The iPhone 3G and the Apple App Store has been out for a few weeks now so I figured it would be a good time to talk about what I’ve got on my iPhone and hopefully show you a few things you might want to check out yourself.
First though, an annoyance I have about the App Store and it’s downloads: the icons keep moving around!
I prefer to organize my iPhone’s homescreen(s) around either tasks or app type. So I have a couple of pages reserved for web shortcuts/favorites, one just for social media stuff (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and one for games. Unfortunately, every time you download a new app or upgrade an existing one, it shuffles the deck which I find really annoying. Scrolling through six pages of apps just isn’t the kind of experience we’re used to getting from Apple so I’m hopeful they will tweak this in an upcoming firmware release.
Anyways, on to the apps! There are simply too many to cover them all off so here’s three apps that I actually seem to be using:
Urban Spoon
This is an app based on a restaurant review website. It has a couple of clever features that really benefit from the iPhone. Unfortunately, at least right now, it’s also probably the crashiest app I have and seems to cause a full reboot one out of every three launches. Hopefully this will be addressed soon.
First thing that happens when you launch it, it checks to see where you are using the GPS function or you can simply choose your city from the list. They have a fairly comprehensive list of cities supported. In the case below, I chose Vancouver. It then gives you a more localized list of areas within that city, type of food and cost of food using multiple dollar signs. This is presented just like a slot machine. You can choose to lock in a specific ‘reel’ like I did with Gastown and then if you shake the iPhone (or press the shake button) it will actually choose a random location, food type or cost and then display the resulting restaurant below. The slot machine reel spinning animation is a nice touch.
If you click on that chosen restaurant, it will give you more information about the place including a clickable phone number that will actually dial the restaurant for you, a clickable address that will launch Google Maps and a ‘More Info’ button with reviews for that place from the website.
Exposure
A decent app for directly viewing you and your friend’s Flickr photos. I just have the free one so I get ads and they don’t bother me. It can be a little slow but that could just be the 3G network and not the app.
You can view all your photos, comments and details just like you can on Flickr. Sometimes I want to see things at the source so I use Mobile Flickr as it’s very fast on the iPhone.
You can view images at full screen and it also works nicely in landscape mode too which not all apps do.
There is also a somewhat cool/creepy ‘nearby’ option that will find photos taken near your current location.
Solitaire Top 3
Everybody needs a decent Solitaire game and there are a bunch on the App Store. This one is a game you have to buy (for only $3.99) but is one of the few worth paying for. It’s an updated version to one I used on Installer before and is a very solid version not unlike what ships with Windows - except you can use your fingers to move the cards around.
It features three different games: Klondike, Freecell and Spider. I’m an old school Klondike player so can’t really speak to the other games…I’ll try them at some point but I keep going back to Klondike when I’ve got some time to kill.
Apps I’m waiting for:
a decent Flickr uploader (maybe even one from Flickr themselves!): I really miss SendPics from Erica Sudan. I haven’t come across any app that properly sends iPhone images to Flickr with the EXIF data intact and the image size correct - GPS location data would be great too. Hopefully Erica already has an official version in the App Store approval queue
a video app that lets you record video with the iPhone. A number of these were available on Installer before…where are they now?
PhotoBooth - Apple should port this to the iPhone
There are probably more but I can’t think of any at the moment….post in the comments what you’d like to see on the App Store.
Bonus Video review: Shazam
Shazam is similar to an app that was on Installer before that was kind of cool called Listen but takes it to the next level with the built in iTunes purchase links. Very slick. Here’s Buzz showing how Shazam works:
One last annoyance
I wish the App Store application on the iPhone had a better mechanism for browsing/sorting through the apps. Sure there is a RSS feed of new releases (although not officially from Apple), but I prefer to browse and grab in the same place while on the go. I go through the store at least every other day looking for new apps to check out and it’s a pain to do it on the phone itself since they keep ‘featuring’ the same apps and there isn’t a ’sort by release date’ option like in iTunes. Again - this is an inconsistent experience from Apple that I’m hopeful they will rectify.
I was recently offered the chance to test drive Microsoft’s latest version of their ‘wish I was an iPod’ MP3 player, the Zune and I jumped at the chance.
Despite what some people may think, I’m not *just* a fan of Apple products. I’m a fan of cool products in general and always like to at least try out the latest and greatest so that I know where I stand with my recommendations to friends/family/etc and so that I can accurately compare these products. I prefer to think of myself as a fan of a good experience rather than a particular company…but lately, Apple has been hitting most of the right notes for me so it’s easy to recommend them over many others depending on the product.
At first glance I thought the packaging was nice and simple but almost destroyed the Zune before I’d even opened it. A friend picked up the Zune box (middle in the photo above) and the little orange line on the bottom of the box is actually a drawer where you slide the inner contents out from. He picked up the box (it was standing upright) and the bottom fell out, Zune inside. Fortunately it didn’t fall far but was an inauspicious start to say the least.
As you can see in the photo, my Zune kit came with an AC adapter (basically a USB to wall outlet) along with ‘premium headphones’. The base Zune comes with basic headphones but the premium ones are truly decent. They feel and fit nice, do a great job of blocking external sound, and have a very long, rope-like cable which doesn’t feel cheap or plastic-y.
As you can see from the above photo, it’s pretty similar in size to the older version of the iPod Nano. Just a little thicker but the same width.
The first thing I noticed about the Zune was the large, clean font presentation. For such a relatively small device, it’s very bright and easy to read. The background in the above photo is my own photo (actually my wife’s from our trip to Hawaii) so it’s really nice to customize the background of something you will be using a lot - something Apple could learn from since none of their devices really support this kind of personalization. The iPod interface seems a little dated now in comparison, even on the new models…excluding of course the Touch and the iPhone.
The Zune just launched recently in Canada and has been available in the US for a number of years. Seems kind of strange to launch a product like this so long after they did in the US…and when compared to the iPod Nano (newer model), it may seem a little old to the uninformed consumer.
One thing that was initially a bit of a pain to deal with was the fact that they can only be setup with a Windows PC. I would have liked to use a virtualized version of Windows on one of my Macs but the Zune software complained of needing to do a Windows Update before installing…I wasn’t prepared to do that to any of my installs just yet so opted to use my wife’s old PC (she now uses an iMac) and install the software on there which was pretty straightforward and works fairly similar to iTunes as a media manager.
The menu system is actually quite nice and has a few nice little animated flourishes as you navigate around your content. I found the ‘touch pad’ navigational button to be quite sensitive and once I realized it behaves more like a laptop touch pad than a game controller d-pad, it was easy to get used to.
One feature I haven’t had a chance to play with is the wireless syncing and the ’social’ aspect of the device which allows you to wirelessly share your content with other Zune owners. A number of local friends are also participating in this trial so hopefully we can get together soon and try out these features. The biggest problem is finding other Zunes ‘in the wild’…I’ve never seen one other than on store shelves.
Music and video played back like you’d expect if you’ve ever used an iPod…no surprises there.
Another lesson Apple could learn from Microsoft is the Zune came preloaded with some sample content. What a novel idea! Show people how the various content types could be used before dropping them into iTunes.
One feature that actually surprised me was the FM tuner. I’ve always thought it was a useless feature on an mp3 player. It made sense to me that you’d never use it since you have your own music on it. But considering this is an 8gb model, perhaps not all your music. Plus there are times when you may want to hear the news or traffic. Unfortunately where I live at least, the best news/traffic station is on AM. Still not sure it’s a main selling point, but definitely a nice feature. I also thought it was cool that the tuner was able to pull down the station name and even the track playing from the source radio station which even pushed out weather updates during commercials which was a nice touch.
All in all, I think the Zune is a solid mp3 player when compared to the iPod Nano - at least the model I played with. Possibly even a better device depending on your needs and your computer setup (PC or Mac). The big drawback for me with using it is the Windows only nature of the syncing software which is the same complaint Windows users made about the iPod when it was first released.
Part of the marketing campaign is to track the conversations about this mp3 player. They’ve asked me to include a link to the tool they are using to do this so that you, the reader, can add your voice to the conversation. This is an interesting approach and I’m curious to see how many people actually participate. It’s not an easy thing to track and requires people to do something they may not normally do. If you’re so inclined, here’s the link:
So here’s my quick list of thoughts about the Zune after playing with it for a few days:
Positives:
slick user interface
personalization options
wireless built in
FM tuner
the premium headphones are really nice
preloaded with sample audio/video content including tutorials and even the Zune commercial so you can use it out of the box (kind of - you need to run ’setup’ first)
Negatives:
Windows only software install
form factor a little old when compared to Apple’s offerings
possibly a year or two too late to Canada
touchpad took a little getting used to due to sensitivity
poor design choice in package layout
I’ll add to this list once I’ve used it more and had a chance to further test some of the features.
Well, it didn’t take long for a free version of the software unlock for the iPhone to be released by the iPhone Dev Team. As I mentioned previously, it’s not for the those that are afraid of the command line but expect that to change as more people get their hands on the code in the coming days. I used this tutorial (which also has all the files). If you follow it completely then run Independence (Mac) to activate your non-AT&T sim, you should be good to go!
So this is my confirmed, it fully works on Roger’s post:
with the only tool you need for the job
If you want to enable EDGE to work on Roger’s (aka the highway robbery that is data in Canada), just edit the EDGE settings in the Settings/General/Network/Edge menu to:
To disable EDGE at anytime, simply add an extra character to the APN url so that it’s not valid.
It’s worth mentioning that when you connect to “Roger’s Wireless” on the iPhone, it does a neat little scrolling animation (not unlike when you connect to a long wireless network name on a Mac) but then instead of just saying “Roger’s” in the network name spot on the top left, it truncates the name with “…” so it then says “Roge…”. I could probably change that to the logo of my choosing but figure I’ll be ‘proving’ it’s on Roger’s to friends for a little while at least.
Update to this post: I did a complete iTunes restore to my iPhone and the unlock survived the restore. I used the latest version of the iPhone software (1.02) and was using iTunes 7.3.4 (haven’t upgraded to the latest yet).
Update #2: the latest version of Independence now also makes YouTube work when you activate it! Woohoo!
Update #3: there is now a number of much simpler software unlock methods. iUnlock and AnySim are free apps you can install on the iPhone to do all the heavy lifting directly. There should be soon a version available via the Installer App. For now, follow this detailed tutorial to get your iPhone unlocked.
Expect everything to change after the big Apple announcement in London on September 18th which is widely rumoured to be European iPhone release which will most likely also come with a firmware update.
Yesterday, Gizmodo posted a video (no embeded version) of them using the iPhoneSimFree unlock software. It seems pretty convincing that at least the software unlock application exists and it’s pretty straightforward to apply the unlock. Engadget also weighed in on this latest chapter although they seem to point out that this is a demo of the backend system and that it doesn’t actually unlock anything, but rather just goes through the motions.
I didn’t need anymore convincing that it’s real although it’s still unclear how Apple will handle a software based unlock. In the past they have looked the other way when it comes to many forms of hacking of their products. The AppleTV has been hacked and very little was done by Apple to stop it. Given the hacking roots of Apple’s creators, it’s no surprise that Apple doesn’t mind this type of activity as long as it don’t cost them any money. Hacking for the sake of extending a product beyond what was intended or offered originally should be okay….doing it for the purpose of bypassing payment, not so much.
Stay tuned as next week should be an interesting week for iPhone users or potential customers!
