The iPhone famously solves many of life's little problems--you can't decide where to eat, you've got nothing to read, you need to update your Facebook status right now--but who's going to solve the iPhone's problems?
For instance, maybe it's low on storage. Or it's having trouble connecting to a Starbucks hot spot. Here's a list of five common iPhone ailments and the apps that aim to cure them.
Why let music consume precious iPhone storage when Simplify Media can stream your entire library from home?
- You're running out of storage. Apple may have a 32GB iPhone waiting in the wings, but how does that help you and your storage-strapped model now? Here's one radical idea: delete all your music. Then install Simplify Media, a $3.99 app that streams your entire music library from your Windows, Mac, or Linux PC. I've been test-driving the app for a few days and it works like a charm. Just think of how much space you'll free up for apps, videos, photos, and the like.
- You're texting your way to the poorhouse. Tired of dropping an extra $20 per month for unlimited texting? How about a one-time fee of $5.99 instead? That's the price of Textfree Unlimited, which, true to its name, lets you send and receive an unlimited number of text messages. It's not perfect--you need to enable "push" mail if you want new-message notifications--but it'll definitely save you money.
- There's no way to check your SMS count. Prefer to stick with old-school texting? It would be nice if you could see how many messages you have left for the month. Pageonce just took the wraps off Cell Minute Tracker, a 99-cent app that shows not only your SMS usage, but also your AT&T account balance, rollover minutes, and more. (You can even pay your bill.) Check out Jessica Dolcourt's full review.
- There's no to-do list. Third-party apps to the rescue! Chapura's KeyTasks provides robust task management, and it syncs with Outlook. (But $9.99? Ouch!) Appigo's Todo offers iCal syncing for Mac users for an equally ouchy $9.99. If you'd rather sync your tasks to the Web, try Remember The Milk. The app's free, but you need a $25/year pro account.
- Connecting to Starbucks' Wi-Fi is a hassle. Oh, the hoops you must jump to tap a Starbucks Wi-Fi network. For a mere 99 cents, Easy Wi-Fi lives up to its name, making AT&T hot-spot connections a one-tap affair. No monkeying around with text messages and all that: you'll be online faster than you'll be sipping your latte.
Cell Minute Tracker monitors your AT&T minutes.
(Credit: CNET)On Thursday, Pageonce released a native application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that AT&T might have considered when it won the iPhone's exclusive carrier rights in the U.S. Cell Minute Tracker (99 cents) keeps tabs on your cell phone usage, data plan, rollover minutes, SMS costs, and payments on a relatively compact page that has additional features AT&T doesn't provide you on the phone.
You'll need to register for a MyAccount login from AT&T.com for Cell Minute Tracker to work. The app speaks directly to AT&T's online minutes-tracking service to bring you a native experience from the iPhone, though you can certainly get the information for free by visiting AT&T's site on Safari, or by finding a shortcut to this page in the iPhone's Settings menu. What the app's nominal price point boils down to is convenience and an early warning system if you're about to go over your allotted minutes or are nearing billing time. If you've got limited minutes or are monitoring the usage of family members or employees who are also gathered under the same plan, seeing those details gathered in one place is a boon.
The same goes for those who frequently miss payment due dates. Cell Minute Tracker automatically flies a red badge when you open to app to alert you when you've hit 90 percent of your plan limits, or when your bill is due. In the future, the app will e-mail you this information.
You're also able to pay your AT&T bills from the iPhone (or iPod Touch if you have an AT&T cell phone in addition to your Touch) from another tab, although the 'Make a Payment' button is actually only a shortcut to AT&T's site, not an integrated feature. However, it appears to transfer your log-in info, a big help on keeping time-consuming typing down. Cell Minute Tracker also employs 128-bit encryption to shield your details.
Also on our wish list is a way to view a detailed copy of your bill, and break-downs of call and SMS activity, unlike CallCounter, a similar app for jailbroken iPhones. If all you want to do is view your minutes or pay your bill, there are free ways to do them separately online or via a call. Cell Minute Tracker gets its greatest value from bringing the summary to you in a pretty package. When it builds in the additional features on our wish list, the application will appeal to even more U.S. users.
AT&T is offering a new service that allows parents--or potentially jealous spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends--to track loved ones using their phones.
(Credit:
AT&T)
AT&T's service, called FamilyMaps, allows people to track the location of any cell phone on AT&T's network from a mobile phone or PC. The person being tracked receives a text message informing him or her that he or she is being watched. The service periodically informs the tracked individual that he or she is being watched, just in case one text message reminder wasn't enough.
Users can either track someone in real time by viewing the location on a map or they can set up the service to send them text message alerts or e-mails with location information. For example, a parent may get an alert each day that his child made it home from school. Or perhaps a jealous girlfriend looking to keep tabs on her boyfriend could set up the service to notify her if her boyfriend happens to wander into a bar or over to his ex-girlfriend's apartment after work.
Users can only track phones that are part of their family plans. This means that stalkers looking to keep tabs on their old flames won't simply be able to type in their ex-lover's phone numbers and start tracking. (I suppose those people will just have to settle for stalking via Facebook and Twitter updates.)
The service uses satellite GPS technology and cell tower triangulation to pin-point the location of the phone. The service is not supported on prepaid or AT&T Go Phones. And the service costs $9.99 for two phones and $14.99 for up to five phones.
Location-based services are nothing new. They've been around for years and are expected to generate a lot of money for carriers in the future. Already, most major mobile operators are offering some kind of location-based service, such as GPS-enabled navigation or tracking.
Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and Alltel have each been offering "tracking" services for more than a year. Sprint Nextel has even lowered the price of its service from about $10 a month to $5 a month.
The social-networking company Loopt also offers a "friend finding" application that can be downloaded on certain phones. Loopt is offered as a free application on Apple's iPhone, which operates over AT&T's network. It's also offered on some Verizon and Sprint Nextel phones.
There are several other social-networking services that use location information to track or find friends or share information via a cell phone. Google also offers a tracking/friend finding application it calls Latitude. There are also other services, such as FourSquare, Whrrl, and Brightkite.
What's different about these social-networking location services from the service AT&T is offering is that these other services often require those being "tracked" to also run the application on their phones. These services also typically have privacy settings controlled by the person being tracked that allows him or her to turn off their "friend-finding beacon" and to hide from certain individuals.
No more SMS two-step.
"They wrote this for you," Josh said in IM to me about Devicescape's Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T, an app that directly addresses my complaints about the free Wi-Fi that AT&T now provides to iPhone users at Starbucks and various airports.
As I wrote, I dislike the Safari/SMS two-step required to authorize the iPhone to use the AT&T free Wi-Fi. Yes, it's looking a gift horse in the mouth. But I am a professional crank. I really do get paid for this.
Anyway, the Easy Wi-Fi app bypasses the SMS process with a single button. You do have to pre-load the app with your phone number. But only once. And you also have to connect to the AT&T access point through the iPhone's control panel first, but once you've done that, you just press the big Log In button and you're connected.
I tried this app at a Starbucks. I downloaded the app over my phone's cellular connection, put in my phone number (both things I'll never have to do again), connected to the store's Wi-Fi router, fired up the Easy Wi-Fi, pressed Log In, and I was connected. Much better than the old way. Thank you, Devicescape.
Easy Wi-Fi is free through Friday. Then it goes up to $1.99. So grab it now (iTunes link).
First spotted: Gizmodo.
The obvious first question one asks the AT&T execs when beginning a discussion of Pogo, the company's new Web browser, is "What is AT&T doing getting into the browser market?" The answer you get is, at first, amusing. It's a chance to build "another relationship with the customer," they say. They also tell you it could be a great conduit for AT&T messages (e.g., brand or product advertising). Sounds like the makings for a truly awful product, does it not?
Video demo is embedded at the end of this post.
But here's the weird thing: Pogo is not awful. Putting aside what might happen to the product should the AT&T brand Nazis get hold of it, it is, even in the early beta I got access to, a solid, usable Web browser.
Pogo is a combination of the Mozilla browser code base with technology from Vizible, which AT&T has invested in. As a basic Web browser, it works as expected. Type a URL and it loads. No drama.
Things only get weird when you dive into the browser bookmarks or history, or use the multi-home-page feature called Springboard.
The best use of Pogo's graphical chops is in the history viewer, which lets you smoothly scroll backward and forward through snapshots of your visited Web pages.
For these three functions, Pogo puts snapshot images, which it calls "cells," into a slick 3D rendering engine. In the bookmark feature, for example, you can thumb through categories like flipping through index cards. When you zoom into a category, you see all your site bookmarks as snapshots of your pages, not just page titles.
The history function also uses visual snapshots. I found this very useful. Seeing your previously visited sites in graphic format added a lot of context that's missing if all you're looking at is a stream of titles.
You can set the browser's home page to be your "springboard," which is a grid of cells for sites you visit a lot. It's a little better than having your browser start with several home pages in separate tabs, although it's not a big enough feature that anyone should switch browsers for it.
You can fly through your bookmarks and the "collections" they are categorized in.
Pogo is a tabbed browser, but instead of using text tabs it uses little page snapshots. This may appeal to some people; I didn't find it much of an advantage.
All cells, be they on the Springboard, the history, or bookmarks, can be tagged and moved around (you can drag history items to the Springboard, for example). The browser also has a search feature that scans for pages living in the the three sections just mentioned. For Web search, Pogo remembers the pages you visit from its integrated search engine (Google, currently), and saves them as cells, too.
Unrelated to its 3D features, the browser also supports mouse gestures for navigation, a fun feature that could become very useful if Pogo is ported to touch-screen mobile phones. (See also: Opera.)
Pogo does not support add-ons or plug-ins yet. Vizible built the browser with the older Firefox 2 code from Mozilla. It is waiting for the Firefox 3 code, which it will re-configure its product in. Vizible will support plug-ins shortly after that.
While I've derided 3D interfaces in the past, the truth is that using the graphics power of a local computer can make for more engaging and easier-to-understand interfaces. See PicLens, a recently released plug-in photo browser, and also Flip3D in Vista, and Time Machine and CoverFlow on the Mac. Finally, Picasa has a timeline view that's very similar to the Collections view in Pogo.
Pogo's 3D interface works because it doesn't get in your face most of the time, and when it does, it's in functions where using visual devices to jog your memory can make a positive difference in your productivity in the app.
That said, I do not expect Pogo to take the world by storm. It is a nice, slick, graphical browser. It's probably an easier product to teach than the other browsers. I wouldn't be surprised to see it show up in the mail in AT&T DSL bills, or maybe even on some new computers. And that will be just fine. But it's still weird that AT&T is in the browser business, and I don't think this product will win the hearts and minds of people already accustomed to Firefox or Internet Explorer. Pogo is quite good, but it's not so good that current heavy browser users are going to feel that they need to switch.
The pre-public version of Pogo that I tried was too slow to live with, but AT&T is planning on opening up a private beta in May with a newer build. We'll have some invites to the beta to give out when that happens. Open availability is still three or four months out.
(Credit:
Hands-On Mobile)
Article updated 2/29/08 to correct headquarters location.
We were stoked when Hands-On Mobile, a San Francisco mobile games company, announced Guitar Hero III Mobile for Verizon. On Friday, AT&T brings the portable version of the wildly popular console game to J2ME phones.
The game is expected to launch on 30 handsets today, including Motorola V3 RAZR and Sony Ericcson 810, with more handsets joining the fray. The staggered launch means there's no guaranteeing that your handset will be supported when the game goes live today, but Hands-On Mobile suggests that eager phone gamers check back with AT&T throughout the day and Saturday.
(Credit:
Hands-On Mobile)
There's good reason to make haste. Guitar Hero III Mobile dethroned Tetris in mobile gaming on Verizon, a miraculous feat, by offering three popular songs per month taken straight from Activision's console game. Users who subscribe by March 1 will receive the standard start-up song package and also the month's playlist, including Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Freebird', Black Sabbath's 'War Pigs', and Iggy Pop's 'Search and Destroy'. Dilly-dalliers who subscribe after March 1 will have to wait for April to get any bonus song releases.
Membership on AT&T-supported phones has other benefits, too. The Java platform has allowed for certain upgrades to the BREW version of the game currently out on Verizon phones. The graphics are slightly larger and clearer, and Hands-On Mobile has added a haptic dimension to a missed note: the phone vibrates in response to butter fingers.
In another welcome change, songs will now live on AT&T phones, saving users from having to download them anew. Sorry, Verizon users, you shouldn't expect any alterations to your version yet.
What the J2ME platform gains in graphical quality, it loses, slightly, in audio power. Songs on Guitar Hero III Mobile for Verizon play MP3s; while AT&T's version streams out MIDI.
Be sure to catch Guitar Hero III Mobile in action in this video, taken on a Verizon phone.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Eight days! In only eight days (after this post) the iPhone will be released to the technology-loving public. The thing I'm most amazed about is the hype this thing is generating. I'm definitely excited and have been a supplier of hype myself in this very blog, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer volume of information and rumors surrounding a phone that hasn't even seen the light of day yet (unless you count those lucky Apple employees). The hype is reaching such a feverish pitch at this point that some Mac rumor sites, like the appropriately named MacRumors.com, are offering buying strategies to obtain an iPhone.... Read more
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