Carnival of the Mobilists 152
Ahem. Steve Litchfield here. Yes, me, of 3-Lib and The Phones Show and All About Symbian notoriety. Matt Radford has been called away and it seems I’m next in line of succession here at All About iPhone to assemble this week’s best writing in mobile. My pleasure.
I wanted to emphasise a few things about All About iPhone before we get started though. Firstly, it’s not an iPhone news site – the plethora of cut and paste news sites around the world is already apparent. Here at All About iPhone, Matt, James and I provide (hopefully) thought-provoking insights, reviews and critiques, all relevant to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s all original content – think of it as your Friday morning coffee break read (there are usually 2 or 3 new articles each week). And please consider adding it to your RSS feeds or even linking in from your blog.
Sending contact details from your iPhone
One of the things I miss on my iPhone is the ability to simply send some contact details to someone else.
In this article, I’m going to look at four applications that – to varying degrees – add that functionality. All of them are available from the App Store.
James’ App Store Pick of The Week!
I’m really eager to see what John Carmack can do with the iPhone. Back in August, the designer of such classics as Doom and Quake stated that he believed the iPhone to be as powerful as Sega’s Dreamcast console and almost as powerful as the PS2 or original XBOX. Admittedly, Kroll and Cro-Mag are both beautiful iPhone games that are surprisingly attractive in their own right, but nothing on the iPhone thus far makes be believe that Carmack might be onto something. That was until I played Fastlane Street Racing by Atod AB.
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New RSS feed address
Over the weekend I switched All About iPhone RSS feed to Feedburner. The old feed address should still be fine, but if you want to switch, the new address is:
Carnival of the Mobilists #151
Judy Breck at Golden Swamp is hosting the latest Carnival. It features some great writing on the future of mobile, especially “The iPhone and Android Platforms as Validators“, showing how both platforms are developing.
There’s also a post from AAi’s James Burland on adding Genuis-style recommendations to the App Store. A genius idea, in my opinion 
Next week’s Carnival will be hosted right here at All About iPhone.
Google Street View
iPhone update 2.2 sees the introduction of Google Street View. This stunning virtual reality feature added to the desktop version of Google Maps last year was first shoehorned into the Android based G1. How does it perform on the iPhone? Let’s find out…
It’s hard to believe that the industry has moved from the basic cell phone with a crippled ‘sawn-off’ version of the internet to the iPhone with its near perfect access to the web and other internet services in just a handful of years. Whatever will the next decade bring?
The iPhone laptop
OK, it’s a fair cop, the photo below isn’t representative of a real solution, but its vision is something that iPhone fans have been crying out for almost from day one. Almost every Nokia S60 smartphone comes with the right drivers for a Bluetooth keyboard, i.e. you power the keyboard on and simply start typing into any textual application (email, notes, Quickoffice, etc.) Why on earth can’t we do the same with the Apple iPhone?
iPhone with Bluetooth keyboard
Now, I’m broadminded enough to see this from Apple’s perspective. (more…)
Push notification as an App Store solution?
Background push notification is Apple’s solution to the problems created by refusing to grant multi-tasking to 3rd party applications. Keeping a persistent IP connection to the iPhone to forward third-party server notifications will enable IM clients and other social networking apps such as Twitterrific to operate in a much more useful fashion.
Obviously, this will be a welcomed addition to this powerful pocket computer. True multi-tasking would be the ideal, but with the iPhone’s limited resources Apple’s nifty solution – should it ever see the light of day – could be a dream come true.
Could the push notification service be used for more than instant messaging, perhaps even solving some other thorny issues presently worrying iPhone developers?
Chess, chess, chess
It all started when the John at ZingMagic, creator of Chess Professional for every other handheld platform since time began, buzzed me that Chess was now available in the iPhone App Store. I used ‘Search’ to find it and discovered another dozen versions of Chess at the same time. Wow. Talk about competition!
Hmm…. One way to rate how good or bad Chess Professional and the other chess applicatons really are would be to play them all using my legendarily bad chess skills. But a more reliable way would be to pit them against each other. Now, admittedly, in this piece I’m only pitting the newcomer against an identically-priced competitor ($1), but it’s still a valid and interesting test.
James’ App Store Pick of The Week!
Back in January I conveyed my excitement for the coming iPhone revolution…
“This month the iPhone will be transformed. At present the iPhone is a refined phone, a first class iPod and a capable internet device. By this summer it might well have been reborn as the smallest, lightest, thinnest and cheapest Mac OSX computer. If the iPhone SDK lives up to expectations, it could propel the iPhone into a completely new orbit, escaping even the Newton’s powerful gravitational field.”
It turned out that Apple wasn’t quite ready in February, but pent up demand and an extra few months of development overcame any marketing hurdles that the delay may have caused Apple.