Reviews - page 164

Among the many dozens (hundreds?) of companies in the cottage industry that makes cases and other protective doo dads for your iPhone, Totonto-based Gelaskins probably produces the most arresting and beautiful of them all.

Actually, just saying they produce protective devices for the iPhone is selling the company way short since they adapt fine art from a deep roster of global artists working in a broad range of styles, putting photo quality prints on thin, but tough, scratch-resistant polymer with a patented 3M adhesive, allowing you to personalize and protect everything from iPhone to the full range of Apple iPods and laptops.

The iPhone covers go for about $15, while iPod protection runs a little less and laptop protective art will set you back about $30. Not that Apple’s industrial design isn’t beautiful itself, but all the Gelaskins art is distinctive – and any of it is guaranteed to make your device stand out from the crowd.

Hit the jump for a gallery of 10 of the newest designs that we think are among the coolest.

It’s Friday and it’s time for a weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This week, I review Smart Maps – Brussels, Who’s Buying, Tasks – Tick If Off, Pac-Man Remix, FortuneBall, Mr.AahH!! Lite, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, A Quest of Knights Onrush, Power Toppler, and CrunchUrl.

Even though there is something awkward and unattractive about laptop bags, I seem drawn to them over and over. I guess it’s because when it comes to carrying a laptop, they do the job. I have been through several at this stage, but never liked any of them. But finally I have found a bag that changes the message — Hellolulu’s Messenger Bag.

The $120 Hellolulu messenger is the ultimate laptop bag. There is nothing cumbersome about this bag.

What is it? It’s one of my all-time favourite Menu Bar apps, and was recently updated to work with Snow Leopard. I’m delighted to have just re-installed it after a spell of trying to live without it.

The app is called I Love Stars, and I prefer it over ever other iTunes helper I’ve tried. And I’ve tried quite a few.

Kirikae, a free jailbreak app switcher/launcher for the iPhone, is yet another forbidden app that shows exactly how simple power features can drastically improve the iPhone user experience. With two clicks of the home button you can switch between apps while automatically backgrounding the app you leave. Kirikae was initially released on September 7, and the recent update (version svn.r49) adds more great features to an already killer app switcher.

What is it? It’s Notational Velocity, one of the best and yet most overlooked note apps for OS X. You should download it immediately.

Why it’s cool Because if you want to store text notes, many hundreds or thousands of them, and then be able to search through them at lighting speed, there is no faster or simpler way of doing it.

Unfortunately, Audio-Technica’s $220, noise-cancelling beauties have turned me into a complete twit. They’ve caused me to belt out John Legend’s “If You’re Out There” while in line at the local Starbucks; and they make make me look like Lando Calrissian’s crony in The Empire Strikes Back

I don’t care. They’re so good, I’m probably never taking them off.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac. Except this article didn’t show up last week, due to me ending up in Belgium, so this time it’s a one-off, extra-special iPhone Fortnightly Digest!

APPS OF THE WEEK

TonePad Pro: Addictive grid-based musical toy. Many editing/sharing options. Ringtone exports a tad distorted. 5/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/36AZt

FlipTime: Cute clock/calendar akin to old-style airport/train station boards. Lsc. & portrait modes. No alarm. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2NJnC

Terminator: Death Valley 1: So-so ‘humanoid killer robots’ vs contemporary ‘human cannon fodder’ comic. Nice UI. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2JTvQ

Remix David Bowie – Space Oddity: Simple but limited multitrack ‘mixing’ of a famous Bowie track. 3/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2LtRo

Adrenaline: 32 basic, quickfire ‘blitz’ games. Sometimes fun but would benefit from much shorter level times. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Qryw

Leaves: Tranquil leaves-based toy. Slightly iffy 3D and physics, but calming, and fun for a short time. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/30cmL

Score-Em: Virtual scorecard app with varied graphics and relevant audio. Works fine, but throwaway in nature. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/32bBx

Gem Ninja: Mindless prod-based tile-match game. OK for a free time-waster, but not worth paying for. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/32cQy

Looptastic Electro Edition Lite: Loop remix tool. Fantastic UI, varied audio stems, and ten loops to play with. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/34Hp2

StarTime: Vibrant, bold Star Trek-like clock. Optional random sounds & can run iPod music in background. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/39xOi

Since this column didn’t happen last week, it’s only fair to highlight FlipTime, which would have been ‘app of the week’ last week. It’s one of those apps that shows you don’t need something that’s all-singing and all-dancing to make an impression. Instead, charm sometimes goes a long way. All FlipTime does is show the time and date, sporting a visual appearance like those old-fashioned flip boards you’d see at railway stations and airports. Sounds are optional and the numerals are bold enough to see at a distance. Aesthetically, it’s also the nicest iPhone clock I’ve seen.

TonePad Pro is this week’s favourite. It’s been described as iPhone musical crack elsewhere, and it does have a certain addictive quality about it. Again, it’s a simple app—this time, you toggle grid spaces to play notes in an ever-repeating loop. However, this time it’s the attention to detail that wins through, the developer having provided plenty of options for editing, saving and sharing your creations. The Pro version is ad-free and enables you to email ringtones that can then be dropped into iTunes and synchronised with your iPhone. But if you don’t care about ringtones and ads, the free version of TonePad is just as good.

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Apple’s new fifth-generation iPod nano, now with a video camera, is a perfect pearl of 21st-century technology. It’s a lovely piece of electronic jewelry that does almost everything except dispense pints of beer.

It can record video, play movies, store weeks’ worth of music, wake you in the morning, remind you of a dental appointment, record how many steps you walked to work, and how long it took you. It remembers all your contacts, records voice memos, stores your shopping lists and plays a bunch of games that are controlled by tipping and tilting the beautiful little device.

It’s easy to get complacent about Apple’s iPods, new ones come out so often. They’ve got to be 3D holographic auto-mastubators to get anyone’s attention. But take a step back, and it’s pretty astonishing how much advanced technology is stuffed into such a tiny device, and how beautifully it’s done.

When i was younger I worked as a house painter and had a great JVC boombox that blasted punk tunes to everyone’s annoyance.

That’s why I like Altec Lansing’s new $300 Mix iMT800, a ghettoblaster for the iPhone age.

The Mix Boombox is loud and obnoxious, like a boombox should be. It mixes old school block-rockin’ beats with new school digital connectivity. It easily fills a room with sound and can piss off the neighbors, even in the daytime.

The Pogoplug from CloudEngines looks like a boring power adapter, but it’s a fantastic little gizmo that turns any USB hard drive into your own little cloud server accessible over the Internet.

Just stick a router and USB hard drive into the $99 Pogoplug, plug it into the wall and baboom — instant cloud. Which means I can dump my important files and media onto a drive, and as long as I’m online, I can access those files, anywhere, anytime.

Hit the jump for the full review.

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Duracell’s cheap and cheerful little rechargeable battery pack is “perfect,” Gizmodo says in a nice little review of the new gadget.

Just released, Duracell’s $20 Instant Charger is good for about half a charge of an iPhone, or a full charge of an iPod nano.

“Duracell’s Instant Charger is a perfectly executed little gadget,” Gizmodo says.

The site has seen plenty of pricey chargers with all the bells and whistles, which are usually superfluous. Gizmodo is charmed by the Instant Charger’s purity: it’s basically a rechargeable litium ion battery hooked to a USB port, and that’s it.

You plug in your own charging cables, so it’s good for iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, Bluetooth headsets and any other gadget that comes with a USB cable.

The Instant Charger ‘s bigger brother, the $50 Powerhouse Charger, stores enough juice to charge an iPhone 3G 1.2 times, or an iPod nano 4 times, Giz says. But it isn’t as compelling as the Instant Charger, which is perfectly simple and cheap.

Way way back in the mists of ancient history, I owned a Palm device, and I loved the little fella.

One of my favourite apps for the Palm was AvantGo (now defunct) – a huge database of free newspaper and magazine content that the device would download every time you synced the Palm with your desktop computer.

I used to spend long train journeys catching up with news from the BBC, Wired, and a bunch of other publications. Most of it was full text, there were no ads (not that I can remember, anyway – this was a long time ago now), it was fast and quick and easy. Superb.

This week I noticed Time magazine’s new app, and started poking around elsewhere in the news section of the App Store. In particular, I wanted to see what the UK media were up to.

In what’s turning out to be a busy few weeks for the team at Bare Bones, their information manager app Yojimbo has just been bumped up to 2.0. The new version is a 20 dollar upgrade for owners of older versions, is Snow Leopard compatible, and has this spectacular new icon.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

Birdhouse: Notepad for Twitter. Drafts can be rated, backed-up, published/’unpublished’. Fantastic UI. 5/5 $3.99 https://is.gd/2A56C

Shoot-Em-Up: Competent but easy, unexciting vertical shooter with annoying ship inertia. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wmWJ

Bloons Lite: 12-level dart-throw action puzzler. Iffy controls, poor graphics. Mildly compulsive but annoying. 2/5 Free https://is.gd/2wn5L

Spaceballs: Mediocre Puzz Loop clone. Dull graphics and slowdown take edge off fun core gameplay of original. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2wnoq

Minigore: Characterful Robotron-style shooter. Fun, but lacks depth & environment doesn’t affect protagonist. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2xWGi

PapiJump+: Cute vertical platformer with varied modes, but bettered in every way by Doodle Jump. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2C0uN

Mevo: Rhythm action game. OK graphics, but dullish gameplay and problematic response lag & slowdown. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2Eeys

In amongst lots of iffy games, a fun vertical platformer (PapiJump+) and Chillingo’s bloody (and furry) dual-thumb shooter (Minigore), Birdhouse appealed this week. Birdhouse is a good example of how a really odd idea can be great. The app is a drafting app for Twitter. You might wonder why you need to draft 140-character tweets, but if you’re serious about the service, it often pays to think about things and mull them over. Birdhouse is like a sounding board for your thoughts, and the interface is absolutely fantastic. The ability to rate drafts and back them up to email is also welcome.

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Have you heard of Posterous yet? It’s a free hosted blogging service, where the aim is to making the act of posting content as simple as possible.

Which means that posting-by-email is the primary interface. Send Posterous anything in a mail message – text, pictures, video, other files – and it tries to do The Right Thing with whatever it is, to make it work as a post.

And on the whole it works very well. I’ve been playing around with it recently and I’m impressed. I like the simplicity and the immediacy of it.

That might explain why I was excited to see today’s announcement of a Posterous iPhone app.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

Pinball Fantasies: First-rate update of 4-table Amiga pinball. More intricate than Dreams, but a bit less fun. 4/5 $5.99 https://is.gd/2rNSH

KRYZER: Stylish, great-looking, great-sounding, but terminally dull basic shooter with Head On overtones. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2kYfK

Solitaire (Fat Head Apps): Bare-bones Solitaire. Iffy graphics & feature-light. Sol Free much better. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mIKj

Mixed: Anagram game with ongoing/timed modes. Has problems with mixes that have multiple solutions. 2/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mITf

Tase-A-Hippie: One-joke app, which lacks a joke. Just prod to ‘tase’ a static cartoon beatnik. 1/5 Free https://is.gd/2mJ1U

Ask Happy Buddha: Rub fat guy’s tummy, ask ?, shake, get answer, wonder why didn’t get free Magic 8-Ball app. 1/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2mJaz

Eurosport: Sports news app. Lots of content, mostly looks good, and works well, but a bit crashy. 4/5 Free https://is.gd/2oonU

Ten Pin Championship Bowling: Good-looking, fun bowling. Let down by ball sometimes having a mind of its own. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2qha6

Lots of junk and mediocre stuff this week—one-‘joke’ apps in particular are really wearing thin—but three apps stand out from the crowd. Eurosport offers a pretty good means to get at regularly updated European sports news and standings; Ten Pin Championship Bowling, while having a ball that sometimes seems to do its own thing, is a fun game and made by industry legend David Crane (Pitfall!, Little Computer People); and Pinball Fantasies proves that you don’t need gloss to create a great game. A loving and careful update of the 1992 Amiga classic, Pinball Fantasies eschews modern cartoon-like or 3D pinball for tables instead packed with features and missions. It might not look terribly modern, but it plays brilliantly, and its four tables offer plenty do to. If I’m honest, I prefer the simpler tables from prequel Pinball Dreams, but Fantasies is still a must-have iPod game for pinball aficionados, and I await Pinball Illusions with bated breath.

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Another screencast for your information and entertainment. If you want to know more, you can grab a copy of Radio Gaga from here.

And that station playing French pop from the 50s and 60s is Radio Oh-la-la, and if you couldn’t listen to it for free on the web, it’d almost be worth buying Radio Gaga for that alone. Maybe.

Much has been said about the super-handy Flip digital video cameras. These well-designed, inexpensive cams have gotten plenty of favorable reviews.

But the question is whether they’re worth having when the iPod gets video capability.

The Flip model we tested is ripe for iPod comparison: the 8G UltraHD records two hours of video and is slightly cheaper than an 8G iPod Touch, with a price tag of $199. It shoots 720p (1,280×720) high-definition video.

So, should you wait to see what’s behind door no. 2 or stick with the Flip HD?

Full review after the jump.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

QuadCamera: Top serial-shots ‘toy’ camera with vivid effects and various layouts. Would like higher output res. 5/5 $1.99 http://is.gd/2bzLs

iPolygon: Top-notch twist-based Breakout, played from within a polygonal shape. Three different modes. 5/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2afgK

Whoiser: Efficient client for accessing whois info. Spindly font, but good landscape view & mail ability. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2atfA

OldCamera: Mono camera effects. Great results, but prefs a bit awkward & you can’t use pics from Photos app. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2bAet

ToyCamera: Like OldCamera but with vintage/saturation colour effects. Randomiser a nice touch. 3/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2bAFr

Critter Crunch: Action puzzler, resembling a souped-up single-player Magical Drop. Fun & plenty of depth. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/2fk82

DrawRace: Top-down racer. Draw racing lines before races start. Good concept/multiplayer; frustrates quickly. 3/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/2gGGE

Although some people still stamp their angry little feet while moaning that Apple handhelds aren’t ‘proper’ games consoles, developers don’t care. Most complaints seem to stem from the lack of tactile controls, but this week’s batch of games shows how a decent developer can get around such perceived shortcomings.

iPolygon is essentially Breakout, but played from inside polygonal shapes, and the twist-based mechanic is more fun and makes for more frantic gaming than the typical approach seen in most clones and evolutions of Atari’s ancient coin-op. Similarly, DrawRace takes Super Sprint and makes you draw your route before the race starts and then watch the outcome. I found it pretty frustrating in terms of difficulty, but there’s no getting away from the innovative nature of the app.

However, my favourite apps of the week instead deal with another iPhone shortcoming: the rubbish camera. I’m stuck with a 3G for now, and the camera isn’t great. But with some apps installed, it becomes an interesting ‘toy’ camera, along the lines of a Lomo. Of this week’s trio of apps, all from Takayuki Fukatsu, QuadCamera is my pick. The app takes four to eight shots in quick succession, applying user-defined effects while it does so, and although output resolution is lower than I’d like, there’s no denying how much fun the app is. (Long-time Cult of Mac readers will know that Giles agrees.)

I suspect that even when I get my mitts on a 3GS with its video capabilities, I’ll still be drawn to the low-tech charm of QuadCamera.

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Gizmodo’s Brian Lam talked to a high level source who claims to have seen and handled prototypes of Apple’s upcoming tablet.

* The tablet is real (we already knew this though — CoM’s sources have also confirmed it).

* 10-inch screen.

* Looks like a giant iPhone with the same Home button and a shiny black plastic back.

* Two editions: One with a webcam and one for education.

* Will sit between iPod/iPhone and a MacBook, costing $700 to $900.

* Will also function as a secondary screen and/or a touchpad for iMacs and MacBooks, like this 7-inch external USB monitor form MiMo.

* It’s been under development in one form or another for six years, but the first prototype was built at end of 2008. Time to market is 6-9 months, pegging the device’s release date this holiday season.

But just as Lam — who is a great reporter and a straight-shooter – was was about to get to the juicy bit — what OS the tablet will run — his iPhone dropped the call. Classic!

Writes Lam: “My call dropped on some windy road off Skyline Drive. Fucking AT&T.”

UPDATE: I contacted Lam, who said his source didn’t know the tablet’s OS. It’s the biggest secret surrounding the device, he says. Entrepreneur and ugly dog-lover Jason Calacanis just tweeted it runs a modified version of the iPhone OS, citing a developer. Maybe. Here at CoM, we like the idea it’ll run Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

There are two things that really piss me off about iPhone… Actually, that’s a huge lie. There are loads of things that piss me off about iPhone, but two things in particular make me want to HULK SMASH. The first is that you can’t back-up individual app data. Delete Peggle from your iPhone, reinstall and you have to start from scratch. Clearly, whoever decided on that gem went to ‘cheapskate DS games without battery back-up’ school.

The other issue is that it’s a major pain in the arse (or ass, if you’re American) to rearrange apps on your device’s home screens. The current ‘drag everything about’ system was clearly designed for hardware where it wasn’t possible to download fifty billion apps. And although Spotlight in OS X iPhone 3.0 enables you to find apps within the mess, you shouldn’t be using text-based searching to find apps on such a tactile, touch-based system.

What we’d like to see is this:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfv0OJ1oMQ

If you can’t be bothered to watch that, it shows an iTunes interface for dragging and dropping apps about, the organisation of which would then sync with the device itself. Rumours suggest this functionality might appear in iTunes 9, but I remember similar things being promised before.

A press release I received this morning about ShareAppScreen made me hope that someone had somehow managed this, outside of Cupertino. I was hoping for magic beans: someone to have figured out how to rearrange iPhone screens using a widget. What I got was baked beans—a widget that’s awkward to use and that doesn’t realise that different iPhones actually have different apps pre-installed. And when you’re done, it can share your screens with your friends, but not with your device, sadly.

Overall, it’s better than using something like Photoshop for testing app arrangements, but other than that, it’s a case of ‘roll on iTunes 9’.

Because we’re all geeks these days and need bags for our laptops, the market for fashionable computer bags has mercifully grown. Gone are the days when the only laptop bag you could buy was black and rectangular.

A particularly stylish entry onto the fashion laptote market is Ibint, a company that sells a range of good-looking laptop bags called Loopbag. The Loopbags have distinctive zippers that loop around the front and back of the bags — hence the name.

We’ve been testing a pair of Loopbags in New York for the last couple of weeks, and they’ve held up exceptionally well, especially because this summer has been exceptionally wet.

Hit the jump for the rest of the review.

It’s Friday and it’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

APP OF THE WEEK

CrunchFu: Effective and surprisingly fun fitness aid. Kind of like Nike+ for crunches. 4/5 $2.99 https://tr.im/vUFR

Doodle Jump: Infectious (if somewhat irritating) and simple tile-based ‘jump survival’ game. Updated often. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/20Dko

Flyloop: Sweet and surprisingly frantic high-score game. Draw lines & loops to ‘snare’/combine butterflies. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/22g9j

CameraBag: Trendy camera effects (Lomo, Holga, 1970s, 1960s, etc.) and 1200px per edge output. Good quality. 4/5 $1.99 https://tr.im/vCb5

Electrogravitron: Excellent multitouch/accelerometer game where you shepherd blue dots into defined zones. 4/5 $0.99 https://tr.im/vLsv

Lots of decent apps this week, including the infuriatingly addictive Doodle Jump, the hippyesque Flyloop (catch those butterflies, man), Electrogravitron—only second to Eliss in multitouch gaming terms—and CameraBag, which remains one of my favorite iPhone image-manipulation apps.

App of the week is CrunchFu, though, for providing a means for cheapskate iPhone owners to get fit and have some fun at the same time. It takes the same basic principle as Nike+, turning exercise into an online videogame. League tables and online battles ensure you stay engrossed rather than giving up. And if you’re no fan of crunches, GymFu offers similar apps for squats, pull-ups and push-ups.

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