This morning RedBox (the $1 DVD rental kiosk guys in the U.S) put out an announcement boasting that its free iPhone application had been downloaded a million times since its launch four months.

Since we are occasional users of  RedBox, we thought let’s give the application a spin.

So we took out our iPhone and searched for RedBox on the AppStore.

The download didn’t work the first time. But on the second attempt it worked fine and downloaded the application in less than a minute. Not bad, considering we were on a 3G connection and not WiFi.

Neat Design
When you tap on the RedBox icon on the iPhone screen, it opens up the application giving a list of “Newest Releases” on top followed by “Previous Releases’ later.

The newest releases this morning included five movies: Everybody’s Fine, The September Issue, The Damned United, Black Dynamite and Law Abiding Citizen.

We might pick up Law Abiding Citizen later for Jamie Foxx.

There are dozens of movies listed under ‘Previous Releases.’

Clicking on a movie’s title opens up a new screen bringing more information on the film such as the stars, genre, plot summary, running time and MPAA rating.

If you wish, you can also reserve the movie at a kiosk (presumably by signing up for an account and adding your e-mail and credit card) to avoid disappointments after you reach the kiosk. Since we did not want to add our credit card, we did not test that feature.

The main screen also includes a search feature and the ability to narrow down movies by genre.

You can search for a RedBox kiosk by entering the zip code or using your current location.

We picked the the ‘current location’ option and the app quickly offered us 20 locations with address, map and a nice feature that allows us to know whether the movie is available at a particular kiosk or has been checked out.

To see if the map worked, we tested two separate RedBox locations and the map feature including a route (if you pick ‘current location’) was just fine.

If there is one RedBox location that you frequent more often than others, you can make it your ‘favorite.’

With some 20,000 RedBox kiosks around currently in the U.S. surely there’s bound to be one in your neighborhood.

Overall, the RedBox app on the iPhone is a simple and easy to use application.