Tag Archive for 'iPhone'

Tweetie 2

Published on 9 October, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Tweetie

Released in November 2008, I bought it and was hooked. The clean UI, overall simplicity, and ease of use were great. Sadly, it lacked useful features like multiple attachments (eg, photos to TwitPic), and support for other services, like TwitVid. But it was still usable. The problem is that the developer pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a few months.

Until last month, when Tweetie 2 was announced, which came out, literally, in the last hour or so.

Tweetie 2

Sweet new icon eh? Anyway, Tweetie 2. It’s awesome. It has support for 2394586345749356436 different services, including TwitVid (yay!), and, in one word, it rocks. It’s well worth the £1.79, and the whole app feels super smooth, the UI is still clean and still works well, and it’s amazingly good overall. If you have an iPhone and use Twitter, then get Tweetie 2. There’s a reason why it’s the winner of Apple’s 2009 Apple Design Award. :)

And of course, you can get Tweetie 2 on the App Store.

Sennheiser CX300 II Precision

Published on 5 October, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

The majority of my music is listened to at home, using my speakers, and I don’t use headphones/earphones very often. I generally only use earphones when going out for a while, or for watching movies late at night. Up until last week, I’ve been using Apple’s rather “meh” iPhone headset. They’re okay, and they do the job, but they sound very tinny, they lack bass, and they always fall out of my ears if I do anything other then sit deadly still.

To be honest, my headphone and earphone history is quite easy to remember. Pretty much: Generic Sony earphones -> more generic Sony earphones -> “sport” Sony earphones (they were yellow, how could I say no? :P ) -> some random generic headphones -> iPod Nano 1G earphones -> Logitech USB Headset (which I still have, for if I ever want to use it with Skype or something similar on my PC) -> iPhone 2G earphones -> iPhone 3GS earphones….and now, Sennheiser CX300 II Precision earphones. :D

So basically, Fr3d and Acksaw were discussing earphones on IRC, and the CX300s were suggested, so I took a quick look and noticed they were only £14 on Play. Not bad. So, I bought a pair. I’ve had them a few days so far, and they’re fantastic. Compared to the iPhone ones, they’re amazing. They sound much clearer, you can hear all parts of the music, and they have ACTUAL BASS! The iPhone earphones didn’t even understand what bass was. These do, and they do so very well. I’ve watched several movies with them so far, and a few episodes of CSI Miami, and compared to the iPhone ones, they just have so much more bass and clarity, it’s amazing. No surprise they’re the best sellers on Play.com. You can pick them up yourself here.

Pros:

  • Comfortable to wear, small, and neat.
  • They sound fantastic, have plenty of bass, and are loud too if you want them to be.
  • Comes with different sized thingies for your ears, and a small pouch for when you’re not using them.
  • Cheap in price, but not in quality.
  • Cable wraps around the back of your neck to go to the right ear, which I find is quite nice.

Cons:

  • The Eco packaging is nice, but good luck getting it back together again easily. :P
  • The cable is a rather annoying stringy-type one, that tangles up quite easily. I don’t like this. I like the cable like the original iPhone had – it didn’t curl up all the time and just sat there.
  • When wearing them, you go deaf. Seriously. They’re not noise cancelling, and on a plane they’d probably be pretty “meh” at doing so, but it would be nice to be able to hear someone speaking to me in my own home. :cry:
  • Doesn’t have a mic or controls for the iPhone, however, there is an almost-identical model with these features, the Sennheiser MM 50 iPhone.

So, yeah. Go and buy some yourself if you’re still using the crappy iPod ones. :D

MobileMe

Published on 29 September, 2009. Closed Tags: , , , , , , , .

MobileMe

I purchased a .Mac box set back in mid 2008, a few weeks before the service was announced as having it’s name changed to MobileMe. I managed to get it for a not too bad price (£45 instead of the usual £59), and it worked very well with my iPhone and Mac. Initially, MobileMe was quite unstable, going up and down quite a bit after it’s launch, but after a month or so it became stable, and Apple gave a free extension to all accounts (hence why my one year account has lasted a few months more).

I’m not posting this because I want to complain, I’m posting this because I want to express my love, yet at the same time, shall we say, dislike, of MobileMe. At £59 per year, it’s not cheap. Yes, technically, it’s less then £5 a month, but the only thing I managed to ever use it for was syncing and Find My iPhone, and that’s more then I feel is necessary for that, especially when you can get it for free or cheap elsewhere (eg, Google Sync is free, albeit with no Find My iPhone feature).

As the full package, if you make use of the full suite of features – sync, email, gallery, iDisk, Find My iPhone, Remote Wipe, Back to my Mac, etc, it is, in some ways, worth the money. However, for just sync, it is not. And here’s where my idea comes in. I think that Apple should offer two versions of MobileMe. First off, the full package, with everything, at £59 per year. Secondly, a smaller and cheaper package, called MobileMe Sync. Advertise it as “the basics” for the iPhone, or something like that, and price it low – £15-20 per year is ideal. MobileMe Sync would offer calendar, contacts, and bookmark syncing, along with Find My iPhone, and Remote Wipe, all for a low fee, with, say, 20-50MB of storage for calendars, contacts, and bookmarks. I think that this would appeal to a fair few people, myself included, as it offers just the commonly used basic options, as well as Find My iPhone, which is quite useful if you do happen to lose your phone. This would offer an incentive for Exchange users too – Exchange does allow remote wiping of mobile devices, but it can’t find them.

In addition to that, the current MobileMe service has a “family pack”, whereby you can add additional users onto your MobileMe subscription, and with MobileMe sync, you could do much the same – but for less. Maybe £5 per extra user?

I hope Apple do consider this in future, as I’m sure it would allow them to earn even more money ( :roll: ) – they already have the server infrastructure in place, and of course it would need a few tweaks to both OS X and the iPhone OS to work, but in the end I think it would be worth it.

So, that’s why I’ve not renewed my MobileMe subscription this year. I simply don’t need to spend £59 on something that I use a very small part of. In the meantime, I’ve switched to using a friend’s Exchange server, which does the same job (albeit without being able to locate my phone if I lose it), but for free. :)

Google Latitude

Published on 26 July, 2009. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Google Latitude is Google’s location based service, launched in February. Similar to Brightkite, it allows your friends to see where you are at all times. Simply put, you tell it where you are, and it posts your status onto Latitude. Then, your friends can see where you are. Easy. :)

The service is available to platforms such as Google’s own Android OS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, Symbian S60, and now, the iPhone. However, while it’s either integrated or available as a dedicated application on those platforms, it’s not so on the iPhone. Due to Apple’s stubborn attitude, they said to Google that a standalone Latitude application could apparently confuse people with the built in Maps application. So, Google made it into a web app. Not the best idea, but it works okay. This post is basically a quick walkthrough of it. If you want a proper in depth review, look elsewhere. I’m not a professional journalist. :P
Continue reading ‘Google Latitude’

Getting Facebook Birthdays onto your iPhone

Published on 15 July, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Update – March 2010: A recent change with either Facebook or fbCal has caused problems when accessing the calendar links from your iPhone. There is a workaround for this, however. Visit fbCal.com on your PC, and copy the iCal links that you want. They should start with “webcal://”. Paste them into an email, and then send that to yourself. On your iPhone, open the email and tap the links, and the iPhone should prompt you to load the calendars. Easy! :)

The calendar on my iPhone (and on my computer, for that matter) gets very little use. I don’t really do much to warrant using it much, other then a few reminders each week, birthdays, and Library Loans (which is added in by Delicious Library). So, overall, not much. However, I would like to be able to see more birthdays on my phone then the 5 or so that I had added myself, manually. So, how? Well, simple. Facebook. As I have plenty of friends on Facebook, there’s a nice selection of birthdays that I can access via my iPhone. Or…not. I was going to try and use the built in “Export events” function in the standard Events app on Facebook, push that to Google Calendar, and then use CalDAV on my iPhone to access it, however, that doesn’t include birthdays, so it wouldn’t have worked for what I wanted. Luckily, I found another very simple solution.

After a little bit of Googling, I came across a Facebook application called fbCal. Once you give the app permission, it’ll then present you with a simple screen with a number of choices. From here, you can subscribe to events, download a static copy, or even get an RSS feed. Useful! Getting everything set up is very easy too. To make it easy, you might want to do everything from your iPhone directly.
Continue reading ‘Getting Facebook Birthdays onto your iPhone’

To 3G or not to 3G?

Published on 27 June, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

So, that new iPhone I got. It’s a great phone. It’s shiny, it’s fast, and it does video, MMS, and 3G. Overall, it’s excellent.

Until you go to transfer numbers…
Continue reading ‘To 3G or not to 3G?’

iPhone 3GS

Published on 24 June, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

iPhone 3GS 16GB Black (Back) (by William Hook)

A couple of weeks ago, at Apple’s WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple announced the new iPhone 3GS. Doubtless if you’re reading this, you know what that is, and all the info about it, so I’ll spare you the details.

On Friday last week, it was released. Up until then, I only had one of the original 2G (EDGE) iPhones, and having skipped the upgrade to the iPhone 3G, I decided to upgrade now to the 3GS. So, I sold my old iPhone to Matt Mecham (one of the lead developers of IP.Board ;) ), and used the money from that sale to go towards the new 3GS. However, after visiting the O2 store in Stafford, they said they were out of stock. So, I went and asked Carphone Warehouse if they had any, and they too were out of stock! O2 said they were getting some more units in the next day (which was yesterday – Tuesday), however after I phoned them up yesterday to check, they said no, it would most likely be next week. So, I thought screw it, went to the Birmingham Apple Store, and 20 minutes later, I had an iPhone 3GS (16GB, black) in my hand.

Again, I won’t go into detail about the OS, because there are a billion other sites you can visit about that, however, I will mention the speed and the 3GS-specific features, and one other thing which applies to the 3G as well: compared to the iPhone 2G, the 3G and 3GS is a lot nicer to hold. It feels less slippery, and you can get a good grip on it. However, it attracts fingerprints in the same way as Korea’s nuclear tests attract trouble.

First off, the speed. Apple say that applications like the Messages app open so much faster then before. But, really? In a way, yes. The Messages app does open faster, and you will notice it. But it’s not all that much different from the older ones. It’s basically half a second faster. You’re not really going to need it much on other apps, like Facebook, TV Forecast, 1Password, etc. What you will notice is that games (and other 3D apps), for instance, are a lot smoother. On my iPhone 2G, I often noticed a less-then-perfect framerate on one of the games I play, however on the 3GS, it’s dead smooth. I’ve not had a single framerate issue at all so far in any game, which is fantastic. Overall, in terms of speed, I would rate the 3GS as 10/10. Also, fun fact: the CPU in the 3GS is an 833MHz model, underclocked to 600MHz. My dad’s old laptop, which he still owns, is also 800MHz. :lol:

Onto the camera. The camera in the 2G (and the 3G) was a very “meh” thing. It could take okay photos during the day, but any kind of darkness, closeups, or anything other then a daytime landscape made you want to pull out a digital camera, even for casual snaps. Not so with the 3GS. The camera is great. Autofocus works pretty well (aside from it taking a second or two to focus), the picture quality, for a phone, is pretty awesome during the day (and fairly good in a dark room too, but not great). Now, the video is where the 3GS really excels. Again, it’s not the best quality in a darker location, but if you’re outside during the day…wow. The video really is pretty amazing, for a phone. Here’s a sample clip that I took last night out of my bedroom window, at about 9:30pm: iPhone 3GS Video Test (Quicktime movie, 7.7MB). The video is completely unedited too, so that’s what you’ll get yourself if you record a video. ;)

Finally, the compass. At first, I thought this was a pretty big gimmick. And it is. The standalone Compass app on the phone has absolutely no use to me. I reckon the only time I’ll ever use it is for showing off. However, I will say one thing. The way it’s used within the Maps application is genius. If you click the “Find me” button in Maps, it’ll find your location using both the cell towers, and GPS. However, it’ll still have North at the top of the phone. If you tap the Find me button again, it’ll rotate the map to the direction you’re heading, which is a pretty useful feature if you’re walking around a city like London and are somewhat lost. For that alone, I think the compass is worth it.

So, the iPhone 3GS. If you have an iPhone 2G, the upgrade is very much worth it, as you’ll gain a whole host of new features. If you have an iPhone 3G, the upgrade really isn’t that much, but if you’re very much into gaming, it could be a good upgrade. Finally, if you’re using another phone, check out the 3GS. It really is a delight to use.

iStat for the iPhone

Published on 24 January, 2009. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Since I first got my Mac mini several years ago (which I don’t own anymore), and more recently, my iMac (which, again, I don’t own anymore) and MacBook (which I do own), I’ve always been a fan of two handy utilities on my Mac – iStat Pro, and iStat Menus, both of which are developed by iSlayer. Simply put, they’re two system monitoring utilities for Mac OS X. iStat menus sits in your menu bar, and iStat Pro is a Dashboard widget. iStat Pro, the Dashboard widget, shows common stuff about your Mac, including CPU and RAM usage, network activity, uptime, disks and disk usage, battery info, and your internal temperatures and fan speed(s). iStat Menus shows much the same stuff, but on the menu bar, however I myself only use it for the CPU meter, and the Calendar. They’re two of the handiest utilities I’ve come across on OS X, so if you have a Mac, I highly recommend you check them out.

Anyway, I’m not reviewing those, I’m reviewing (or attempting to review it – I’m not the best at that :P ) iStat, for the iPhone. This app was announced a while ago, and I first became aware of it while reading TUAW. It’s developed by the parent company (I think?) of iSlayer, which is called Bjango. The iPhone version of iStat is pretty handy, in that in can monitor your Mac while you’re away from it.

The app itself is available on the iTunes App Store, for £1.19. Now, an quick look at it overall.

Note: The screenshots in this post include some non-standard iPhone UI elements – my iPhone has a different font and keyboard theme applied, so if you’re on an unjailbroken iPhone, you’ll see the normal keyboard and font. Continue reading ‘iStat for the iPhone’

My Top 10 iPhone Applications

Published on 24 December, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

As you might know, I have an iPhone, and I love it very much. It’s only a 1st gen one, but it’s still fast enough for everyday use and serves me well. Since the iPhone App Store has been up and running since Apple launched it earlier this year, I thought I’d post a list of the 10 applications that I use the most. I have not included screenshots, as there are ones on the iTunes store listings, and, finally, this list is not in a specific order – it’s random.

• Twitterrific Premium (£5.99, or free ad-supported version) / Twinkle (free)
These two apps are tied, because I probably use them both equally, and they’re both pretty much the same thing. They’re clients for the popular site, Twitter. If I had to choose only one client, it would be Twitterrific Premium, because it’s the nicest looking and it’s very easy to use. However, Twinkle is also easy to use, but it has in the past not shown some tweets, so it comes second place. It does have one feature which Twitterrific does not have though, which is location-based Tweeting. It works by sending all tweets through Tapulous’ servers, and when you open the app on your iPhone, you can see any nearby tweets. This is handy for meeting new people, however if you live somewhere like me, you might be surrounded by retards.

• Facebook (free)
No guesses as to what this is for – it’s an iPhone client for the popular social networking site. It’s also one of the best iPhone apps that I’ve used – it’s pretty to look at, easy to use, and has yet to crash a single time on me. It does lack some features of the desktop-based Facebook site, but for what it is now, it’s fine for casual use.

• Movies (free)
Again, it’s pretty obvious what this is about. Movies shows current films showing, as well as nearby cinemas, with times, and DVD releases. It’s pretty handy for finding nearby cinemas, and checking times, however I’ve found that more then once, it’s shown the wrong times for a specific film then the cinema’s official website does. Also, the movie dates (such as the “released this week” films) are targeted toward the US market. I think this would be a great app if you live in the US, but otherwise, don’t rely on it 100%. It’s still worth downloading though.

• Night Stand (free)
Simply put, this is a clock. It displays a large LED clock, and does it while looking stylish. It also has the ability to disable the iPhone’s turn-the-screen-off-after-X-minutes function, so it can stay on all night long. However, it WILL kill your battery so it’s best if you use the power adaptor and USB cable to keep it charged.

• 1Password (free)
The iPhone based client that works very well with the desktop based password manager, 1Password. This is an extremely handy app for storing passwords, usernames, credit card numbers, and so on. It’s also protected by a PIN when you open it, and you can also assign a second password to specific entries, such as credit cards. While you don’t need the Mac-only desktop software to use this, it’s handy if you’re an OS X user, as you can sync them both over WiFi. This is also easily the most useful and productive app I have on my iPhone, and I would highly recommend both it and the desktop app if you have a Mac!

• TV Forecast (£1.79)
One of my very favourite apps, this program grabs info from (I think) TV.com, about when your favourite TV show is next on. It’s more suited to the US market, as it doesn’t allow you to choose, say, Prison Break on Sky1 in the UK instead of Fox in the US (season 4 of Prison Break has been shown on Tuesdays here, 24 hours after it’s aired in the US). It can show other shows though – it’s successfully worked with the UK’s “Top Gear” and “The IT Crowd”, as well as “Rush”, which is an Australian cop drama type show. Overall, very useful if you live in the US (or live outside of the US but know what bittorrent is ;) ), and only 75% useful if you live outside the US. There’s also a dashboard widget for OS X, made by the same guy, which I also have. It’s pretty much the same thing as the iPhone app though.

• TV Plus (£2.99)
As far as I know, this is a UK-only app, which is a huge guide of all the TV channels available on Freeview or Sky here. Where the other apps fail though, is where this one is great – it has built in support for Sky’s “Remote Record” function, which allows you to set stuff to record when you’re not at home onto your Sky+ or Sky+HD box. However, this app is buggy, and crashes a lot, so it could do with some bug fixes.

• AroundMe (free)
Simply put – this shows points of interest around you, similar to what a GPS does. There are several categories available, including banks, bars, coffee, gas stations, hotels, cinemas, parking garages, pubs, restaurants, supermarkets, and so on. Data is provided by Google Maps.

• Shazam (free)
We’ve all at one time heard a great song, but have no idea what it actually is. Shazam is perfect for this – hold it up to your speakers (or wherever the music is coming from), and it’ll attempt to identify the track. Most of the time this works fine, but I’ve had several times where it’s failed on obscure music off a TV show. However, it works fine most of the time.

• Moonlight Mahjong (£2.99, or free “lite” version)
Last, but most definitely not least, is this great game. Other people might not like it too much, but I find myself addicted to it all the time. It’s also very pretty, has good performance, doesn’t crash, and there’s a frequent stream of new user-created layouts on the blog that you can load and play.

Note: Prices were correct at time of writing. This post is my personal opinion and is not in any way influnced by the developers of these apps. However, developers, if you want to give me a comission for posting this, feel free to do so. :P