The 2010 Winter Olympics officially began yesterday and if you want to keep up with your country to see how well they are performing, the NBC Olympics Mobile app [iTunes Link - Free] for iPhone and iPod touch is a great companion piece that offers a ton of great features.

• News, results and medal counts are all updated live.
• Video on-demand: Those of you in the U.S. can watch NBC Olympics video clips and highlights. Sorry Canada!
• Favorites: Save athletes, sports and nations as favorites
• Push Notifications: Have results for your favorite sports pushed directly to your iPhone.
• TV Coverage Schedule: View NBC’s TV and online coverage schedule and set program reminders.
• Athlete Bios and Sports Information: You can read up on all of the sports rules and get the full details about nations and teams.
• Social networking: Share Olympic Games content with your friends directly on your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts.

Why Canadian users would be omitted from viewing video is beyond us, especially since they are hosting all of the events. Surely some sort of deal could have been made for those of you in Canada? Now if you throw that major fail aside, you have a great app to give you your daily dose of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Screenshots after the break!

If you’re interested in following the Olympics on your iPhone, you could do worse than the free Lenovo Summer Olympics 2008 (App store link) application.

A classy Olympics app is postworthy, sure, but what makes this app very interesting is that it’s been developed by Zumobi — note the tell-tale ‘Z’ in the screenshot, note also that, ah, Zumobi is the developer. Why is this significant? Zumobi is a company that specializes in creating a neat ’tiled content’ app for Windows Mobile. Ok, so?

Zumobi is an independent software shop whose core technology was created at Microsoft and subsequently spun-off. The company is still pretty much backed by Microsoft and there are plans to include there app ‘on deck’ for Windows Mobile someday. So while it’s not technically accurate to say we’re looking at our first Microsoft-developed application for the iPhone, it’s not crazy to point out the connection either. Add in the Lenovo and Intel sponsorship of the app and we have a very interesting 5-way relationship going on here: Apple, Zumobi, Microsoft, Lenovo, and Intel.

…And you thought the Olympics were about sports. For shame.

via tuaw