This year’s FIFA World Cup, taking place in Germany, is the largest and most watched sports event in the World. As 32 nations face each other in this colossal contest, it can sometimes be a little difficult to remember who’s beaten who, who’s playing tomorrow, and which players already have a yellow card against them. That’s where programs like Resco’s World Cup Mobile 2006 come in. If you want the perfect companion to this year’s finals on your cellphone, look no further than this stylish and easy-to-use little app.

World Cup Mobile 2006 is packed with features which will have fair-weather fans and statos alike pleased to show it off to friends. Locked inside a smart user-interface, the program contains page after page of football trivia and data on topics including team histories, previous years’ results, world rankings and even Peter Shilton.

Of course, the most important factor in a program of this type is its presentation of facts about this year’s tournament, teams’ current standings and the latest results. World Cup Mobile’s simple interface makes it easy to navigate through the group stages, with a clear and well designed snapshot of the current group standings. If you prefer, you can select the ‘Schedule’ view and browse through the up-coming matches, listed with kick-off time and location. Further links from this view provide info about each side as well as the German host city and its stadium.

Statistics about the current standings are updated via a snappy one-click update system. After a couple of dialog boxes, World Cup Mobile connects to Resco’s servers and immediately downloads the latest results (including goals, goal-scorers, red or yellow cards and, after the group stages, schedule updates). Well, this is what it does in theory anyway. In practice, we found it difficult to successfully update the program’s databases, due to repeated ‘unspecified’ and ‘corrupt’ errors. On checking Resco’s support message-boards, it seems that we weren’t the only users complaining of poor update-quality. Resco have yet to respond to these messages, which suggests a disappointing lack of focus on customer support. So far, we’ve managed to successfully update once, after attempting about 15 times – not a good average.

World Cup Mobile offers the best overall quality of any of the companion programs on offer for this year’s finals. We were highly impressed with its simplicity, its wealth of information about the contest and what looked like a promising update system. Even though this most attractive feature didn’t perform as well as we expected was disappointing, it’s not the end of the world. Resco has made it possible to update results manually, possibly because they thought their servers might be over-loaded by the huge level of interest in this year’s World Cup. While not the perfect solution, it does allow your phone to stay up to date with the contest: you can even pretend that England win all their games!