android2cloud
android2cloud is a project similar to Chrome to Phone, but instead of sending links to your phone, instead you send urls from your phone to the browser on your computer.
I am not sure how often I will use it, as majority of the time that I am looking at the browser on my phone, I am not at my computer, and am most likely not logged in. Ideally, the shared links would be queued, and the pages would open the next time that the browser is opened, but it looks like that doesn’t happen.
Chrome to Phone
Chrome to Phone is a pretty cool project. With this Chrome extension and Android applicaiton, you can send links to web pages to your phone. I use this for:
- Sending a location from Google Maps to your phone, where you can easily get start navigating to the destination
- Sending web page url to the phone, where it can be viewed
Sirius/XM on Android
Sirius/XM has released an Android application which allows you to listen to the satellite radio stations on your phone. Once I downloaded the application, I was able to play all of the Sirius/XM station, over wifi and 3G.
Unfortunately, they decided not to put the application in the Android Market, but you have to download it manually. This will mean that updates to the application will not be automatically shown to the user, when they become available. Also, if you have to restore your phone, this application will not be automatically reinstalled.
The other problem that I have had with the application is that when the application loses the connection, it plays the data in the buffer, and continues to loop that audio.
I will probably pay for the premium streaming, once the free trial ends, as I like listening to this content at work.
[via MarketWatch]
On My Way
On My Way is an pretty cool Android application. When you are going somewhere, and someone is expecting you, you can use On My Way.
When you launch On My Way, you can start sharing. When you do that the application generates a url that you can share with people who are expecting you. If they access that url, they will see an embedded map that shows your current location.
It would be very cool if you could also specify your destination in the app, so then the web page could also show your ETA.
My Movies for Android
A while ago, My Movies came out with an iPhone application that lets you sync the meta data of your movie collection to your phone. This lets you see which movies that you own while you are out, so you can know whether you should rent or buy a movie. This synchronization happens by the PC application syncing the collection to the My Movies online collection, and then your phone syncs from there.
They just released an Android application that has the same functionality. This is yet another benefit of using My Movies to manage my movie collection.
Android Apps
This post has a good list of Android applications. I think that ecosystem of Android application is really doing well.
Here is a list of the third party Android applicaitons that I have installed:
- Amazon
- Backgrounds
- Bank of America
- Barcode Scanner
- CNET Scan & Shop
- Evernote
- Jewels
- Last.fm
- LastPass
- Listen
- Movies
- OneTouch Timer Free
- Pandora
- PhoneFlicks
- Remember The Milk
- Seesmic
- Shazam
- SqueezeControl
- SqueezeDroid
- TripIt
- TuneWiki
- Ultimate Stopwatch
- WordPress
- Yelp
Google Voice for cell phones
I have been having a problem receiving my voicemail on my iPhone. My wife would leave message on my cell phone, but my phone would show no indication of a waiting voice mail message. Also when I call in to get my voicemail, nothing appears their either. I think that this is a problem with AT&T and not my iPhone.
Google made it available to use Google Voice with existing cell phones. With this you can now have your voicemail sent to Google voice, and you can listen to it from your phone or your computer. Also Google Voice will create a transcript of your message, and you can received that via email or sms.
I have been using Google Voice for a little bit, but this functionality allows me to receive messages from callers that don’t know my Google Voice number in my Google Voice inbox.
[via Engadget]
Comcast iPhone application
Comcast just came out with an iPhone application[iTunes link]. This application lets you check your comcast.net email, sync your comcast address book with your iPhone’s. The one feature that I am really interested in is to be able to listen to the voicemail from our comcast phone.
This adds one feature that I enjoyed with Vonage. With Vonage you could configure the voicemail system to email the voicemail audio file to an email address. This made it very easy to listen to voicemail messages, while not at home. This iPhone application lets you listen to voicemails.
One feature that I would love to see is this application use Apple’s push notification to deliver notifications of new voicemails.
[via TUAW]
Push notifications on the iPhone
I just received notification that the Remember The Milk iPhone application has a new update. This update adds support for push notifications, where you will be notified if you a task scheduled for the day, without actually launching the application itself.
This had me thinking about some other applications that I think would be great to have push notifications added:
- Facebook: to notify you when someone commented on something that you do, or sent you a message.
- Tweetie: to notify you when someone sends you a direct message
- Skype: to notify you of new messages.
- Games: to notify you if someone “challenges” you, or if someone beats your high score.
I also think that there is an opportunity for another service. Currently, if a developer wants to present notifications on the iPhone, they need to have a native iPhone application installed. A lot of the “applications” that I use are web based. I would love to receive notifications from these applications.
I think that it would be great if some developer wrote an iPhone application and a web service. This application would talk to the web service to see if there are any notifications to be displayed. Then other web services, using OAuth or Facebook Connect, would associate with this service. This would allow notifications to be received from any web service.
I think that Facebook would be a good developer to do this, as they have the relationships with other developers, and they already support Facebook Connect. But, I think that Apple will end up doing this in their MobileMe service. This would be another reason to get users to pay for this service.
Two nice features of iPhone 3.0
I have been playing with the iPhone 3.0 software on my iPhone 3G for a few days now. I have seen two features that I think are the best additions, that haven’t really seen mentioned other places.
- Sending SMS messages now happen asynchronously. With this change you don’t have to wait for a message to be sent, before typing the next message.
- The ability to send a contact to someone via email. This attaches the contact information to the email as a vcard. This makes many of the third party contact sharing applications not necessary.
