OK. Here’s the thing, readers. iPhorest, much like A Real Tree, is an application for the iPhone in which you can plant a virtual tree, and an actual real tree is planted somewhere in the world. I love trees; they’re fantastic. I love the planet; it’s where I live. I completely support the idea of conservation and regeneration, I swear. And to give a lousy review to an app that is so clearly aimed at doing good, well, it kind of bums me out.

So, disclaimer: I appreciate people who are working to help protect the environment. They are heroes, and they are awesome.

However, iPhorest is just, well…not awesome. For $4.99, I want a little more entertainment than what iPhorest gives.

The way iPhorest works is simple. You dig a hole (making a digging motion with your iPhone, which is, admittedly, kind of neat) and drop in a seed. Once the seed is buried, you shake the phone to make it rain. Each time it rains, your seed grows a little more — six rains in, you’ve got yourself a tree.

You can email an image of your iPhorest tree’s progress at any time by touching the Share button, and you can zoom out to get a look at the trees surrounding your tree. With iPhorest you can also zoom out even further to see all the trees that have been planted, which show up on the globe as tiny, shining green pinpricks of light. It’s very pretty.

And iPhorest is a pretty nice-looking app. It was obviously made with care. It’s just not really entertaining at all. The replay value is basically nonexistent. If you’re going to buy, I suggest buying iPhorest because you want a tree planted and you want to support the environment, not because you’re expecting some kind of wildly entertaining application.

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category: Entertainment