The only constant is change.
Posts tagged iphone
iPhone app recommendations – free apps
Apr 20th
Posted by Kevin Matheny in Advice
The iPhone is now an approved device for Best Buy corporate users, which is excellent. Even better, personal phones can now be attached to corporate email/calendar, which is a huge improvement.
The result is that we’re getting new iPhone users, and several of them have asked me to recommend iPhone applications. Therefore I present the following list, which does not purport to be exhaustive, of iPhone apps that I find worth having around.
Free Apps
Google Mobile App – Google search (including voice search, which works well), Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Reader, and more. It’s Google on your phone. Essential.
Pandora – play Pandora streams on your phone. If you’re not using Pandora, you’re missing out – it’s the best music discovery engine in the Milky Way Galaxy. Essential.
Facebook – Facebook on your iPhone. If you use Facebook, the iPhone app is really neat. Useless if you don’t use Facebook, though.
NYTimes – NY Times headlines and stories. Ad-supported. Excellent for catching up on current events when you have some downtime.
Urbanspoon – The first app that convinced me the iPhone was something special. Location-aware listings of restaurants, so you can find the ones near you. Couple that with reviews/ratings and menu information, and you have something really neat. Unlike Yelp, which is unfocused and therefore (to me) useless.
myWireless – the first app that *should* have been released for the iPhone. It lets you monitor usage and adjust rate plans and features as needed. My daughter got a cell phone over the weekend (not an iPhone!) and I went through 175 text messages in four days, so I upped my text messaging plan using this app. Very hand.
myLite – it’s both useful (you can go with a plain white screen so your iPhone is a light source) and entertaining (it has a lighter screen).
Now Playing – find movie showtimes near you. Really handy for that instant-access-to-information moment that makes you so happy to have an iPhone.
Sportacular – Sports junkies rejoice; box scores, schedules, standings and more for a wide variety of sports.
OpenTable -Dinner reservations made incredibly easy. Last week I made dinner reservations for two on the way to the car and was seated 15 minutes later.
RunKeeper Free – If you run, RunKeeper is really handy – handy enough that I bought the paid version, but since there’s a free one, give it a whirl. If you don’t run, skip it.
Bing – Alternative to Google; stronger map/direction features, not as many app integrations.
Gowalla – I’m still trying this one out; see my previous blog post on location to get a sense of my feelings. I think there’s a lot of potential, but location itself is not enough. Gowalla is trying to do more on top of that, which may work. Worth trying.
Paid apps are coming in the next post.
Location is not enough
Mar 16th
Posted by Kevin Matheny in I Think About the Internet
I deleted Foursquare from my iPhone last night. This was the second time I deleted it, and I’m pretty sure I won’t be re-installing it.
I think location is a killer feature, especially for mobile devices. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about potential applications for location-aware mobile devices, including a great conversation with Omar Abdelwahed of Ubisoft about possible mobile games.
But location alone is not enough to make an application useful. Foursquare is trying, especially with the new “hot potato event” feature they added for South by Southwest. Essentially, Foursquare does two things:
1. It tells me where my friends are, if they remember to use the application. This is sort of useful and possibly interesting. Here at SxSW, I saw Oren Michels (@orenmichels on Twitter, CEO of Mashery) check in at a taco place, and I inferred that he’d be bringing breakfast tacos to the Circus Mashimus lounge.
2. It lets me get a list of people who have checked in a a given location using Foursquare. I can’t tell anything other than that they have been at that location – I have no idea if you’re interesting or not, unlike Twitter, which at least gives me some insight into who you are by letting me look at your tweetstream.
Foursquare does not help me grow my set of friends, because it doesn’t give me any more information than “this person is in (or was in) this place.” It does have gamelike mechanisms for encouraging usage of the app — badges and mayorships — but that’s ultimately self-referential. I’d like Foursquare to be cool and useful, but unless and until it offers something more than simply location awareness, it’s not making it back on to my phone.
(Edits)
Fixed an omitted word in the 3rd paragraph that changed its meaning.
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