Koi Pond

By Jim Lynch on September 29th, 2008

Koi are very beautiful fish but not all of us can afford to build a koi pond to keep them in. And why bother when you can have a gorgeous koi pond right on your iPhone 3G? Yup, thanks to the good folks at The Blimp Pilots you can now keep koi living in your iPhone. Well okay they aren’t really alive but you get the idea.

Koi Pond lets you gaze into a tranquil pond as koi swim around. You can touch the screen to create ripples in the water or you can touch the koi themselves. Spook the koi and watch them swim away only to come back a few seconds later. I found that this app is probably one of the most creative uses of multi-touch I’ve seen.

The water itself is amazing to look at, it’s quite beautiful and moves realistically when you touch it with your finger. The splash sound as the water moves adds to the realism and gives the pond authenticity. You really have to see Koi Pond in action to appreciate how good it looks.

You can change the color of the stones in the pond and you can also choose to have more or less fish. You can also choose to hear sound effects such as insects, birds and frogs. And you can have the sunlight shining through the water or you can turn it off. You can even choose to have more or less lily pads in the pond with your fish and you can drag the lily pads around and move them to where you want them.

For an ostensibly simple application, Koi Pond offers quite a few customizable features. I’d like to see even more in a future release. There are so many cool things that could be added to Koi Pond to make it even better and I’m sure that the developers are probably preparing an upgrade even as I type this review.

Koi Pond is one of the most unique apps in the app store. For $.99 you really can’t go wrong.

Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Application: Koi Pond
Download Link: iTunes Store
Price: $.99
The Good: Beautiful graphics and creative use of multi-touch.
The Bad: It’s amusing but there’s no real point to it. It would be nice to have more fish.
Overall: If the price was more, it wouldn’t be worth bothering with but at $.99 it’s worth getting. The graphics are beautiful and the app is just flat out cool.
Score: 3.5 out of 5.