Just yesterday my boss’s son joined us at the office after staying home from school. It wasn’t long before he was playing on my iPod Touch, which lasted a good solid few hours. Now, we are talking about an 8 year old kid here, and I could not help but think that the fact that he could pick up the device, find what to play with, and stay entertained for hours, is a clear indication of how good the Apple device really is.
Many of us use iMovie on our Mac (Or Windows Movie Maker if you’re on PC) to edit our videos, whether it’s for home use, YouTube, or Vimeo. ReelDirector, by Nexvio Inc. provides mobile video editing right on your iPhone 3GS. So whether your in a car, bus, train, or on the street, you can [...]
Are you one of the millions of Twitter users? Like to tweet frequently? Fluttr for Twitter lets you take social networking on Twitter one step further. It puts the power of Twitter into your pocket; loaded on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Wielding a very unique UI (User Interface), Fluttr allows you to tweet from [...]
There are not many apps that, mobile and not mobile, that can actually change the way we behave. Every computer user is familiar with the problem of sharing and syncing your files. Whether you need your file on another computer, want to share it with a friend, or would like to access it on your phone, everyone is presented with this difficulty at one point or another.
There are many reasons a person would download an app for their phone. There is what seems to be the most popular reason, which is that the app provides entertainment in the form of a game or puzzle. There are utility apps that enhance your productivity and there are social apps that enable you to stay connected. Then there are apps like Fake-Call Me, which are just so funny, that you just feel a need to try it out.
While one of the big complaints I have about my BlackBerry Bold is the lack of sufficient application memory, the fact that I can only install the most important apps on my phone helps me decide what I need and what is just fun and games. Any app I leave installed on my Bold is an app I use regularly or something that provides important functionality that the phone would not have otherwise. These three apps are the perfect examples of this. All three apps are ultra simplistic in their UI, in fact, some of them do not even have a UI, but they all provide something very important that RIM apparently did not think about when engineering the Bold.
If you have not been paying attention, one of the big buzz words lately has been Augmented Reality. There really is no simple way to explain what it is, but let’s just say it is a developing technology that overlays or augments reality creating a separate mixed reality. Yes, I know you are probably more confused now than you were before. What this technology allows you to do practically is aim your camera phone in a certain direction, and using the phone’s GPS in combination with the Web, display results based on the phone’s view. That means you can define that you want the phone to look in a 5 mile radius for pizza stores, ATMs, people on Twitter, or many other things, and the phone will display the results.
Android still has not reached puberty. This is true for so many reasons starting with frequent bugs and crashes and ending with a relatively small App Market compared to its competitors. Not to mention the fact that there is no single app to take screen shots. However, for me, one of the main reasons I could not use an Android phone as my primary mobile device is a serious lack of a quality Twitter app.
Ever since I started tweeting, I have been using Twitterfon, now Echofon as my default Twitter client on my iPod Touch. I always found it to be the closest balance between form and function. However, Twitter is not what it used to be, and there are many new features that were not around back then. Echofon pretty much stayed the same with the exception of some small updates, but never really made the transition to the new Twitter experience, and specifically the addition of Twitter lists.
As the year and decade are coming to an end, it is safe to say that one can summarize this year in the mobile space using only three words: Apps, apps, and more apps. While all the major players in the mobile industry have released some pretty amazing phones this year, the ones who are bringing in the major numbers are the ones who realize that software is the name of the game. Apple surpassed the 100,000 mark, Android is hovering around the 20,000 mark, Nokia released its Ovi store, and BlackBerry’s App World is catching up quickly. It is safe to say that Apple still has the lead by a lot, and in my opinion, there is a direct correlation between that lead and the iPhone’s unprecedented popularity.
