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Oh, I'm sorry...I can't hear you over the deafening chorus of angels singing "Hallelujah!" Yes, it's true: the iPhone and the iPod Touch are one step closer to subscription music and I'm pleased as punch about it. Slacker, which released an app for the devices earlier this year, is about to roll out an update that will allow for caching and over-the-air refreshing of stations.
Note the airplane mode.
(Credit: Slacker)While the new capability isn't a huge deal for the iPhone, it's a big win for iPod Touch owners because it means you won't need to be connected to WiFi in order to enjoy Slacker Radio. The only time you will need to hop on is when you're ready to refresh content on the stations, which is a blissfully easy process, thanks to Slacker's excellent onscreen interface.
Actually, the news is great all around, as playing from a cached station takes significantly less of a toll on the battery than streaming. (Slacker's cursory ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
Security Cam can be set up to snap shots on an interval, or by sound. Like this ghost.
(Credit: CNET)New app Security Cam from Crowded Road ($0.99 iTunes link) has had a long journey to the App Store. Its creators tell us the app was first submitted to Apple back in December of 2008, where it remained in review purgatory before finally getting approved earlier this week.
The app lets iPhone owners set a phone to take a picture, either at a set interval of minutes, or every time the phone's microphone picks up sound. The two modes can also be set to run at the same time, so it'll take photos every few minutes, and when it picks up noise.
Along with these settings, the app can also be set to put your phone to sleep after a selected period of time, as well as watermark photos with a time stamp of when it was taken. These shots then end up in your photo roll.
Of course, the one problem with this app, and any others like it, is that you have to set up your phone somewhere, then retrieve it in order to see the shots it's taken. This is slightly less convenient than tools like IP Camera, which we checked out back in October. That app lets you see photos as they're being taken. Although unlike Security Cam, it does not save them locally, or make use of the iPhone's microphone hardware.
Documents To Go now lets you create and edit Power Point documents on iPhone.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)DataViz and Quickoffice have long been racing for the glory of creating the most advanced office suite for iPhone. Their products, Documents To Go and Quickoffice Mobile Suite, have leapfrogged one another as they developed. This time, Documents To Go Premium pulls into the lead with version 3.0 of the $14.99 app that is now capable of creating and editing PowerPoint presentations, and opening Gmail attachments. (There's a simpler version of Documents To Go, without these features, for $9.99.)
As part of its update, Documents To Go Premium 3.0, previously known as Documents To Go with Exchange Attachments, now lets you create and edit PowerPoint presentations instead of just read them. Three simple templates for basic, casual, and corporate slides get you going on creating new presentations. You can add bullet points, speaker notes, and manage slides from a sliding navigation ribbon at the bottom of the screen.
Navigation took some getting used to, and could be more intuitive. Presentations were also graphically limited. With few colors and themes and no capability to add graphics or transitions, this initial stab at PowerPoint creation is best suited for textual edits of existing presentations and for creating concept presentations, not for generating full-blown PowerPoints.
As before, Documents To Go Premium accesses your e-mail attachments, but now gives you the option of viewing attachments from Gmail instead of from just Microsoft Exchange. You'll need to set up an account and open either Exchange or Gmail e-mail--but not both--through the app instead of through the iPhone's default in-box. The publisher, DataViz, provides setup instructions here.
While Quickoffice Mobile Suite costs $5 less than Documents To Go Premium, it does not currently create or edit PowerPoint presentations. Users of the $10 version of Documents To Go will soon be able to upgrade to the Premium version through in-app purchasing, after Docs To Go's next update.
Creating personalized playlists for your iPhone is great if you're a control freak with plenty of time, but I've increasingly come to rely on the Genius function introduced with iTunes 8. But Genius requires you to build playlists around a single "seed" song, and is often weak on variety--it almost always picks two or three other songs from the same album as your seed song, and its other choices tend to run to the same era and genre.
Here's what Moodagent picked when I set the "aggression" and "tempo" sliders to their maximum positions. The playlist changes dynamically as you adjust the sliders.
Moodagent, a free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch released in December, offers a more innovative take on automated playlist creation. It gives you five sliders that let you set desired levels of sensuality, tenderness, joy, aggression, and speed. These categories might seem kind of arbitrary, but in practice the resulting playlists make a lot of sense: turning the sensuality slider up gave me lots of slow and funky stuff like Beastie Boys instrumentals and Portishead, while turning aggression and tempo all the way up returned lots of material from the Reverend Horton Heat, Pixies, and Dead Kennedys. Best of all, the playlist adjusts itself on the fly when you change the sliders.
Like Genius, the Moodagent playlists are 25 songs long and tend to contain a few songs from the same album. But beyond those same-album tracks, it seems to offer quite a bit more variety in terms of year and genre. You can also pick a seed song to create a playlist if you like, but it's not required. If you come upon a winning playlist, you can save it to the app.
Moodagent requires an active Internet connection to analyze the songs on your device against the 8 million songs in its database. It took about 10 minutes to get through 3,000 songs for me, but about 1,000 songs weren't recognized, or were protected by DRM. (Moodagent won't work on DRM-protected tracks.) You can download a free desktop application that transmits non-personally identifiable information about your iTunes library to the company, which in the long run should help Moodagent recognize more of your songs. But the process was a bit weird--when I launched the app, it simply opened Internet Explorer for a half second, then shut it back down. I have no idea whether the desktop app worked or not.
This minor glitch aside, Moodagent is a worthwhile download if you're looking for new ways to listen to your music.
Thumbplay Music on BlackBerry.
(Credit: Thumbplay)Since there's no such thing as too many music apps, Thumbplay has announced at CES its plan to turn its song and ringtone e-store into a downloadable, cloud-based, on-demand music player for desktops and smartphones.
Thumbplay Music launches on Thursday as an invitation-only beta for Windows, Mac, and select BlackBerry smartphones. A single Adobe AIR app will run Thumbplay Music on Windows and Mac. At launch, the app supports BlackBerry Tour (9630), Bold (9000), and Curve (8900) phones. Compatibility with a greater number of BlackBerry models, and apps for iPhone and Android, are next on Thumbplay's road map.
Thumbplay is modeling its nascent app on a subscription service that touts unlimited on-demand playback for artists and albums, a search feature, favorites that can synchronize between the smartphone and desktop app, and an offline playback mode. Thumbplay Music also supports iTunes playlists and playlists of your own creation on both the desktop and phone versions. A music discovery element similar to Pandora additionally seeks out tunes based on ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
A bug in Facebook's software appeared late Tuesday that caused some iPhone apps using the service to crash instantly, according to developers that spoke with CNET.
(Credit:
Nodconcept)
The bug was originally thought to be with Facebook's application programming interface, which enabled developers to publish feed stories into their apps. Facebook reminded developers on Monday that the old APIs would be turned off on Tuesday, a plan that had been in the works since last October.
Chris Diskin of Nodconcept, makers of Emoti (iTunes Link), an iPhone app that enables users to post status messages on Facebook with custom emoticons, said his app stopped working on Tuesday afternoon, after the old APIs were supposed to be turned off. However, Facebook representatives later said a bug in the software, not the company's APIs, caused the issue.
The bug didn't affect all apps, and perhaps not even all apps in the same way. For instance, Emoti users that purchased the app and logged into Facebook before Tuesday afternoon were able to use the app just fine. Those that purchased the app after midafternoon on Tuesday found that the app crashed immediately.
Within hours of being alerted to the problem, Facebook engineers tracked down the problem and fixed it.
Diskin confirmed for CNET late Wednesday that Emoti was working again.
Barcode Reader leverages your iPhone 3GS camera for quick and easy price comparisons.
(Credit: SHAPE Services)Bar code apps are all the rage these days, and with good reason: with one quick pass of your iPhone's camera, you can get all kinds of information about a product.
Joining the ranks of RedLaser, Pic2shop, and SnapTell, the aptly named Barcode Reader helps you compare prices, which is great for those times when you're out shopping and want to know if you can score a better deal online.
Using Barcode Reader couldn't be simpler: just tap "scan," then point your iPhone at the bar code for nearly any product. In mere seconds, it recognizes the code and fetches prices from any number of online vendors.
Of course, numerous other apps (including the aforementioned) do likewise, so why bother with Barcode Reader?
For one thing, it's free. (So are Pic2shop and SnapTell, but RedLaser costs $1.99.) What's more, I found it incredibly fast at recognizing bar codes (though the lack of some kind of progress meter or framing guide is a bit confusing at first).
It would be nice if the app could produce local results in addition to online prices (as SnapTell can), but I suppose beggars can't be choosers. SnapTell, for its part, makes scanning a bit more complex, and in my tests it didn't do a great job finding matches.
I should point out that Barcode Reader is optimized for iPhone 3GS; developer Shape Services says users of older iPhone models may need "additional gadgets" (like the Griffin Clarifi) to improve accuracy.
Anyone interested in the joys of bar-code scanning will want to test-drive the various apps for themselves. Barcode Reader may be just another entry in an increasingly crowded field, but it's a good one--and the price is right.
While you're at it, be sure to check out these related apps:
Facebook for iPhone 3.1 allows users to add profile pictures and links from Facebook to their iPhone contacts.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Facebook's iPhone app is one of the most popular apps for the device. Version 3.1 brings some killer features to an already strong offering. Push notifications and address book sync, new in this version, are welcome additions.
Push notifications are a very logical addition. They have become Apple's compromise for not allowing apps to run in the background. Instead of having to fire up the Facebook app all the time to see if anything is new, you can now opt to get push notifications for new messages, wall posts, friend requests, friend confirmations, photo tags, events, and comments. This is way more efficient and allows you to only access the app when there is something new to check out, if you choose.
Facebook's new contact sync for the iPhone is particularly interesting. At first, I was a bit hesitant to try out the feature, worrying that it would overwrite the data that I had or add a lot of new friends on Facebook that I didn't really want as contacts on my phone. But it didn't cause any of the problems that I had imagined. Rather, it examines the contacts that you already have on your iPhone, trying to match it to a Facebook user. If it finds a match, it pulls down that person's profile picture, making it that his or her photo on your iPhone. It also adds other information, such as a link that takes you to that person's profile in Facebook's app. The feature doesn't seem to cause any data integrity issues, it just makes your iPhone contact information more robust. Even more interestingly, if one of your phone contacts is not your Facebook friend, it will (in most cases) still pull down their info from Facebook if it finds a match.
Version 3.0 was a big jump forward for Facebook's iPhone app. Even though its creator, Joe Hewitt, has since left the project and started boycotting iPhone app development, version 3.1 delivers some really cool features that round out Facebook's offering on the iPhone nicely.
An iPhone contact, post-Facebook sync, with profile picture and Facebook link added.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)
Facebook for iPhone 3.1's push notification options.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a cheapskate. (I even have a blog that says so.) Needless to say, when it comes to buying games for my iPhone, I tend to choose titles that are free or supercheap.
In fact, my buying habits work like this: If a game I want costs 99 cents, I'll usually grab it without a second thought. If it's $1.99 or $2.99, I'll sometimes pull the trigger, though not without some hesitation. Anything that costs more, I rarely pony up for it.
Am I alone in this regard? To find out, I created this poll. Cast your vote, then read on for more discussion.
I suspect most people will choose, "It depends on the game." And, sure enough, some games offer relatively limited replay value, and therefore should be priced lower than games you're likely to play endlessly.
On the other hand, why should I balk at spending, $5 for an iPhone game that's every bit as good as a $50 PlayStation game? (PlayStation 2, anyway.) I'll drop five bucks for a Starbucks coffee and cookie, which last all of 10 minutes, but not on a game I might play for weeks. Why?
Maybe it's because I'm spoiled by all the great freebies, like Tap Tap Revenge 3, Unblock Me, and Traffic Rush. Or perhaps there's less perceived value in a game that runs on such a small screen.
... Read MoreThe ways people use their iPhones are almost as diverse as the number of people using the device. Soon, you'll be able to add live TV to that list.
(Credit:
Flo TV)
FLO TV and Mophie on Wednesday said at CES that they are partnering to develop a series of products that will bring live TV to the iPhone and iPod Touch. The products are expected to ship in the first half of 2010.
The FLO TV service allows users to tune into mobile broadcasts while on the go. The service boasts many of the largest networks including ABC, Fox, MTV, ESPN, NBC, TLC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, and many others.
The partnership with Mophie puts a FLO TV receiver into the company's iPhone and iPod Touch case products. That gives users protection for the device and built-in access to TV programs.
As mobile users know, video tends to drain the battery of devices much quicker than other uses like browsing the Web or checking e-mail. This is another advantage of the Mophie partnership. ... Read the full post at CNET's CES 2010 blog
