The Download Blog

TomTom's fully featured navigation app is on sale for $49.99.

It's already getting cutthroat in the young world of iPhone navigation apps. Facing increased pressure from the likes of ALK, which recently dropped its CoPilot Live North America app to $19.99, TomTom just slashed the price of its eponymous navigation app by 50 percent.

Well, kind of. The new TomTom U.S.A. app ($49.99) provides maps for just the U.S. (including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico). Missing from the picture: Canada. That's probably fine for most drivers, who'd rather not pay for unneeded extra maps anyway.

Of course, if you do need the top half of North America, you can still buy TomTom U.S. & Canada--now priced at $69.99, down from $99.99 when it debuted just a few months ago.

According to TomTom, $49.99 is an "introductory" price good until December 28. But will the company actually raise it in 2010, or leave it alone to stave off increasing competition from the likes of iGo My Way, Magellan RoadMate, and MobileNavigator?

We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, there's never been a better time to buy a GPS app for your iPhone. And in case you're wondering, CoPilot Live is still on sale (though now it's up to $24.99).

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

According to a new study I came across at AppleInsider, Apple's iPhone OS has 40 percent of the Web market share. This study doesn't specifically reflect iPhone or iPod Touch sales, rather it shows that the iPhone OS dominates around the globe when it comes to mobile handset Web browsing. The two areas where iPhone doesn't dominate (Asia and Africa) are places where the Symbian OS had an early foothold and continues to be number one.

We all know the iPhone is doing extremely well around the world, but I have to think this particular dominance (52 percent, just in the U.S.) is more about the simplicity of the iPhone and iPod Touch Web browsing experience than it is about the number of Apple handsets. My hunch is that people are not just using Safari for iPhone, but using it often because it's almost like browsing on a desktop computer. In any case, it's great news for Apple, but even greater news for us--as the iPhone continues to rise in popularity (by whatever means), you can bet that cool new apps are going to keep on coming!

This week's apps include an affordable GPS directions app and a dungeon-crawling RPG that had a brief development hiccup, but is back and ready for you to start hacking and slashing.

Find the nearest coffee, gas station, or restaurants, or you can type in an address

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

MotionX GPS Drive ($2.99) is an affordable GPS directions system you can use for driving directions or just to find nearby restaurants and other common locations. The interface for this app is extremely well-designed, letting you not only enter an address for step-by-step driving or walking directions, but it also locates commonly searched locations making it easy to find what you're looking for. When you're ready, view your route on the map to begin your journey.

MotionX GPS Drive claims to be always up-to-date, meaning that search, maps, routing, and points of interest always come with the latest information (like up-to-date phone numbers for chosen locations or immediate routing changes when you miss a turn, for example). The app also offers voice directions, so you can keep your eyes on the road; the first month is free, but you'll need to purchase a plan for voice directions beyond that. Overall, though other GPS systems at the app store provide more features, MotionX GPS offers up an incredibly useful tool with a slick and intuitive interface at a fraction of the cost.

Beautiful animated 3D graphics and endless character upgrades make this title one of the best RPGs to date

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Dungeon Hunter is a hack-and-slash RPG with excellent graphics and fun for any RPG enthusiast. Start by choosing between three classes including a warrior, a rogue, or a mage. The Warrior gives you the slow but steady strength to endure tons of enemies, while the rogue is more about killing quickly before you take too much damage. The mage has spells to zap monsters and a protective magic shield for defense. Each character provides a unique way to play the game so it's fun to go back and complete levels using different fighting styles. Dungeon Hunter will appeal to fans of Diablo and Dungeon Siege, because it offers a similar kind of hack-and-slash gameplay along with quests, character advancement, and numerous abilities to choose as you progress.

This the second time Dungeon Hunter has appeared in the iTunes Store because during their initial launch a major bug prevented players from passing a certain level of the game. Fortunately, the game has been patched up and made it through its second round of Apple's somewhat infamous app approval process. In any case, with clean console-like graphics, surprisingly good onscreen controls, great sounds, and a staggering amount of skills to obtain and use, Dungeon Hunter is a great purchase for fans of the dungeon-crawling genre.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Did you purchase other more expensive GPS apps like Tom Tom app and have thoughts on newer cheaper GPS apps like MotionX GPS Drive? Is Dungeon Hunter the best hack-and-slash RPG so far for the iPhone? Let me know in the comments!

Paragon's robust partition-management software is available free, but only for today.

(Credit: Paragon Software Group)

Normally $39.95, Paragon Software's Partition Manager 10.0 Personal can be yours absolutely free. Today only. From software-freebie site Giveaway of the Day.

If you haven't visited the site before, here's how it works: You've got until midnight tonight (ET) to download and install the software. Other than that, there are absolutely no strings attached.

Well, OK, one "string" is that if you ever need to reinstall the software, you're outta luck. Its setup/registration process is tied to the date. But, hey, keep in mind you're getting a $40 app free of charge. You gonna gripe about that tiny gotcha?

True to its name, Partition Manager provides tools for partitioning your hard drive(s). That means you could have, say, Windows XP running on one partition and Windows 7 on another (a great solution for folks who want to migrate to the new OS gradually rather than all at once).

The software also features drive-optimization and -defragmentation tools, a boot fixer, a basic backup wizard, and a recovery-CD option.

I haven't found many reviews of Partition Manager 10.0 Personal, but over at Amazon it averages 4.5 stars out of 5, and 81% of users on the GotD site gave it a thumbs-up--a pretty high percentage compared with most freebies.

The program runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. There's a special 64-bit version available (download), which you should definitely choose if you're running a 64-bit OS.

Obviously this isn't a utility everybody needs, but if you have even the slightest interest in partitioning your hard drive, it's a no-brainer: grab it.

You've heard every mantra and cautionary tale a dozen times, but if you still haven't backed up that hard drive by now, the lessons haven't sunk in. It may not seem like a big deal if everything's humming along, but losing files or precious photos to malware, food spills, fire, or any other corrosive indignity brings on those twin sensations of panic and despair. This article takes you through some simple hardware and software solutions to save those files, then weighs the pros and cons of each approach.

Back up to an external hard drive

External hard drives and network-attached storage are local ways to back up your files to a physical drive that lives outside your PC. Since network-attached storage devices are typically for the home networker with multiple computers to safeguard from data loss, most people looking for a basic backup option will lean toward external hard drives, like some of these CNET favorites.

The Clickfree Portable Backup Drive automatically begins backing up your drive for you.

(Credit: CNET)

After purchasing an external drive, you'll just plug it into your computer to get started. Most conventional drives like the ultraportable 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go will trigger your computer to open a separate drive folder, like "Removable Drive F:". Copying or dragging the files you'd like to save from their original folder into the external drive folder transfers them over.

The purpose-built 320GB Clickfree Portable Backup Drive provides an even simpler backup method. After plugging it in, the drive's native software automatically finds and backs up all of your computer's data. Not bad for about $200. If that's not enough storage space for you, there's also the four-bay Drobo for serious data nuts. It's not without its shortcomings, including its high price. For backups, it's best used for creating redundancy in case one of your other drives fail.

Desktop backup software

One of the primary advantages of using software to copy your files is being able to schedule backups of your data, although all programs will let you manually back up data as well. While most people will find online storage solutions the easiest to maintain, desktop backup software has its merits.

For example, for $50, the Acronis True Image Home 2009 images your hard drive, including your programs, documents, music, photos, and Outlook e-mail. In the event of a crash, you can boot it from the PC or from a CD.

Israeli start-up Waze is at the Where 2.0 conference this week showing off its service for collecting real-time traffic and driving condition data from its users. Currently running on 80,000 smartphones in Israel, Waze shows you traffic flows on highways, and unlike other traffic services, it also shows it on side streets, and it creates routing advice based on that data.

The service allows users to report accidents, speed traps, cops by the side of the road, and other traffic-related items. What's cool is that these items fade automatically over time, and there's also the possibility for the system to ping a driver as he or she passes a previously reported incident to see if it's still there.

Waze on a mobile device shows you nearby traffic and incidents.

(Credit: Waze)

CEO Noam Bardin tells me that in Israel, Waze doesn't even use commonly available street maps as its base layer of data. Instead, it tracks users (with their permission), and builds maps from those traces. Then it asks users to name the roads.

In a technology utopia, this product makes beautiful sense. But the real world is messy. You can't roll out a peer-to-peer traffic service and expect it to work perfectly from day one, since it needs a critical mass of users. Realistically, Waze is going to have to roll out its service, in big countries like the U.S., region by region. However, smartphone app stores are national, so there may be unhappy users from under-represented locations. (At least in the U.S., the company will use existing maps as a starting place.)

Then there's the safety question. While the demo I saw, on an Android phone, had simple and big buttons on it like "speed camera," it still represents a distraction, and in our society all it will take is one user causing an accident while reporting another to put the hurt on this feature.

I'll leave privacy and power consumption issues as exercises for the reader.

It's also worth noting that in-car navigator company Dash Navigation launched a product with a similar vision, and it hasn't really worked as business. The company, which originally made navigation hardware, is now just in the software licensing business. The consumer navigation products were never price-competitive with the increasingly higher-powered run-of-the mill navigators from the likes of Garmin and TomTom.

Bardin also belives that Dash's problem was mostly on money side: The unit was too expensive, and furthermore, he says, "If you want to have a community product, you can't charge the members." He points to services like YouTube that take content from, and provide value to, their users, but that have to go to other routes, like advertising, to make money.

Waze, Bardin says, will be a free app for the smartphone users who get it from Waze directly. Revenues will come from selling ads, and from selling the technology other companies (like mobile carriers) to package or re-sell.

When the iPhone 3.0 software comes out, and with it the new terms of service for developers that allow the release of turn-by-turn navigation products, we're going to see several products competitive with standard dedicated dash-top navigators. Waze is different from almost every other navigation product I've seen, but I hope it succeeds, if only because I like the idea of a route navigation system that gets better as more people use it.

In the U.S., Waze is in alpha testing now, for Android users only.

The Web app shows you all the Waze drivers.

(Credit: Waze)

(Credit: CNET)

Everyone knows they should back up their data, but a surprisingly small percentage of people actually do. Unfortunately, when the big crash finally comes or you experience a hard-drive failure, that's usually the time you realize you should have been backing up all along. There are a number of programs that make it easier to regularly back up your hard drive, but in my experience, many require several steps to get the job done.

Nero's BackItUp and Burn ($39.99), released yesterday, attempts to make the whole process easier for everyone. Using an intuitive tabbed interface and simple controls, just about anyone can pick up BackItUp and Burn and start a regular schedule for backups or folder syncing in only a few clicks. The software even offers the option of sending you an e-mail notification when automated backups are complete.

It's incredibly easy to set up a backup schedule so you never have to worry about your data again

(Credit: CNET)

BackItUp and Burn also includes full burning capabilities (as the name suggests), letting you burn your music, videos, data, and pictures to CD, DVD, or Blue-ray Discs so you have a hard copy of your most important personal files. Nero offers a free Gigabyte of online storage for a three-month trial, but you'll need to buy a subscription (there are three tiers to choose from) if you want to store more data in the cloud. You can pay as little as $7.49 for 5GB of storage for three months, or as much as $59.99 for 25GB of storage for a year. You should be aware that this program requires the latest Microsoft .NET Framework in order to run (you will be prompted to download during install). You also will have the choice of installing the Ask Toolbar during install.

Nobody wants to lose all his or her data, but too few of us actually take the steps necessary to create regular backups. Nero's BackItUp and Burn provides novice and advanced users a way to keep music, photos, and data safe without a lot of hassle and at a fairly affordable price.

If you're an iTunes user (download for Windows|Mac) whose appetite for music, movies, and podcasts is outstripping the capacity of your computer, it might be a good time to think about offloading that library to an external hard drive or a separate internal drive. If you do it right, the process is relatively simple, although the transfer time could take an hour or more, depending on the size of your media library.

To walk you through it, here's a step-by-step video and slide show tutorial on how to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive.

Move your iTunes library to an external hard drive

(Credit: CNET)

Just about everyone who works with a computer knows they should perform regular backups, but only a very small percentage actually do. While people's intentions are good, most simply think backing up their computer is too much trouble or software is too complex to figure out. Unfortunately, when the big crash finally does occur or a laptop is stolen, for example, the resulting loss of important data has us pulling our hair out wondering why we didn't take the plunge on backup software.

Today, a front-runner in backup software on Windows machines released a strong backup solution for Mac. Backblaze takes the guesswork out of backing up your data with an easy to understand interface, simple scheduling tools, and a brand-new external drives backup interface. To keep your data safe, use the Backblaze preference pane to securely back up your data online so when the unthinkable happens, you can resync your data from the last backup. Backblaze lets you restore from the Web or you can get a DVD or USB drive sent through FedEx.

The initial backup can take some time, but you can pause the process if you need to.

(Credit: CNET)

On launch, Backblaze gets to work analyzing your drive for irreplaceable documents immediately, automatically scanning for important files like photos, music files, and other important documents. The files are automatically encrypted on your hard drive, compressed, and then sent to the Backblaze servers in their encrypted state. The initial backup can take up to a few days depending on your Internet connection, but once it's finished, Backblaze backs up files continuously as you work, making sure you won't lose the latest file revisions or recently added music and photos.

While you shouldn't notice a significant change in your Mac's performance during backups, you have the option of scheduling a time each day to perform the backup. Those who want full control over their backup schedule can simply hit a button to Backup Now whenever it's convenient.

The demo gives you a 15-day trial to find out if Backblaze is right for you, and a $5/month subscription fee is all you'll need to get regular backups with unlimited storage. Also, Backblaze is offering the first 25 people who install today a free 1-year license. Clearly, they will go quickly, so grab your copy as soon as possible.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Last month there was a fair amount of buzz about how iPhone apps don't have much of a shelf life. According to a recent article at TechCrunch, the average free iPhone app is used for less than 30 days before it sits inactive on the desktop or is deleted by the user.

I guess I fit in with the average iPhone user to a certain extent. I have deleted apps that I thought were pretty cool in the beginning, but no longer catch my interest. But it might be different for me because I review apps, so I need to continue to make space on my iPhone every week. On the other hand, there are some apps on my iPhone that I go back to again and again, yet I can see how people would get sick of certain gimmicky apps. I would be interested to know whether your experience lines up with the TechCrunch article so let me know in the comments.

This week's apps include a handy cloud storage utility and a classic arcade type of top-down shooter.

Navigating through your files on ZumoDrive couldn't be easier.

(Credit: CNET)

ZumoDrive (free) works in tandem with a downloadable desktop client (Mac or Windows) to let you easily move and use files between your desktop, your laptop, and your iPhone. Simply install the free iPhone client and install the software appropriate to your OS. From there, your ZumoDrive will show up like another hard drive where you can easily drag files that show up almost immediately on other devices. What makes ZumoDrive exceptionally cool is that it automatically understands not to store the big files on your iPhone, but gives you access to those files from the cloud. This means that you can have your entire 30GB music collection (or any other folder of files) accessible from your iPhone. It's important to note that the free version only allows you 1GB of space to work with, but you can sign up for several different monthly plans if you need more space. I think many users will be able to get by with the free version.

Grab bonuses as you blow away planes and tanks to get the high score.

(Credit: CNET)

Sky Force Reloaded is an excellent shoot-'em-up arcade game in the vein of top-down, 2D classics like 1943 and Xevious (Wikipedia links to games). Any child of the '80s and '90s who plays Sky Force Reloaded will remember hitting the fire button repeatedly at the arcade, as throngs of bad guys flew in every direction while bullets seemed to come from everywhere. Sky Force Reloaded captures the action from these classic games on your iPhone with satisfying touch-screen movement and eight levels of bad guys to blow away. You get three ships to choose from that balance armor and maneuverability to let you decide what kind of mix will work best for the onslaught. Like any good arcade game throwback, Sky Force Reloaded gives you an almost impossible boss at the end of each level to keep you coming back for more.

While there's no replacement for the joystick when it comes to control in these type of games, Sky Force Reloaded manages to make the touch-screen controls work quite well. You'll also be able to pick up better weapons, save countless humans, and gather medals for points. What more could you ask for in an arcade game?

What do you think? What's the shelf life for your iPhone apps? Do you have use for a cloud computing app like ZumoDrive? How far can you get on Sky Force at the hardest difficulty level? Let me know in the comments!