Since the release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware I’ve become a stubble covered hobo with a taste for £1.99 tipples. After having an iPhone for several months the initial lust started to turn in to more of a comfortable facet of every day life. But thanks to the App Store, my relationship with my darling iPhone has been revitalised. And now, the sex has never been better!
Ok, so maybe I don’t love my iPhone enough to engage in autoerotica but with the new apps I have access to I do find it much more productive!
The first couple of apps I downloaded were Apple’s Remote, Facebook and Twitterrific.
Remote is brilliant. Imagine listening to your music on your iPhone with all your glorious album artwork displayed on the big bright screen, playing, pausing and scrubbing away. Now imagine the music that’s playing is actually coming out of your £2000 surround sound stereo system and your 8 GB iPhone has access to 500 GB of music. All you need is iTunes on the same wireless network as your iPhone and you can pair away. The integration with iTunes feels solid and professionally done which really helps!
If you use Facebook then the Facebook app is a must have. The initial release had all the most basic features of Facebook without all the adverts and tacky third-party apps. Since 1.1 the Facebook has seen a few improvements. For example you can now write on your friend’s walls and upload photos stored in your photo library.
As a pretty regular user of Twitter I couldn’t resist getting Twitterific by IconFactory. I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far, and it’s got a rating of around five stars on the App store. Twitterrific will show you your timeline of tweets with the ability to reply to and direct message people you are following. You can also access your friend’s profiles and star tweets. All round it does everything you need.
There is a premium version of Twitterrific, which gives you the option of a lighter theme and no adverts but to be honest I haven’t found the ads to be too obtrusive so haven’t opted to buy the premium version.
I’m loving the Last.fm applications because there’s nothing quite like free music and Last.fm’s recommendations are always really good! If you’re not already using Last.fm sign up today! You can share your musical tastes with other people and find loads of guys and gals who listen to the same embarrassing rubbish as you! I’ll post a load more about Last.fm in the next couple of days because there’s more to it than meets the eye…
So now you’re posting pictures to your friends on Facebook, tweeting as you sit on the train to work and listening to internet radio tailor made to your musical tastes. But wait, you decided to pop in to a trendy little independent clothes store to pick up a pair of jeans for the weekend and you hear this great track playing in the background. Those rolling lo-fi beats would make a perfect addition to your pre-partying warmup mix but you have no idea who the song is by or what it’s called. There are after all no words!
Out comes the iPhone with Shazam. Shazam is amazing and it’s currently free! This app listens to what’s going on around your iPhone, picks up a song in the background and tells you what it is. And it works!
I’ve only had it fail on me once and that was when the music was really quiet and there were loads of people talking. To be fair, I could barely hear the music myself! It did, however, manage to recognise an Al Green track in Pulp Fiction while in the midst of onscreen dialog. Overall, a must have app!
Tap Tap Revenge is the only real game I have on my iPhone. It’s kind of like a guitar hero dance mat kind of game where you tap the screen or shake your iPhone in time with music. It’s quite a lot of fun especially when playing two player head to head mode! And there are additional tracks available for download so the shelf life of the game can be extended.
I’ve played Super Monkey Ball on the iPhone and was quite impressed with the logistics of it all. It makes great use of the accelerometer and feels well made. The only reason I haven’t bought it is I can’t justify spending £5.99 just to waste all of my battery life in an hour.
The next app I want to try out has to be the VNC viewer. I don’t think it would be that practical in every day situations. For example, I could never use it for controlling a server over a VPN connection, it would just be far too slow; and I’d rather use SSH anyway. But it does seem like a nice idea when I’m floating around the house controlling iTunes remotely. And it would be quite good at showing off what the iPhone can do.
When I get my 3G I’ll no doubt be able to rethink some of my app choices as the size of my pipe will increase massively. Until then, I’ll just stick with my edgy little pipe and use bandwidth hungry apps over WiFi only.
