Imagine this scenario: You’re in a hotel room and you bring your iPhone, Macbook, External Hard Drive, Camera, and another iPod cause you’re nasty..but they’re all in need of a charge. You run and send a search team for the nearest available outlet, to your utter dismay it only provides two outputs. You reason you can live without a couple of those items but then you can’t fit two clunky chargers at once. You’re left with just charging one device.
We’ve all run into hotel rooms that just don’t seem to have enough power outlets. With the Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB that problem is pretty much solved. How does it perform?
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Enigmo is a 3D puzzle-based game for the iPhone developed by Pangea Software that has been met with rave reviews, even earning a “Best iPhone Game” at WWDC 08. The basic premise is to put water droplets in the water container, oil droplets in the oil container, and lava droplets in the lava container using the specific materials given to you. The materials can range from sponges, springs, slides, or even laser guns and it uses basic physics to determine where each droplet will land.
Enigmo is already a popular game on the Mac, but does it translate to the iPhone? Is it worth your $9.99? How does it perform?
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Can’t find a Bluetooth Headset that fits your ear? Struggling enough with the headset that it defeats the purpose of being ‘hands free’? Well, the Motorola MOTOROKR T505 Bluetooth In-Car Speakerphone ($99.95) is ideal for you. It is essentially a Bluetooth speakerphone, keeping your hands free and your ears clear while driving your car. Unlike a Bluetooth headset, the Motorokr T505 is meant to be used strictly in a car setting. How does it perform?
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Unlike the original iPhone which withstood the rigorous tests of sweaty palms, fingerpints, keys, and just daily life with relative ease, the iPhone 3G has some quality and durability concerns that the original iPhone never had. Insert the need for a case. The Griffin Nu Form Case for iPhone 3G ($24.95) is a stylish solution that hopes to offer better grip and protection from the elements while still looking good. How does it perform?
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I originally bought my first Palm V so I could take some writing with me on the road. I “upgraded” later to a WinMob device in hopes Pocket Office would be a more robust solution, and then again to a Palm Treo, trying a couple high profile “Office” apps out. Confession: none of them really worked. They stripped out style sheets. They converted files to HTML and mangled format, and the feature sets just were never there. I abandoned them shortly after they abandoned me. Mobile editing just isn’t there yet.
While I wait for a next generation document editor to (hope beyond hope) prove me wrong, FileMagnet from Magnatism is proving to me the value of the iPhone’s built in, format-respectful, Quickview and Quicktime viewers, and added the previously missing — and tremendously useful — ability to transfer supported files effortlessly via WiFi, straight from your Mac (with Windows support already in development).
How does this wireless drive-mode, doc viewer hybrid work out? Read on!
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While Apple waits on manpower/priority celestial alignment to someday enable the long requested cut, copy, and paste functionality in the iPhone OS, Proximi’s MagicPad has decided to take multi-touch into their own hands, and provided something far more than what they describe as a proof of concept: a rich text editor which, a few limitations aside, brings Apple’s OS future very much into the App Store present.
Text Selection
Apple provides a user experience for insertion point placement that involves tapping and holding your finger down until a magnifying loupe pops up and lets you more accurately position the curser. To zoom in on a photo or fill the screen with a web element, Apple gives you the double tap. Many have wondered what an interface for text selection (the pre-requisite for Rich Text formatting and cut, copy, and paste) could or would look like — and some have even wondered if getting it “right” was what was delaying the functionality.
MagicPad combined the insertion point placement tap-and-hold with the zoom double-tap, to text select via double-tap-and-hold. And while it may not be what Apple will ultimately term “right”, could it be “right now”?
Read on to find out!
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Today’s lightning review: Epocrates Rx, available for free in the App Store. For writing the review, Libuff gets a 25% off coupon to the iPhone Blog Store. A review of a medical app from a genuine paramedic: Epic Win! Interested in getting your own coupon? Read the details on how your own Lightning Review could do just that!
Epocrates is the iPhone version of the famous drug reference software which is available on nearly all portable devices. from Palm to Blackberry to Windows Mobile and now to iPhone. This application is not for just the professional, although most of the information would be over the head of the non-medical professional types. This product is FREE, however an online registration is required, but also FREE. You can register here.
I work as a Paramedic, and as such, drug reference material is very important. We are quite often confronted with a myriad of medications which even the most experienced pharmacists have yet to hear about. Because of the ever expanding amount of medications out there, it becomes important to have dynamic drug references.
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In the years before iPhone, my smartphones had replaceable batteries and I usually carried a spare, especially on trips. Inexplicably, the iPhone doesn’t afford this “luxury” — the battery is not user-replaceable and when it’s dead, it’s dead. If you don’t have a charger handy, you are out of luck. This can be particularly frustrating if you are taking a long flight, want to watch a movie on your iPhone’s expansive screen, and still have enough juice left to call someone when you get to your destination.
Enter the mophie Juice Pack Battery Pack/Case for iPhone, available now at TiPB store for $99.95. Read on for the full review!
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Are you a frequent international traveler? Are you always confused by international electrical outlets? Have you realized that there are a gazillion different electrical outlets requiring a gazillion different plugs? Well, the Mobi Products World Wall Adapter for S&C Cables for iPhone 3G, iPhone ($34.95) tries to simplify the tangled messy world of cables by giving you almost every solution in a simple adaptor. How does it perform?
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(cjvitek is back with a review of Units ($.99 at the iTunes Store), a straightforward unit conversion app. It’s currently sitting pretty at #4 on the bestseller list, but does it belong? Read on to find out!)
On my old Treo, I had a great conversion program which I used frequently. When I switched to the iPhone 3G, I was hoping to find a similar program. The best I have found so far is “Units”.
Units is a conversion program that allows you to convert currencies, length, area, temperature, energy units, volume, time, speed, and weight. It has a simple, straightforward interface. First you select the mode you want to convert (say, currency), then the “from” units, then the “to” units. You select these options be repeatedly tapping on the “mode”, “from”, and “to” buttons until you get the selection you want. Then, using the calculator style interface, you type in the number you want converted. While I haven’t used the currency converter yet, the currency values are updated daily (automatically) or you can update them yourself manually.
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