ESPN’s Scorecenter app received a major update today, one that includes a complete UI overhaul. As seen in the screenshots below, you now have a cleaner panel-to-panel viewing experience and an experience that no longer feels like it was built in 2009 as a direct copy of an iPhone app.

It has definitely been built with some of the new Android theme guidelines, including the side panel for additional options, and category options that can be accessed with a swipe at the top. Your “My Teams” tab still sits in the number 1 spot, followed by top events, videos, and big headlines.

It’ll take some getting used to, but it should make for accessing information from different sports much easier. In the past, you had to either pull up the bottom menu or swipe from column to column to access the non-major headlines. Now, a couple of quick taps get you there. 

When I’m not spending my days reviewing the latest in tech gadgetry, you’ll probably find me at a Portland Trail Blazers game, in a sports pub watching college football, or planning a trip to the next big sports event. I’m a sports junky, to say the least. But since I can’t make it to every game, I need to find ways to stay connected from anywhere in the world. Thanks to these wonderful new smartphones that we all own, it has become increasingly easier to do just that.

Featured today over at Intel’s My Life Scoop blog, I toss out the 5 sports apps that I use on a regular basis to keep up to speed on the latest news for my favorite teams, which current games are the closest or most interesting, and how badly I’m crushing my fantasy match-up this week.

To read the post, head over to My Life Scoop.

If you own a Samsung Galaxy S3 and use ESPN’s Scorecenter app, they be sure to grab the latest update, as it allows you to push on-demand videos from device to any DLNA Smart TV that is on your same WiFi network. Once updated and playing a video, you will see a “Share” icon in the top left of each video you play. While playing, you can tap that icon to bring up a menu of your DLNA capable devices. Tap a device and the video should instantly jump to that device. Scott Van Pelt in multi-view. 

I’m doing my best to give the LG Spectrum a fair shot, but the pluses are struggling to keep up with the minuses to this point. One thing I do have to give it some love for though, is the fact that it streams HD video through ESPN’s ScoreCenter app. Actually, it’s tough to tell if it actually streams through the app or not. When you press on a video, a separate browser window loads that then asks if you would like to download or “execute” an action – that action is of course, the watching of HD video.

So below, I have embedded a video that shows off the high quality streams that only this phone is currently capable of. Talk about impressive for a mobile stream.  

Two of our favorite apps along with an up-and-comer received updates this morning that you may be interested. Evernote – the #1 note app on the planet – now creates automatic titles if you forget to, has improved layout for images and audio attachments, and should perform at a much swifter pace. ESPN ScoreCenter finally received Ice Cream Sandwich improvements, but the big story here is the breaking news notifications to tell you when games start, periods end, and what the final score was. Evi on the other hand appears to be struggling still from server overload. Today’s update included bug fixes, but we can’t really know since the app itself fails to produce any results still.

Market Links:  Evernote | ESPN ScoreCenter | Evi

The original release of ESPN’s Scorecenter on Android was pretty weak – there is no denying that.  As of today though, the app stands up to the best of them with its new panel swiping abilities, drop down menus for additional coverage of your favorite sports, video feed and performance tweaks.  Using this app used to be extremely frustrating, but after having the latest update for just a few minutes, I’m starting to find a new attraction.  Now, if only we could get a tablet version?    

After announcing that the Score Mobile app had hit the Android Market today, and expressing our frustrations with the lack of a ESPN ScoreCenter app to date, one of our commenters informed us that it is officially on the way.  Possibly by the end of May.  (Yes that rhymed.)

Playdom, who created the iPhone version, is said to have it almost ready…

In social media, the company said it has a deal with Playdom to develop ESPN-branded sports games that can be housed on Facebook and MySpace. Also, ESPN’s ScoreCenter, which provides score updates to iPhone users, will be available as an Android app this month.

This news, just made my Friday.

Source: MediaPost

Cheers Scott!