Wednesday, August 27, 2008

iPhone review

I love this thing more today than I did yesterday. Seriously, you couldn't ask for a better phone. If you're in the market, you really should get one — it's amazing and the $199 price tag is a steal. The phone quality is exceptional, the interface is very easy to use, intuitive and has some great features, the camera is as good on a phone as I've seen and it has GPS, iTunes, YouTube, e-mail, a calendar, calculator and weather report all built in. My battery has lasted all day and I really only have two gripes about the phone, but they're both minor. First, you can't set a home page for the internet browser. This isn't a huge deal because I have my bookmarks set up and am two clicks away from those. Secondly, you can't text pictures to your friends or create videos. Sure, you can e-mail photos, but you can't text them, which seems strange. But, like I said, the gripes are pretty minor, especially when you consider all that you can do with the phone. The best thing about the iPhone is that you can download other little applications that can really do some neat things. Here are the apps I downloaded yesterday...

MLB At Bat
This is the application I was most excited for and the only one that costs money ($4.99). It provides live score updates for all MLB games, as well as video highlights. For some reason, it doesn't have box scores, but having near-live video highlights straight to your phone for a one-time fee of $4.99 is an incredible bargain. The video quality isn't superb, but hello...you're watching highlights on your phone, for crying out loud!

Baseball
This is also awesome. It provides player stats all the way back to 1882. 1882! No more sitting at a game wondering how many doubles Mark Ellis hit last season or how many strikeouts Heath Bell had. Faster and easier than loading Baseball-Reference on the internet and it was free!

Jott
This program records 15 seconds of audio and turns it into text. My first test had about a 90% accuracy rate and I was speaking pretty quickly. The only thing it didn't recognize was my name, so that's promising. No more typing up little to-do lists or grocery lists, I can just speak them into my phone. Sweet!

Urbanspoon
This is a great little application, made even more desirable for me because I'm away from home. It uses your phone's GPS to figure out where you are. After that, it gives you three lists that look sort of like a slot machine. The one on the left has a list of nearby cities. In the middle, there's all different types of cuisine and on the right there's price ranges. You can lock down all or none of the columns and it will recommend a restaurant. So, for example, you could tell it that you want an Italian restaurant in Durham that is between $5 and $10. Or you could request any type of restaurant under $20 in Chapel Hill, etc. It gives you the phone number, reviews, directions. It's awesome!

Last.fm & Pandora
These are both internet radio programs where you tell them a few artists you like and they play similar artists. Today I said I like Gatsbys and it suggested Moneen — good call!

Stanza
This is a free book service so I can read books on my phone. I have to download a program to my Mac to get the books and it looks like most that are freely available are sci-fi, so I'm not sure how much I'll use this.

Loopt
Loopt is a social-networking app, similar to Twitter, where you keep your friends updated with what you're doing. It's cool because Cheryl and Megan have it too, so it's nice to know what they're up to and where they are. You can update your status as much as you want and can even include pictures. Fun stuff!

Google
This is a google reader app for reading RSS streams of Web sites. Probably won't use it much, as I like to flip through my bookmarks instead.

Instapaper
This allows you to send text versions of web sites to your phone to read later. We'll see how much I use it. It was free and was listed as one of the best apps, so I'm trying it out.

Shazam
This is mind blowing. You press a button, hold your phone up to the radio and, after listening to 10 seconds of the song, tells you the artist, song title and album title. Technology is amazing!

Showtimes
This uses the GPS to identify the closest theaters and give you showtimes for movies. You can click on the theater and get directions. Another awesome app for someone 3,000 miles from home!

Any recommendations? Any good games? Let me know!

4 comments:

mernando fonterey said...

shazam sounds like the devils work.

I didn't know you reviewed the little leage world championship:http://www.theonion.com/content/news/hawaii_wins_little_league_world?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

mernando fonterey said...

also recommend 'the onion' rss feed

Cheryl said...

I think you're a little too obsessed. Seriously. Do you need to go to i.A.?

Thanks for the scoop on the apps. I can officially say that none of those apps are on my computer, except for Urbanspoon and possibly Shazam in the near future. I plan on filling my screen with mindless games that I will easily become addicted to.

ConorGlassey said...

See - the phone is so cool, you think it's a computer! :)