21202 on O2 – Who Knew?
This is a small snippet about a very useful service. I was in my local O2 store on Saturday with a friend who was signing up for an iPhone. He had a final question before he completed the purchase – “How do I check my balance?” As far as I was aware, the only way to do this was through O2’s painful, non-iPhone optimised website. Using it is a chore – many steps are required to get your account information.
But the sales assistant simply said, “Send a blank text to 21202”. I was surprised, as I’d heard nothing about this service. So I tried it, and discovered you can’t send a blank text on the iPhone. So I added a space in the message field – it sent, and I received a text back like this:
(more…)
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….
How people really use the iPhone
Create with Context have done an interesting study of how people
actually use the iPhone, and released some of their findings in a PDF:
http://www.createwithcontext.com/landing-iphone.html
And on Slideshare.
Facts at your fingertips – Trivopaedia – a plug!
Woohoo! Excuse my excitement, but as a non-C-programmer, it’s exciting to see All About iPhone’s first application hit the iPhone AppStore. I’ve been maintaining and fiddling with Trivopaedia, my ‘encyclopaedia of all things trivial’ for years and Stefan Wolfrum has done a sterling job in producing a basic iPhone conversion.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
It’s free, of course, as all versions have been since 1997, so there’s no reason not to have it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Stefan’s planning all sorts of enhancements, I’m looking forward to seeing a search box in the interface, for example.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
Still, it’s a great start, you can download it here, or of course, in AppStore on the iPhone itself.
Comments welcome, back to me on the content at [email protected] or to Stefan on the interface at [email protected].
Carnival of the Mobilists #148
Just a quick one to mention that the latest Carnival of the Mobilists is up over at MOpocket. Some very interesting posts as usual, including an entry from All About iPhone.
Check out the Carnival at http://www.mopocket.com/2008/11/148th-carnival-of-the-mobilists.php
Not so hot in ‘Bed’ mode…? [updated]
The iPhone is, as we know, without match in the web browsing world. Safari on that big 4″ screen is very intuitive and the fact that Flash objects are ignored (for better or for worse) means that pages load much faster than on S60 Web, for example.
However.
There’s one scenario in which the iPhone (and iPod Touch) fall short. Bedtime. (more…)
Halo (sort of) & Quake (maybe) come to the iPhone
With that hugely qualified headline, how can you not be excited?!
I have two gaming tidbits for you this morning:
(1) I mentioned a little while ago that Bungie had given their staff iPhones, and that there was an outside chance that a Halo port could be in the offing. Well, there is no news from Bungie, but Halo is coming to the iPhone (in a way) for jailbroken users.