and other related information. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the success of IMDb is hardly surprising, and while I don't personally share this fascination, I do love movies in particular and use the site regularly for entertainment-related research and to learn more about the movies, actors, and directors I've seen.

With the rise of mobile devices, IMDb has naturally pursued a number of mobile clients and the Windows Phone 7 version, as we've come to expect, looks and works like a good Windows Phone app, while leveraging the considerable database back-end that the site has built up over the years. And in keep with the needs of mobile users, it offers location-based features like local movie listings and schedules, as well as news and other time killers.