My New iPhone – 25 Apps in 10 Days

After much procrastinating, I finally picked up a new iPhone 3G on the 18th. Had I known what a nightmare I I’d be in for just getting the thing activated, or how long I’d be at the Apple Store (6 hours), I would’ve procrastinated even longer – but that’s a story for another post. What I want to write about today are some of the (mostly) amazing and (mostly) free applications that are being developed for the platform. In my first 10 days with the phone, I’ve sampled over 50 apps – the ones below are the ones still on my iPhone as of today. Here’s my quick rundown of the good and the bad of what I’ve sampled so far.

REFERENCE & PRODUCTIVITY:

Google Mobile App (free): Installing the Google app was pretty much a no-brainer, and was the first one I added. Who doesn’t want the convenience of a google search at their fingertips at all times? If my desktop behavior was any indicator, surely I’d be googling from my phone several times a day. Nope. Maybe the right circumstances haven’t yet come up, but this has turned out to be the app I use the least – so far anyway. I was moderately excited that the app offered access to google reader, since that is my preferred message for blog/news reading – but until an app is developed (a free one) that will actually download articles for offline reading, I’ll stick to getting my news on the “big screen”

Epocrates Rx (free): When I was a teen, I kept a copy of the Physician’s Desk Reference around as a way to keep myself from killing myself when I “experimented” with pharmaceuticals stolen from various friends’ grandmothers’ medicine cabinets. These days, I’m the one with the cabinet full of meds and do a fair amount of research on every drug my doc prescribes. Epocrates Rx offers a fairly comprehensive database of both prescription and OTC drugs – allowing you to search and displaying a full monograph on each including dosage, contraindications, reactions, interactions, safety, pricing, and pictures. There’s also an “Interaction Finder” allowing you to check one drug against another, and Pill identifier. The app is intended for health care professionals, but turns out to be a great resource for delinquent kids and oldies like me.

Evernote (free): Evernote hypes itself as your “external brain”, and the premise is actually very simple and very cool. Evernote allows you to take “notes” on your phone, either with the camera, or using text or audio. You then send the “note” to your account on their site, where you can tag each item and create a little searchable database for yourself. One of the claims this app makes is that it can also search text that appears within a picture, so that you can use Evernote to store business cards, wine labels, etc. That’s pretty exciting if it works, but I haven’t tested that yet so withhold my final report card on this app until I do.

LIFESTYLE/RESTAURANT GUIDES:
All the “Lifestyle Guide” apps seem to be pretty formulaic: Listings and reviews for restaurants/bars/shopping/etc. in your area based on your GPS location. As such, I’ve only added the 2 most popular:

Yelp (free): Leveraging the listings and reviews from the wildly popular website of the same name, Yelp is my favorite mobile guide so far. Well laid out and easy to navigate, the app features listings for restaurants, bars, cafes, banks, gas stations, and drug stores. Most listings have several reviews, and the ratings seem to be pretty accurate (or at least in line with my tastes). There are maps of each location, and the only thing I’d like to see added would be walking or driving directions based on your current location. Other than that, pretty cool.

iWant (free): This app is basically a Yelp clone – in fact even partners with Yelp for it’s restaurant, bar and cafe listings. iWant also adds grocery stores, clothing stores, movie listings, hotels, dept stores, and car rentals to the mix – which is why it stays on my phone. There’s also a cool little feature that maps out all the listings in a category while keeping you within the app. For directions, however, it bumps you over to google maps which is annoying since you’ll have to relaunch iWant to get back to your listing.

GAMES:

Scrabble ($9.99): I will not, repeat, NOT spend ten dollars on ANY app – unless that app happens to be Scrabble. The saddest part of giving up my old Treo 700p to my ex-girlfriend was losing this daily addiction, and the transition to iPhone Scrabble wasn’t easy. Yes it’s annoying to have to drag little tiles with my big fat fingers, yes its annoying that the board automatically zooms in when you place them (I like to see the whole board), yes it’s annoying that it doesn’t give you the scores of potential plays, and YES it’s VERY annoying that the Scrabble people (for some reason) saw the need to change the COLORS of the bonus squares (double-word, triple-letter, etc…they did the same thing on the Facebook app). But hey, it’s Scrabble…. it’s my crack and I will learn to love it.

CheckWord (free): Very simple, very cool little app that simply tells you whether a word is good or bad in Scrabble. It uses the TWL (Tournament Word List) as opposed to the consumer dictionary, so “FUCK is GOOD”, which is just as it should be.

2Across ($2.99): The only other app I paid for, this is a crossword puzzle application that allows you to download puzzles from several sources – The Washington Post, WSJ, Houston Chronicle, and the Philadelphia Enquirer among others. You can even get the daily NY Times puzzles, provided you’ve purchased a subscription for the puzzles on nytimes.com (which I did, just to use this app). Most of my complaints about Scrabble apply to 2across as well – the fat fingers, the zooming in – but for three bucks I figured you can’t really go wrong. I’ve only done about 5 NY Times puzzles so far, and I have to say I MUCH prefer the old pen n’ paper way. This ones for hardcore puzzlers only who, for whatever reason, can’t carry around a magazine or book of puzzles.

SOCIAL NETWORKING:
It’s become axiomatic that social networking tools are only as good as the number of people actually using them. The classic example is that a fax machine has zero value if only one person owns one. Never has this truism been so evident as in all the social networking iPhone apps being rolled out, many which are very cool… but since no one else was using them, found my “trash can” very quickly. There are exceptions, though, so let’s focus the most popular apps:

Facebook (free): I’m not using this as much as I thought I would. My most common activity on Facebook (on the computer) is scanning the mini-feed and checking out my friends “posted items”, comments, and events they are attending. On the iPhone app, the only available items on the mini-feeds are status updates (I have twitter for that) and photo uploads. If you click through to your friends profiles, you can also read their Walls, but that’s something I tend to do only when there’s something written to, or about, me. When clicking through to individual friends, you can also see photos and add comments, but this is actually the *opposite* of how I use Facebook on the computer – I don’t WANT to click through to each of my 200+ friends to see what they might be doing – I want to see everything in the context of a feed and then click through to the things that interest me. Whoever designed this app did not consider the psychology of how people actually use the site, and it makes this a mediocre application, at best.

AIM (free): I’m withholding judgement on AIM for the time being, as I haven’t really had the chance to use it much. It was kind of a must-have for me since I do so much of my communication at work over IM and figured I’d like to have mobile access to it, “just in case”. To be honest, I haven’t IM’d on it yet.. not even once. It looks pretty, though.

Twitterriffic (free): Cool little Twitter client – its simple interface provides a MUCH easier alternative to SMS for texting updates, direct messaging, and replying to tweets. My only complaint is that every time I launch it or go back to “list view”, it takes me to the center of the page and I have to scroll up to see the most recent tweets. Not sure why that can’t be the default position.

WordPress (free): Hmmm… I dunno. This might be a cool app for someone who only blogs short little posts, or just photos with captions, etc. But for someone like me who tends to be on the wordy side, this app has very little value I’m afraid, even though I’m a HUGE WordPress fan. Plus, the day that I downloaded it and was just playing around to see what it could do, it triggered my WordPress Twitter plugin and sent a tweet to my followers that said “New Blog Post: %title%” (sic). When I logged in to my blog via Firefox and went to find the post I’d accidentally created, I found that no such post existed. Arghhh… You are so outta here, WordPress app.

CellSpin (free): Very cool little app that let’s you post mobile uploads (photos, text, or audio) to a number of your sites simultaneously. Supported sites include: Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, LiveJournal, Twitter, Pownce, Picasa, and Flickr. Has worked well in my tests, however the only time I used it in “real life” – to post a photo of my co-workers from the roof of a bar in Manhattan (after several drinks) – the picture never seemed to make it to my Facebook album. That could be my fault, though… I was pretty drunk.

Shozu (free) : Shozu is similar to Cellspin, but offers MANY more sites you can post to, and varies in the types of content you can upload, depending on the destination, but is generally limited to photos and text. For example, select Twitter and you can update your Twitter status and view your status timeline, whereas Picasa and Flickr only accept photos. Some of the additional sites supported on Shozu include: Photobucket, Buzznet, CNN Exchange, Friendster (sic), Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Twitpic, Windows Spaces, and several others. Works well and is a nice complement to CellSpin.

Who’s Here (free): Very simple idea – users create a very simple profile (photo, tag line, gender, age, and who you’re ‘looking for’) and this app shows you other members who are near you, based on your GPS location. You can set the distance within you wish to search (anywhere from 10 meters to 100km). When people show up as “in your area”, you can see their profiles and chat with them if you like. Being recently single, I thought this might be a fun way to strike up conversations with ladies nearby… but when it turned out that other dudes were using it to hit on ME, I realized how sort of… creepy and weird… the whole thing is. I am now afraid of you, WhosHere. The other drawback is that it suffers from the lack of users I mentioned earlier. 9 times out of ten, there is no one “near” me when I check in.

MUSIC:
This is where things start getting really interesting. Some of the most innovative apps are in the music category – what’dya expect would happen when you turn the iPod into a “mobile device” and throw it onto a high-speed network?

AOL Radio (free): Finally, a way to take internet radio with you to the gym! YAY! AOL Radio offers HUNDREDS of live streams from radio stations around the country, as well as pre-programmed internet-only stations based on particular niches and tastes (“This is Radio Clash” e.g.) The choices are mind-boggling, everything from 1010 WINS (local NYC news) to KCRW in Los Angeles, to B-96 in Chicago… AOL Radio almost makes me not care that radio in NYC sucks so badly. It totally doesn’t matter anymore.

Shazam (free): While not the most utilized, Shazam is the best app I’ve seen so far in terms of sheer coolness. Ever hear a song in a bar or on TV and wonder what it was? For me, the OLD way of identifying songs was this: memorize a line of the lyrics, google said line – adding the word “lyrics” to the search – and hope for the best. Now I have a new way: launch Shazam, let the app “listen” to the song for a few seconds and… ta-da! Shazam gives you title, artist, album, genre, label, and a picture of the album cover, and links to the artist on iTunes and YouTube. I have NO CLUE how it does it, but it is SO FREAKING COOL! On my first day with the phone a song came on in a noisy restaurant and my friend wanted to know who it was. I was wary… “surely” I thought, “there is no way it can identify this song amongst all this extraneous noise”. I was wrong. I am still working on scraping my jaw from the floor.

Midomi (free): Now take Shazam and add to it the ability to simply say, sing, or hum (!) any part of a song and have it tell you what it is. Of course, doing it this way depends largely on your ability to carry a tune so the results (at least for me) aren’t always as accurate as Shazam – but it does a pretty decent job.

Remote (free): Not as mind-bendingly cool as the previous two apps, of all my music apps, Remote is the one I think I’ve actually *used* the most. What it does is control your iTunes on your computer over your wireless network. If you have your computer in one room and speakers in another like I do, this is VERY useful. No more running back into my office to click forward through the shuffle or search for what I want to hear – I can do it without moving a lazy-ass muscle off the couch! Sweet.

Pandora (free): Pandora is all about discovery: You set up a “station” based on an artist you like, and Pandora chooses songs that it thinks you will like based on a) the artist the station is “based” on, and b) the rating you give each song. As a pure discovery tool, Pandora is great, and is clearly the leader in this space. But last.fm (see below) does the same thing and offers more options.

last.fm (free): So let’s take the idea of music discovery (Pandora) and throw in social networking, personalized music charts based on my listening habits, artist bios, and where bands are posting concerts near you to boot. That’s last.fm. At least for me, the concept of “friends” is pretty important in the discovery process. I don’t necessarily care as much about what a machine thinks I will like as much as I care about what my friend Peggy in Arkansas is listening to these days, since she is someone I know and whose taste I trust. With last.fm, I can choose to listen to my own music which I *know* I will like, build discovery channels like I can in Pandora, or just kick back and listen to what Peggy’s been listening to lately. This, to me, has more value than simple algorithmic recommendation engine. If last.fm and Pandora got in a knife-fight, Pandora would get her ass kicked.

MOVIES:

Showtimes (free): Simple. It is what it says it is: show times. This application takes your GPS location and gives you movie show times at the theatres nearest to you. Other info includes map to the theatre, MPAA ratings, and movie length. Although there are (non-free) apps that do this, a nice addition would be the ability to order tickets in the app itself – through your Fandango or MovieTickets.com account.

BoxOffice (free): As of this writing, BoxOffice has disappeared from iTunes, and when I launched the app it made me enter a zip code instead of finding me on GPS – so I don’t know what the future of this is. In any case, Box Office is (or was) nice in that it complements Showtimes but instead of searching by theatre, you seach by movie title. When you click a title, it gives you theatres, show times, a synopsis of the film, reviews, and even video trailers when available. The interface isn’t nearly as elegant as Showtimes, but if you want comprehensive info on the films themselves then this app is for you.

TV/VIDEO:
Because iPhone doesn’t include any video camera capabilities (lame), there are not many apps developed that utilize video, esp. uploading. The phone does ship with a YouTube app which I’ve barely used at all, and other than that there is precious little out there. Similarly, I was hoping to find some cool apps that would cater to my television obsession – recaps & reviews? fan commentary? anything??? Nothing. The only things I found were a couple of scheduling apps. Yawn.

vSNAX (free): I haven’t played with this much yet, but it does look promising. What you’ll get here is “official” content from real networks like (ahem) VH1, CBS, G4, Fuse, Spike, etc. No crappy UGC stuff here. Everything is categorized by channel, with the option to see that “Most Viewed” of all channels as well. So far I’ve checked out some of the “Best Night Ever” clips and movie trailers – all loaded and played without a hitch, both on wifi and g3. There’s a sharing feature, allowing you to send the clip via email and, of course, the obligatory favorites list for later reference.

AOL TV Listings/TV Forecast (free): I lumped these 2 together because a) they were about the only TV applications I could find and b) they are both “web apps” which are a bit different than the apps you download. Web apps are basically WAP sites optimized for the iphone, which include (hopefully) useful web tools. AOL TV Listings: Worthless. Didn’t work at all. Couldn’t find the shows I searched for and the interface was slow and clunky. TV Forecast: The concept is a bit uninspired, but at least it works. Basically, you tell it what shows you like and it tells you the next time it will be on. Just today, I used it to find out that my beloved “24″ is actually premiering on November 23, not in January as I’d thought.

So that’s it. Phew. I didn’t mean to turn this post into Infinite Jest, but really wanted to get all these thoughts “out there” before I go on vacation. Would love to hear what you agree/disagree with, or recommendations for other apps I should know about.

Tagged as: iPhone