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.
Undercover for iPhone
A while ago I was interested in Undercover for Mac OS X. This application is supposed to help you recover a stolen computer. It connects to their service periodiocally. If your computer is stolen, you contact the service and then the next time your computer connects to the service, it takes and uploads a picture of what ever is in front of the computer and the service logs the location of the ip address.
It looks like they now have an iPhone application. It pretty much has the same functionality (I don’t think it takes the photo though). The problem that I see with this solution is that it requires that the person to launch the Undercover application in order for the information to be logged to their service. I don’t see people launching random applications if they steal an iPhone. Most likely, they will wipe it, and get a new SIM card. This will make Undercover pretty much useless.
Also, in my case, I lock my phone. So there is no way that the Undercover application will be launched for the service to log the iPhone’s location.
Ideally, for this functionality, iPhone would allow applications to run in the background. Then it wouldn’t require that the user launches an application. Alternatively, this could be a service that the cellular provider would provide
mophie iPhone 3G Juice Pack
I was going on a trip a few weeks ago. I wanted to make sure that my iPhone would not run out of power, especially since there would be longer times than usual that I would be away from a charger.
I bought the mophie iPhone 3G Juice Pack
. This is a battery pack for the iPhone that connects to the iPhone like a case. I chose this battery pack instead of others, as it would fit in my pocket while it is attached.
The Juice Pack is 1800 mAh battery, that doubles the battery life of the iPhone. It connects to the iPod dock connector. The Juice Pack has a USB port that it uses to chare the battery. If a iPhone is also attached, the iPhone’s battery will be charged before the Juice Pack’s. Also on discharge, the Juice Pack’s battery is discharged before the iPhone’s internal, so you can remove it from the battery pack once the battery pack loses power.
The only problem that I have with the mophie Juice Pack is that after I put on a BodyGuardz protector on my iPhone, it takes a significant amount of force to put on and take off the battery pack.
tweets of the day
- Howto: Install Google Chrome Alpha in Ubuntu! ff.im/-1FKXg #
- Windows Home Server Power Pack 2 Features and Links ff.im/-1GWc2 #
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
iPhone
So my wife and I joined the crowd and got iPhone 3Gs. Now that we have them, we are enjoying them, but it was a pretty big hassle to get them.
I got to the Apple Store pretty early in the morning, and there wasn’t a line for iPhones. An Apple Store employees got the two iPhones and started activating the first. The Symbian device lost connection to the service, but after the AT&T Wireless account was created, and after the phone number port started, but before the number was added to the account.
When he got another Symbian device, further attempts to continue the setup kept failing. It looks like Apple’s system to register iPhones will only work if the device actually does the registration, and will not work if the phone is configured via the phone with AT&T support. We were on hold with AT&T for over 2 hours, talking to 7 different people at AT&T.
Finally we got the phones registered. What we had to do was add the iPhones to the account with new phone numbers. Then with the AT&T support rep on the phone, the numbers were switched to the numbers that were were attempting to port.
I do appreciate the time that the Apple Store rep spent with settiing this up.
One other problem arose. The microphone on my wife’s iPhone didn’t work so I took it back to the Apple Store and they did replace it, without too much hassle.
Skype for Windows Mobile
This post mentions that the Windows Mobile version of Skype has been upated. We use Skype at work, so I was interested in trying this out.
The download and install went well. I was able to use it to send text messages, but I wasn’t able tomake a voice call. I am not sure if it is possible for Skype to use the microphone on my phone to send audio to Skype.
