Software & Service Reviews | May 19, 2010 | 1 Comment

BlackGold – iPad App Review

It's All About The Oil Or Is It?

I sat down today to write a financial iPad app review about StockPortfolio for this part of my iPad series, but then something happened. I ran into BlackGold. Being an oil enthusiast—guess that’s the right way to put it—BlackGold immediately had my attention.

So, I thought I’d delay the article by a few hours and do a fresh review for this app. As it turns out, the makers of the other app I like, StockWatch, make this one. It has the same feel to it and operates in the same way.

Quick Overview

BlackGold is a decent app for $1.99. It’s a mix of commodities though. It could be better. I would have liked the app to be just about oil or at least give me the option to add my own commodities to follow.

Tracklist

BlackGold is a very simple app. You have two main options—Tracklist and Gasoline.

The tracklist, as you can see on the left, lists the current prices for several commodities, including natural gas, heating oil, crude oil, bent crude, gold and silver.

It’s odd that an app named for oil includes these other items. And if it’s more of a commodities play, then there needs to be more tracking implemented. Unfortunately, there’s no way to add anything, like platinum, copper, agricultural commodities, etc.

The order of the commodities shown can be swapped.

In the center of the app is latest chart and current trade information for the commodity chosen. And on the right side of the screen you can see related news. Just touch a news item and it opens up. These news items come from Yahoo Finance.

If you own StockWatch or another app and don’t want to increase your apps just to watch a couple commodities, you can enter their ticker symbol in the iPad app you use. For example, enter GCM10.CMX for gold.

Gasoline

This section is most likely why they kept the BlackGold name.

On the left is a listing of every state in the US. When you touch one, the center of the screen shows current gas prices and how those relate to national averages. For my demo, I selected New York, which is showing $3.054 for regular gasoline—higher than the $2.852 national average.

On the right of the screen is a listing of recent gasoline news. Again, just touch a news item to open it up.
Overall, the gasoline component of this app is more of a conversational piece than anything else. The data comes straight from AAA and is apparently updated about every 20 minutes.

Final Thoughts

I think a true commodities or oil-based app has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, BlackGold doesn’t do either one well enough. It’s $1.99 and if you’re mainly interested in following a few commodities and keeping up with gas prices, it’s worth it.

Since I own other apps, like their StockWatch, I can just add commodities I want to follow there.

Despite all of this, BlackGold’s value could be increased greatly by allowing users to enter their own commodities to follow. I’d also like to see other news sources and video added.

Still, this app gives me one-button access to a few key commodities. If your watch lists in other apps are getting too long, this app will save you time.

What are your thoughts about BlackGold? Do you think it’s a good app? What are some options you think this app creator should develop? Even if you don’t have an iPad, I’d love to hear what you think about apps like this.