The App Store on every page
Forgive this beginner’s tip if you’re a hardened iPhone user and thought about this many months ago… BUT….
As we all know, the App Store is just about the best thing since sliced bread. In fact, it’s probably the best thing since bread, full stop. But its icon is on the first applications page only, meaning that you’ve got to get back to this in order to have your weekly/daily/hourly addict’s fix of App Store goodness.
OK, so with the v2.2 firmware update, Apple gave us a single keypress on the Home button to get back to the first applications page easily, but what if you were really enjoying the apps on your 9th page? You’ve then got to laboriously scroll back again, page by page.
Now this isn’t another rant about the flatness of Apple’s application menus, but a tip about increasing the visibility of the App Store.
App Review: Seadragon Mobile
Rather amazingly, created by Microsoft, Apple arch-rival in the operating system business, Seadragon is a graphical demo from one of Microsoft’s fringe labs. It has been implemented first on the iPhone because of the latter’s market-leading graphics capabilities (e.g. the hardware graphics acceleration). No doubt other mobile platforms will follow as and when the hardware catches up. Although labelled a demo, there’s still a huge amount here of interest – and it’s all free.
Seadragon Mobile
Wardriving for Wi-Fi – on the iPod Touch!
I’ve got an admission to make. Actually, you’ll have realised already if you’ve been paying attention to some of my screenshots. I don’t own an iPhone. [FX: readers faint with shock]
Actually, I own an iPod Touch. No, it wasn’t that I didn’t want an iPhone, it’s just that, being a phone journalist, I already have about 20 phones and numerous pay-as-you-go SIMs knocking around the office and just couldn’t justify a particular device that mandated an expensive longterm contract. Because, for the purposes of enjoying all the multimedia and application goodness of the iPhone, the much slimmer and cheaper iPod Touch was absolutely perfect. Apart from the few extra iPhone-only apps and slightly different behaviour in Google Maps, the two platforms are identical.
With all that in mind, what can I do about connectivity? More and more applications these days either want to ‘phone home’, to load data from a server or to communicate with others across the Internet. iPhone owners have unlimited EDGE or 3G data in most world markets, but what about us poor iPod Touch relatives?
The Apple iPhone 2 and firmware 2.3
[Wharamurrrrrr……] The flux capacitor hisses, the time disk whirrs and I’m standing in the auditorium at the Moscone Centre on January 5th 2009. Now THAT’s fortuitous. Ooh, Steve Jobs is on stage. Let’s listen in.
Peering into MacWorld 2009
iPhone 3G vs Nokia N96 and HTC Touch HD
Please forgive a link across to another haunt of mine, but yesterday I wrote this head to head between the iPhone 3G and two of its ‘flagship’ smartphone competitors in the marketplace: Nokia N96 and HTC Touch HD.
iPhone 3G vs HTC Touch HD vs Nokia N96
[and yes, I know that I’ve cheated here and used an iPod Touch in the photo – sorry, I didn’t have a physical iPhone to hand]
The article/table’s quite long, but hopefully of interest. Summing up, I said that “The iPhone 3G will appeal to anyone looking for heavy media consumption and gaming – and it’s relatively cheap, SIM-free, especially considering the all-in data bundle”. I’m still staggered that O2 can offer it with unlimited data at £380 all-in, with no monthly contract or further commitments.
The HTC Touch HD is probably the best for Microsoft-centric businesses, despite its truly awful TouchFLO mashup, while the Nokia N96 is the best voice phone and has the best camera. But it’s fair to say that with its value and AppStore and elegant UI, the iPhone wins on most other counts.
App Store – Help, I want my life back!
You know, once the iPhone App Store got to a few hundred applications, I sat back and thought “Well, that’s a decent selection, it’s getting up to the speed of other handheld platforms and, hey, there are some nice apps here to keep me occupied.”
Once the App Store got to a few thousand applications, I started to get worried. “Whoa there, this is starting to get seriously overwhelming. I’m only just keeping up and I already have more applications than I’ll ever need…”
Then the App Store (last week) hit 10,000 applications, with new apps now arriving at the rate of over 50 a day. At which point, as someone who likes to feel like I’ve got a handle on a software scene, I’m really panicking. “Stttooooppppp!! This is a deluge and great apps are being missed right, left and centre – even trying to keep up is taking over my life – and I want it back!”
9 App screens - 144 apps!
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.
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…)
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.
Just jaw-droppingly well done…
Now, I know Apple iPhone fans have been known to get a bit… well, zealous. And as such, some of the writing on iPhone sites can be tarred with the ‘fanboy’ brush. But when scanning this post, bear in mind that I’m a hardened journalist who has specialised in Symbian OS hardware for the past 15 years. So it takes a lot to impress me.
We have written, here on All About iPhone, quite a bit about the iPhone App Store. No, it’s not perfect, but it has given an awful lot of creative programmers a real chance to shine. We all have our own favourites from the App store, and I’m looking past the legions of games, both good and bad, but let me run some of these less obvious applications past you…. Each is potentially jaw-dropping, capable of making a hardened fan of any other handheld device green with jealousy….