iPhone App Review, vol. 1

Well I had to do it. The Bold was just not working out for me and I decided to get the iphone. I would say the major factor was the bigger screen. This is crucial if you're watching video or doing any web browsing. The app store is awesome too. There's "an app for just about everything", as the apple commercial says. Thats not to say they're all good, mind you, but if you look at the reviews and it seems like something you would enjoy then go for it. Why not? Most of them are free anyways.



1) Apple Remote

This one is sweet because it allows you to control your itunes library on your phone. Big deal, you say? Well say you're having people over and you make a custom mix, you can pick and choose tracks on your computer to entertain people. Say that you don't want to sit at your desk or walk across the room to switch tracks. Hook up a decent sound system to your computer, and you don't even have a need for a boom box. The coolest thing about this app is that it downloads all the songs in your library allowing you to pick and choose, not just pause, play, or skip tracks. How many boom boxes do that?

2) Stanza and/or Kindle for iphone

Stanza was recently acquired by amazon, so i am lumping these two together. Plus they do practically the same thing anyways. Both these apps allow you to read books on the iphone. The kindle downloads via Amazon through your wifi network. There is a really good selection of books and they are all cheaper than their paper counterparts. A bonus is that you don't have to pay 400 dollars for a regular kindle to get this great service. The stanza is great too, because it allows you to get many, albeit older, books from sources like project gutenberg. This app even allows you to cut down on battery life by switching the text to white and the background on white. Using this contrast ratio makes reading on the iphone much more pleasing to your eyes. Another cool thing is that you can download Stanza for your desktop and convert pdf files into readable format and load them on your phone. This is great for downloading ebook torrents.

3) Wired Reviews

Wired is a great magazine about technology and geek culture, so its only natural that they have a great iphone app. The reviews haven't really been updated much but im sure there will be more to come. Reviews on such items as the latest phones, cameras, computers, TVs, laptops, games, and even household appliances. The app also gives you daily access to their blog, which is worth the app alone, and video blogs. The video blogs integrate well with the youTube app, kinda satisfying my need for missing flash videos on the browser. Hopefully more websites and apps just add youTube in the future until we get flash.

4) Feeds

Feeds is an RSS reader that allows you easy access to websites by providing just the headlines and then either brief descriptions or sometimes full articles. This cuts down on loading time if you have a lot of bookmarks that you want to keep up on such as news, tech, video games, etc. Best of all there is an internal browser that allows you to quickly bring up the source article, if the shorter version is not enough. The fact that it is an internal browser is key, otherwise you would be switching back and forth between the safari and the app and that would suck. There are a few gripes about this app though. If you have a lot of feeds, it can be slow to load them when you bring up the app. Gladly you can change the setting to load individual feeds as you choose them instead of loading all them at once when you open the app. The other is a minor gripe less about the app itself. Sometimes finding RSS feeds and/or typing them in can be a pain. Most major sites have them, but they may not be easily accesible. When you do find them, they are long and take a while to type in. This isn't too bad since you only have to do it once, and that's only if typing the initial web address in the app doesn't find the actual feed.

5) Flixster Movies

This is pretty much the standard movie finding app. You can scope local theaters for listings, see reviews, box office statistics and more. This app even has facebook connectivity, facebook is also a great app for the iphone.