techknow beat
by Bilal Iqbal
In its Play Store description, Cinema Qatar gets right down to what it does —“Cinema Showtimes for all cinemas in Qatar” — before promising a slew of features that may make it sound like the best thing to happen to you since your first shawarma bite.
“In addition to timings you can view the movie ratings, cast, plot, news, trailer and other information about a movie. You can also get push notifications for new movie releases,” the app promises, and in my experience, delivers to varying levels of success (or lack, thereof).
You see, the app does indeed have all of the features that it promises, only that in most cases the implementation is sorely lacking. The touted trailers feature, for instance, opens a small preview window that presumably takes its feed from YouTube. But we would never know that because I was unable to get the videos to play. In all instances, I got the following error message: “This video is unavailable in safety mode,” followed by a promise to “Learn more.”, complete with a full-stop and an underline. But as it turns out, even a thousand taps on plain text masquerading as a link will not help you learn more. Either that, or something awful has gone wrong with the implementation of this feature.
Before I discuss some of the other “value added” features of the app, I will say this: the app does at least get the basics right. It tells you the show timings for all movies playing in all cinemas in Qatar (as provided by the cinemas themselves, according to an in-app disclaimer).
Opening the app, you are presented with a scrollable screen of all the movies currently playing in Qatar, with basic information on each film such as its IMDb rating, cast, director and genre. At this point, I urge you to resist the temptation to tap or scroll. Instead, be patient for a few moments, for the full-screen ad to pop into your view. This will happen every time you open the app and while supremely annoying, this is the only time you will encounter an ad while using the app — the compromises one has to make to use free software. Tap the large cross in the top-left corner of the screen and you are good to go.
Tapping a movie will reveal the cinemas with show times. If all cinemas are playing it, you may have to scroll down to get to the cinema you are looking for. One does feel that the screen space could have been utilised more effectively — just a little less than a third of the screen is used by the movie poster and buttons leading to the film’s trailer that never loads, and synopsis and cast information. The layout though is fine for the most part.
What I did not appreciate was that there was no way for me to know which of the show timings was for IMAX (for films also showing in IMAX). The app creators may think that all screens are made equally, but IMAX screens do tend to be bigger than regular cinema screens. The fact that I have to go to a ticket-booking website to know about the IMAX timings of a particular film negate the entire point of the app. Thankfully, Cinema Qatar does tell you the timings for 3D screenings. Curiously, it also offers timings for the VIP screenings in the City Centre and Novo Cinema Theatre. Clearly, the exclusion of IMAX timings is laziness on part of the developer.
The More Info button takes you to another screen that has the film’s IMDb rating, the sometimes incomplete plot synopsis from IMDb, cast and director names with pictures, the storyline and a review sourced from God knows where. In theory, these are all useful and informative bits, but I would not be using them to replace my usual sources any time soon.
The app also allows you to browse by cinemas instead of movies. The good thing here is that it sorts the cinema in the order of their distances from you. So you can choose a cinema of your preference and see what films are playing there. There is also Location Map for each cinema, which again seems to be a half-baked implementation and isn’t particularly useful. It does not help you navigate to the cinema in question nor does it pin point its exact location. It just gives you the map of the area the cinemas is in, sourced from Google Maps.
The third tab that you can try out in the app is Coming Soon, which as expected gives you a synopsis for movies that are, well, coming soon along with their expected release dates in Qatar. This is a rather useful feature to have given that the release dates in Qatar frequently differ from those in the US.
There is also a News tab that I will, frankly speaking, not rely solely on for my entertainment news. As of this writing on November 26, the latest entertainment news in the app was published on November 22.
That’s it for Cinema Qatar. The app does not have the option to book or buy tickets online, which seems like a missed opportunity. The developer could also have included the RottenTomatoes score for a particular movie, to give an indication of what critics think about it.
All in all, the expression “strictly adequate” seems to be the mantra here. It can certainly do with more polishing, and some of its ‘features’ will actually do well to, well, actually work.
Don’t get me wrong, the bar has been set low, but for now Cinema Qatar will do in a pinch.
The app is available on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store for free (the Apple App Store has two versions, ad-free for 2 dollars or ad-supported for free).
l The author may be e-mailed at [email protected]
or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat
