My new 32GB iPhone 3GS!
I’ll start this post by saying, in order to do the iPhone justice, all screenshots will be shown in this post full-size! I could shrink them to save some screen space, but screen space costs nothing, so why not? 
The phone screen is probably a little smaller than the size of the screenshots you are seeing on your screen, but nevertheless, they do show the quality of the various apps!
So, first of all, above is the desktop of my iPhone right now. The only non-standard iPhone applications are Google and “UK – Ireland”, one of which which I’ll come to later.
Just so you know at this stage, the main reasons for writing this post are (a) I think such a revolutionary device deserves to be written about and (b) to tell you about some of my favourite apps in case you have an iPhone and want to hear about potentially cool and useful apps!
So… onto my favourite features & apps!
Above you can see the iPod feature. I have spent a great deal of time copying every single CD I own onto my computer, then into the iTunes software and then onto my iPhone, including information for each song such as Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Year and album art! Right now, I have just over 2,500 songs on the iPhone and yes – I do try to listen to them all as time goes on! The main advantage of having so much music at your disposal is that you never know what’s coming next!
The nice feature of the iPod app on the iPhone (and any iPod with a screen, I understand), which admittedly I don’t use a great deal, is the way of flicking the album collection from left to right to find the album you want. I generally use the voice activation instead of this as it works kinda well and is much quicker than scrolling through over 200 albums!
Anyway, it’s a nice feature and, for those who don’t know about it, worth pointing out!
The next feature, as you can see above, that’s worth a mention is the Youtube application. This is built into the iPhone, and with an unlimited data download limit it works amazingly well!
The phone must be tilted horizontally to view the videos, as the aspect ratio suits better that way, and it seems to download a suitable size/quality of video depending on the quality of your Internet link at the time.
At work, for example, on the WiFi, it shows good quality full-screen videos. Elsewhere, however, where 3G is the only connection method available, it shows slightly worse quality and slightly smaller videos. This is a good feature though – I’d rather see a video after 30 seconds or less and put up with low quality than wait 5 minutes for a high quality version!
Above, you can see the video-watching screen layout. Pretty intuitive really! After a couple of seconds of not touching the screen, or when you touch the center of the screen, the bars disappear leaving the video to play with nothing in front of it.
Above you can see the Google Maps application. This is a remarkably useful app – it has aerial photos of most of the world, including accurate map data. It has points of interest, businesses, directions, traffic info and almost everything else Google Maps online has to offer! The Maps application on the iPhone has one major advantage though – use of the GPS and compass. At a press of button, you can see within a few seconds your exact location on earth and in which direction your iPhone is pointing. Very useful indeed.
Now, what with my addiction to Facebook, I’m very glad there is a Facebook app for the iPhone. On the above screenshot, I have, of course, blurred out the information that is particular to my own news feed, but I’m sure Facebook users will recognise the classic News Feed.
The current version of the Facebook application lets you view your News Feed, user profiles, friend lists and photos. It also lets you deal with requests, chat, messages, events, photos, notes and other things too. If you are on Facebook, this is the app for you!
While we’re on the subject of Facebook, I’ll also talk about Twitter. There are various apps which allow you to interact with Twitter. My favourite is “Twitterrific” (seen above). It is a simply interface which allows you to search, post, filter and many other things. I use the Free version and put up with the advert right at the top of the page, but there is also a paid for version which has no ads (as far as I’m aware) and possibly other features too. The free version is perfectly good enough for me though!
If you are a keen eBay buyer or seller, then the eBay and PayPal apps are for you. I haven’t pictured the PayPal app here, but you can see the eBay app above. I’m not too sure which features are available in the eBay app, but I believe you can at least place bids on things and keep track of the items you are selling. To be honest, I’ve not used it too much yet, but I’m sure time will tell.
Above and below is the “Photogene” application.
The “Photogene” app. costs £1.79 at the time of writing, but if you are into Photography and often end up taking photos with your iPhone for one reason or another, this app is definitely worth having.
It allows you to brighten, darken, increase/decrease contrast, saturation, white balance, black balance, apply effects, sharpen, soften etc… and as you can see from the two screenshots above – it’s very capable of making an original photo look significantly better!
If you have Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or some other software on your PC, then that may do a better job, but as far as the iPhone camera goes, this app is very good indeed.
The “Decibel” app, shown above, has had a series of very good reviews, apparently, and on that basis I paid the £0.59 to download it to find out that it was a simple, but accurate, decibel meter! I had to calibrate mine slightly (fortunately I had access to a professional calibrated decibel meter), but once calibrated it was pretty accurate! If you have a need for a decibel meter, this is probably the best and cheapest one out there!
I’m now going to talk about games…
Above, you can see “Blowfish”. This is a very addictive game. The idea is that the red sea urchins float around the screen and you have to inflate the blowfish to fill the screen without a sea urchin hitting the blowfish while it is being inflated. Very simple, but high addictive!
I am also a big fan of racing games on any platform, and above you will see “Fast & Furious” on the iPhone. The handing is a little strange – left and right turns are made by tilting the iPhone left or right, respectively. The accelerometers do a fairly decent job, but by the end of a race I often find the accelerometers have skewed one way of another and I end up holding the phone tilted to the left in order to maintain a straight line! Regardless of that, however, the game is very good and worth the couple of quid I paid for it!
Finally, I’ll talk about the TomTom turn-by-turn satellite navigation software.
There are now lots of turn-by-turn navigation apps available for the iPhone, and I think TomTom is one of the most expensive ones at £59.99. Navigon sells for £52.99 and CoPilot Live sells for £24.99 at the time of writing, but regardless of this, I think TomTom is still the best!
All iPhone satnav users complain of dropped signals (due to the low power GPS unit inside the iPhone itself), CoPilot has mixed reviews but is generally regarded as a very good value for money satnav solution, but I personally don’t like the way it looks. For me, it was down to the two main players – Navigon and TomTom. Navigon has “Lane assist” and “RealityView Pro” to help you get into the correct lane when entering or leaving a main road, but it only has 5 character postcode searches. TomTom, on the other hand, has full 7 character postcode searches, but doesn’t have “Lane Assist” or “RealityView Pro”. What TomTom does have, however, is IQ Routes which make routing much more intelligent and take general traffic trends into account.
For me, 7 character postcode search is a very useful feature, and I can work around Lane Assist etc… by simply reading the signs on the road. What I can’t do, however, is know the traffic trends and incorporate them into my route plan, and this, in my book, makes TomTom a winner!
Anyway, with that all said – the iPhone does have one major limitation, in my view. You cannot transfer files between devices via Bluetooth. You have to plug your iPhone into your iTunes install to get your photos/videos from it. You could email them, but that can take a very long time depending on your Internet connection.
That aside though, I think the iPhone has revolutionised the mobile phone market and is hopefully here to stay for a very long time!
