Snappy and easy to use
GoSkyWatch Planetarium seems to work quite well on the iPhone. It is responsive and quite easy to use. There are a few minor gripes that I have - for starters, since when is the "Sun" a planet. I think it would be more appropriate if the Sun and the other planets were classified as "Solar System" objects rather than under "Planet". Secondly, what's happened to the moon - it is a fairly prominent naked-eye object but it doesn't appear in the maps? i.e. there does not appear to be any option to view the moon or its phases.
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Great potential, terrible stability
I bought this app to compare with Starmap. It has a beautiful interface, and the smoothest, most polished animation I've seen on an iPhone app. The app also makes the best use of the accelerometer, giving you portrait and landscape modes and every angle in between.
However, there are two big downsides. The first is the lack of any deep sky objects in the database. The second downside is that the app is totally unstable, crashing within moments no matter what I tried doing: finding my location, looking up a star or planet, changing an option... In moments each session the app would crash. Luckily, those two big problems are solvable.
Minor issues surround the implementation of Night Mode, where menus still appear in full white-light brightness, and the lack of differentiation in lookup lists to show what objects in the list are currently visible and what are not - a great timesaver when trying to bring people's attention to objects in real-time.
I think the app shows great potential, and I'll likely keep both this one and Starmap on my iphone, but for now only Starmap is on the reliable list.
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