When I first heard about Flixup, a new iPhone app that just been released, my first thought was, “oh boy how do they expect to compete with the slew of other movie-related iPhone apps that are out there?”. But I figured I’d give it a try anyway, and you know what? I was pleasantly surprised by just how different this app is! The key to this app’s success will come in one word…social.

Flixup is ostensibly a combination of Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango, and Twitter all rolled into one little package. When you first open the app you see a fairly standard screen that gives you a list of movies that are currently being released (or you can check the “Coming Soon” tab as well for future releases). From here you can watch trailers of the movies you might be interested in, which seems to actually work faster than some apps I’ve seen that do the same. You also can see the current general ratings for that movie. You can tell right from the get-go how people are feeling about any particular film, and this might influence you to check it out or avoid it!

The real genius behind this app happens after you’ve selected a movie to learn more about. The next screen gives you some of the same information, but also gives you how the flick is doing on Rotten Tomatoes as well as, and here is the kicker, tweets from people who are talking about that film on Twitter so you can connect with them! Other methods this app uses for connecting with people are to prompt you after doing certain actions (like viewing the trailer for example) to post a quick little tweet about it on whether you are interested or not to see this movie. The app runs nicely and hasn’t crashed on me yet, the social aspect of it runs just as smooth, and leaves me little to do but touch the screen. It isn’t obtrusive to my Twitter acct (@filmsnobbery if anyone wants to follow us there), and politely asks permission before posting anything to it.

Overall a great little film app that could easily replace half the movie apps in the iTunes Store.