iPhones seem to be everywhere these days and even the release of the G1 phone hasn’t really had an impact on their growing marketshare. Palm have also announced that they will soon be launching their new smartphone called the Palm Pre, which is getting a huge amount of buzz at the moment. Thus bringing us to the final major player in the market who is yet to release a smartphone that can actually take marketshare and thats Nokia.
Nokia announced about three months ago that they will be releasing the N97 which is their rival to the iPhone. The N97 will be release in the 2nd quarter of 2009 and its sure to raise some eyebrows.
Here at Crenk we are still yet to get our hands on a new N97 test version, but I thought I would provide our readers with a basic overview of the phone and how it compares to iPhone and G1.
32GB Onboard memory (expandable through microSD card upto 48GB as total capacity)
(neither iPhone nor G1 go beyond 32 GB as total capacity )
Battery : 1500 mAh (Heavy duty ! )
(iPhone : 1400 mAh ; G1 : 1150 mAh )
5 MP Digital Camera (DVD quality video capture)
(iPhone : 2.0 MP ; G1 : 3.2 MP )
OS : S60 5th Edition
(iPhone : iPhone OS 2.2 ; G1 : Android 1.0 )
Weight : 150 g (approx.)
( iPhone : 133 g ; G1 : 158 g )
Price : $550 (before network subsidies so expect it to go way cheaper than this)
(iPhone : $199(min.) ; G1 : $179(min.) )
Conclusions:
After a direct comparison with all the feature of the n97, G1 and iPhone3G the Nokia is by far the leader from a hardware perspective. However, it terms of the software and the OS, Nokia is a long way behind Google and Apple but this is expected.
The key also is that the App Store has made a huge impact on making the iPhone such a big success, and with the Android Market just being launched I’m sure that the G1 will slowly gain more and more marketshare. Where does this leave Nokia? Nokia really need to think hard and long about how they are going to open up their software to outside developers and then allow the average user the ability to pick and choose the applications that are right for them. OS has never been a strong point for Nokia, but it is about time they actually improved this sector if they are going to continue to be a major player in the smartphone market.
Also that the ‘App Store’ is something that has played a very critical role in making iPhone a worldwide success and now the same thing is occurring in the form of ’Android Market’ for G1, Nokia(being ‘new’ to open developer support for apps) can’t afford to reach the standards set by the other two veteran smartphones(specially iPhone)
There are so many financial applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch already, but how do you know which ones are actually worth using? Mint has put together a great list of the top 10 Financial applications everyone should use, so I thought I would post our top 5 and then let you head over to Mint to see the rest.
Wall Street Traders swear by the Bloomberg Terminal to analyze real-time financial market data, place trades, and get news and price quotes. Bloomberg Mobile isn’t quite the same thing but it is a beautifully designed app that provides up-to-the-minute news, stock quotes, company descriptions, and price chart and market trend analysis. The My Stocks feature is a more detailed replacement for Apple’s stock Stocks app. And Bloomberg Mobile takes full advantage of the iPhone’s position sensor by providing larger charts when you rotate the phone to a horizontal position.
Bank of America’s iPhone app, Mobile Banking is little more than a wrapper around its existing mobile site (which isn’t optimized for the iPhone) but if this is your bank you’ll still find it useful. You can use it to check available balances, pay bills, and transfer funds on-the-go 24/7. Its best feature is its ability to find the nearest ATM and Banking Center locations using the GPS in the iPhone, something that isn’t possible with the mobile site. BofA’s Online Banking Guarantee is its assurance that you won’t be responsible for any unauthorized transactions and it uses advanced encryption technology to prevent unauthorized access to your accounts and to protect your online identity.
In Japan many have thrown away their wallets in favor of paying for everything from train tickets to beer from a vending machine with their mobile phones. We’re not quite there yet but the PayPal app provides a tantalizing glimpse at this future. It provides complete access to your PayPal account allowing you to check your balances and send money to your friends and family, all from your iPhone. It supports 16 currencies and is secured by your existing PIN or password. It’s a good start but I’d like to see it go further. Missing is any way of displaying your transaction history and I’d also like to see it use the notification indicator on the app icon to show when money has arrived in your account.
Designed to help you navigate the often treacherous waters of financial lending, Loan Shark provides a number of features that let you calculate and compare loans from different vendors. You can calculate any component of a loan, including payment, interest rate or loan amount, see the full Amortization Table for the loan’s lifespan and play with “what-if” scenarios that let you determine the effect of making extra, higher, or lower payments. Loan Shark can help you determine how long it will take to pay off that credit card, determine how close you are to paying off your mortgage, and compare the cost of different loans, among many other uses. Kudos to FoggyNoggin Software for an easy-to-use and good looking interface that works well on a mobile device.
Bonus feature: Lets you locate nearby banks using the iPhone’s location-awareness
Tipulator stands out in a crowded field of tip calculators (it’s often said that the true test of how successful a new platform will be is how quickly a tip calculator appears for it) by marrying cute graphics with easy-to-use number dials. You can probably split the check without it but you won’t have as much fun doing it. And for 1/3 the price of your last latte, you owe it to yourself to at least try it.
MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.
The plugin also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin. Therefore, theme designers can create specific iPhone themes or generic themes.
MobilePress also features Mobile SEO which detects Google and Yahoo mobile search bots. These mobile search bots will see the mobile version of you blog which allows your blog to optimized and indexed on Google and Yahoo mobile search.
3banana is a Silicon Valley startup that just appeared on the market, launching a new note-taking application (called 3banana Notes) for the Android, the iPhone, and small-device Web use.
The application is free and works by synchronizing with an online notebook so you can save information you want to save quickly and easily from your phone. This allows free access online, whether you have your phone with your or not.
The app has a wireless synch-up and allows for social media sharing. Think of it as Twitter for your iPhone, but with a few more uses. Notes can be shared or kept private, as you prefer, and on an individual basis. So if you’re wanting to jot down that next great American novel idea you came up with, you can keep that to yourself, but if you’re wanting to see if anyone is up for coffee on the corner of Johnson and Main, you can broadcast that to your friends.
Andreas Schobel, the co-founder of 3banana and its CTO, says, “…the 3banana note taking app helps you catch those ideas before they escape. 3banana also makes it easy to share your notes with friends—rather than being lost forever, that idea in your notes can be the beginning of an online conversation.”
This seems like a great idea and one that could catch on quickly. Especially since it will work on so many platforms of portable phone. More universal apps like this are needed, in my opinion, to stop the trend of “it’s all about the iPhone.” Not that I don’t like iPhones, I just want to see more competition so the technology will improve faster.
Probably the sum-up from Steve Brown, the CEO and other co-founder of 3banana, does it best: “In the information-rich and fast-paced world today, the challenge is to get information from the brain in your head, into the brain in your pocket, and connected to the brainpower in the Internet cloud. We streamlined and simplified our note taking app so that users could quickly jot down a thought or tag a photo on their Android smart phone with as few keystrokes as possible, and then synch and share those notes wirelessly and effortlessly.”
Basically, it works like this: the 3banana software stays synched with their online service so that photos and notes on the smart phone can be immediately stored and kept online. At the same time, websites, online notes, and other Internet-based information can also be kept through a browser interface. Synchs in Twitter-like feeds with friends and colleagues can also be set up so that it creates an “always on” cloud for data sharing.
Shared notes can be linked with Twitter or Facebook for wide broadcasts or can be kept inside 3banana for easier and more private sharing and discussion.
3banana is currently available for download from the Google Android App Market free of charge.
No I know what most of you are thinking, why the hell isn’t this an iPhone app or why hasn’t Apple done this already, well they should have! The Next Web is reporting on a new app that is really going to help.
It’s an awesome app in Cydia called “Categories” which lets you organise your apps into folders. The app provides an array of different icons you can use, you can easily rename folders via the app and adding/removing apps is relatively easy. However, this is not available in the app store and you need to have your iPhone jailbroken.
Currently, on my iPod touch I have over 5 pages worth of applications that I use on a monthly basis. At the moment I’m having so much trouble keep track of the apps and actually arranging them so they can be easily used and organised. Apple needs to come up with an app like this, either that or they need to be able to arrange your apps directly in iTunes.
One limitation: the app doesn’t recognise iPhone web apps only genuinely local apps.
As I noted above, this is only for Jailbroken iPhones. Other features which Cydia (jailbroken app database) brings is copy & paste, 5 apps in the dock amongst hundreds of others.
The sequel to the iPhone’s most popular ever game is here, Tap Tap Revenge 2. The latest version has hit the app store today. The previous version of the game had more than six million downloads and featured licensed music from some of the worlds largest bands including Weezer and Nine Inch Nails. You can Download the app here.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
Popular Stories
Top Stories
Movers & Shakers
Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
Easy to use
Clean interface
Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
Free of charge
Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
Programming
Funny
Science
Tech
World News
Entertainment
Business
Comics
Gaming
Best Of
Economics
Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
Save links to view/read later
Comment participation
Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
Most expensive Reddit app
Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
reddit.com
bacon
politics
pics
WTF
funny
technology
programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
Greatly improved performance
New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
The subreddit list is reorderable
A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Have you ever had a hard time falling asleep? Well Ambiance is for you! Ambiance is a new iphone or ipod touch app that plays relaxing sounds.
Ambiance is designed to help you create the perfect ambient atmosphere to focus and relax. You can choose from hundreds of free sounds, exclusive to Ambiance, to download and listen to, create customised sound mixes, cycle through playlists and more.
Currently, the app is only $2.99 in the app stores so check it out.
I was lucky enough today to receive some ear buds from v-mode. v-mode are a bit of a strange company in that they make headphones and also clothing under the same umbrella. The earphones that I received were the new vibe ii sports ear hooks.
First impressions from the packaging were good, but there simply just seemed to be a lot of packaging for a simply pair of ear buds.The little piece of novelty was that the box itself has two compartments that were had magnets build in to they stayed together.
Once inside after getting through the packaging (20 min) the speakers themselves seemed to be quite heavy, a lot heavier than a normal pair of ear buds. The Vibe ii is made especially for smartphones and the iPhone because they have included a built in microphone. The design of the microphone and overall look of the product is great, but the ear buds themselves are quite flat towards the end and if you listen to music for long periods on end then you might get a bit of a sore ear.
Obviously the key to a good set of ear buds is the quality of sound and the Vibe ii seems to give off a much better quality to the average ear bud on the market today. Unfortunately for me the quality of depth within the sounds in slightly lacking and the volume of the sounds also seems to be low.
Overall the Vibe ii is a great set of ear buds that I’m sure will last you a long time. Vibe ii is ahead of the average ear buds simply because of the sounds quality but for the price (USD $119.99) it seems to be just not good enough.
Ten One Design has created a way to boost the sound for your iPhone 3G. The product is called SoundClip and it increases the sound by about 10dB with signal between 6kHz and 20kHz.
This would be useful to people that especially love to listen to music through the built-in speaker, but the device just gets in the way of iPhone gamers in landscape mode.
Storing the SounClip is simple. There is a cord-gripping feature that keeps it fastened to your iPhone charge cable during syncing and charging. To buy the device, visit Ten One’s website here.
Accomedion is a new musical instrument application that combines a keyboard harmonica and an accordion.
Sound sources from keyboard harmonica are used, and chord buttons similar to the ones on accordion are attached. The wide range of tunes will be played as accompaniment.
Main functions
- Capable to shift between major chord and minor chord
- Capable to record and replay up to three tunes
- Five demonstration tunes are stored. Capable to play in accordance with the tutorial guide.
- You can play it like a real keyboard harmonica by blowing the microphone. (iPhone only)
You can download this application from the iTunes store here.
iPhones seem to be everywhere these days and even the release of the G1 phone hasn’t really had an impact on their growing marketshare. Palm have also announced that they will soon be launching their new smartphone called the Palm Pre, which is getting a huge amount of buzz at the moment. Thus bringing us to the final major player in the market who is yet to release a smartphone that can actually take marketshare and thats Nokia.
3banana
(at the time of writing)
