The Download Blog

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.

Skype 2.8 for Mac will ship on Tuesday, with new features including screen sharing and an integrated Wi-Fi hot spot connector.

Available only for Mac OS X at first, the new version will add screen-sharing capabilities to the app's voice, video, and chat communications features. Skype spokespeople told me that users will be able to run all four channels at once with acceptable performance.

Screen sharing is useful in business settings (I get a lot of demos over apps like Webex, for example), but it has personal applications as well: People could share photographs, and presumably videos as well, using the feature.

Skype is also getting a feature that will allow users to access WiFi hotspots on the Boingo network for 19 cents a minute. The funds will be deducted from users' Skype accounts. Boingo has about 85,000 hot spots worldwide, a Boingo rep told me. TMobile, the primary Wi-Fi provider at U.S. airports, is on the Boingo network.

The Wi-Fi access feature makes Skype a more useful product for people who use the VoIP app from their Mac laptops, and the per-minute payment scheme makes sense for highly mobile users for whom buying access by the hour or month would leave a lot of unused credits behind.

Skype co-founder Nicklas Zennstrom also started a Wi-Fi network called Fon, but Skype 2.8 doesn't yet integrate with that system.

Disruptive Telephony covered other new features in Skype 2.8, including a new way to update your Skype "mood" and to follow users in a Twitter-like fashion, bigger Avatar images, and a new way to manage and prioritize chat windows.

Also, regarding Boingo: That company announced a new Apple product: A connector app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For $7.95 a month, users of those devices can access the entire Boingo Wi-Fi network. For U.S.-based iPhone users on the AT&T network, this is not such a great product since AT&T-provided Wi-Fi is now free for them, but international users and travelers, and iPod Touch users (perhaps those who use TruPhone for VOIP calls) may find it a good deal.

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.

UPDATED: Corrected LogMeIn spelling.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

It's great to be able to log in your computer remotely. It's convenient, it saves gas, hassle, and most importantly, time. Personally I've used LogMeIn for a long time and loved it.

The company has actually been cooking up an application for the iPhone (and iPod Touch), too, called LogMeIn Ignition. I tried out the preview version of the app on my iPhone 3G and was impressed overall.

First off, it works! I was able to log in to any Windows machine where I have the Logmein client installed and view its desktop on my iPhone's screen. The app allows for viewing the entire scaled-down screen of the remote computer or zooming in to a potion of it, just like you would view a photo or a Web page on the iPhone.

While viewing is easy, interacting with the remote computer is a different story. It was fairly easy for me to type. When a user-input area is selected, you can pop up the onscreen keyboard of the iPhone to type just like composing a text message. On the other hand, it's much more cumbersome to use the mouse. As there's no mouse on the iPhone, the app designates single tab as single click, double tab as double click, two-finger tab as right click, and so on.

In practice, however, it is hard to pinpoint the place that you want to click on. In my experience, when I clicked on a link on the iPhone screen, the mouse on the remote computer would click on a point half an inch below, possibly due to the lag. The app also easily mistakes a two-finger tab as a zooming action. It took me a while to get used to it and compensate accordingly. In the end, I was even able to conduct a video chat on the remote computer, which was really cool.

With LogMeIn Ignition you can even do video calling at the remote computer.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Performance-wise, the app worked well on a Wi-Fi connection. The 3G connection also worked when viewing but registered so much lag when I wanted to type or use mouse clicks. It was not possible for me to get connected via a GPRS connection connection at all. It was also helpful if you run the Logmein Ignition as the first app up after restarting the iPhone, or else you might run into a message prompting that the device is running low on memory.

In all, the app has a lot of potential. It's unclear when it will be available in the App Store and if it will be free. Whether or not it will be, I would still recommend it to anyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch and an account with Logmein.

AirRadar is a free utility that can help you scan for, track information on, and join wireless networks. Like similar apps, AirRadar provides much more information than you'd otherwise get through the Mac OS Airport status menu.

Whether you're testing your signal strength at home or trying to find free Wi-Fi on the road, AirRadar will list all open and closed networks in range, along with information such as signal strength (current, average, and max), type of encryption, MAC address, and channel. AirRadar can keep scanning at any interval you set, automatically join the best open network (or a network of a specified minimum strength), and notify you of new networks in a variety of ways, including through Growl messages and by speaking network names out loud--perhaps a bit dorky, but useful for the visually impaired.

The basic functionality should be more than enough for most users, but you can also have AirRadar provide more than two dozen pieces of live data for a given network, and even track noise and signal strength in graphs. More Mac freeware should be as useful and well-rounded as AirRadar.

This utility is absolutely utilitarian, and may strike users accustomed to a bit of visual flash and bang or superfluous features as being sparse. However, WirelessKeyView does precisely what it promises, and every additional feature builds on the central purpose.

The main feature lets you view the passwords your Wi-Fi manager has stored, useful if you've forgotten what they are. The spreadsheet-style main window shows the properties on any stored network name. Users can view not just the ASCII password, but also the Hex key, the adapter type, and the adapter GUID. If you want to copy any of the information, hit ALT+Enter to open a properties window that displays it all in editable text fields.

Besides offering copy and search functions, WirelessKeyView also crams in an HTML report feature for either selected networks or the entire database. All in all, it's a great little app for revealing some of the hidden mysteries of the Wi-Fi signals you're using.

Power Downloader often uses his friends' Wi-Fi hot spots all over the world, but he doesn't visit each friend as regularly as he'd like. Months or even years go by before he sees them again. Whether they use a WEP key or a WPA, he never has to worry about keeping a password database with WirelessKeyView.

WirelessKeyView consolidates your Wi-Fi settings into one window.

(Credit: Nirsoft)

WirelessKeyView is a simple utility. The main feature lets Power D view the passwords his Wi-Fi manager has stored, but it offers more than just that. The spreadsheet-style main window shows the properties on any stored network name. Users can view not only the ASCII password, but also the Hex key, the adapter type, and the adapter GUID. If you want to copy any of the information, hit ALT-Enter to open a properties window that displays it all in editable text fields.

Besides offering copy and search functions, WirelessKeyView also crams in an HTML report feature for either selected networks or the entire database. All in all, it's a great little application for revealing some of the hidden mysteries of the Wi-Fi signal you're using.

As we head into the long weekend here in the States, I caught word of a newfangled freeware called JoikuSpot Light that might appeal to traveling owners of laptops and 3G phones that can't get their Wi-Fi connection to, you know, connect.

Joikuspot, and its Windows Mobile sibling, WMWiFiRouter, let laptop users wirelessly connect to their phones' 3G signal, piggybacking on it to your messages out and get fresh data in. If you're stuck in an airport or hotel room with a crappy or nonexistent Wi-Fi signal, JoikuSpot will enable to you to connect. If you've got an unlimited data phone plan, this could be extremely cost- and time-effective.

JoikuSpot Light turns your 3G phone into a Wi-Fi hot spot.

(Credit: JoikuSpot)

Originally, this was going to be a "hands-on" style write-up, but Joikuspot has some strict device limitations and can only be used by certain phones. However, the program's publisher does make it easy to determine if your phone will work with it. Head on over to the JoikuSpot Light page at Joiku.com and select your phone model. If it's not there, it's not supported.

If it is supported, you can have Joiku SMS the software to your phone, or download it directly. According to the JoikuSpot Web site, they have more than 200,000 users since the product was released a few months back. It appears to be reasonably secure, too, as it supports encrypted hypertext protocols (https).

Once installed, your laptop's Wi-Fi router should find your phone as an available Wi-Fi hot spot. Activate the connection and surf knowing that, in the relationship between you and your devices, you wear the pants.

Not every social networking concept strikes gold, even when the coalescing factor is the common interest of finding a good Internet cafe. In the case of WeFi, a hot-spot-finding application with a social community tacked on, various CNET editors have raised a collective eyebrow at some of the more intense methods of attaining human connection, but largely agree that being able to chat with verified friends or nearby Internet surfers adds a useful dimension to the search for reliable Wi-Fi access in comfortable coffee shops.

This First Look at WeFi for Windows laptops and WeFi for Pocket PC tours WeFi's easy-to-use interface and automated hot-spot-sniffers from two Internet-thirsty devices.