Griffin iFM Radio Browser

When Griffin Technology released its combination FM radio tuner and remote control Navigate back in April, something was conspicuously missing: Griffin's promised free App Store iPhone and iPod touch application iFM. This week, the app finally became available as iFM Radio Browser 1.1 (Free), and though it's in markedly different form from the pre-release version we'd previously tested, most of the changes the company has made are for the better. Still, some relatively serious issues limit its appeal.
Whereas Navigate is capable of acting on its own as an FM radio tuner for any Dock Connector-equipped iPod or iPhone model, iFM transforms iPhones and iPod touches* running iPhone OS 3.0 into something more: an assisted, one-click or finger-dialed radio with an on-screen list of currently available stations, marked by genre, and complete with the names of currently playing artists. The station and currently playing song details are provided in major U.S. cities by Mediaguide,** and worked more or less properly in our tests of the new 1.1 software; they’d had some issues in the prior beta version.
By “more or less properly,” we mean to say that iFM does about as well as can be expected given the manner in which it’s achieving its results: most of the time—with an iPhone, at least—you can load the app, quickly see a list of stations, click on one, and hear what the list says is playing. With the song on screen, you can switch to a display that lets you add the track to a wish list or find it in iTunes for a purchase; another button displays additional track, biography and events detail. You can visit your wish list at any time, see a list of the tracks that were playing, and assemble a list of favorite stations; individual station details actually let you see the last five tracks they played, although the track list also includes individual advertisements, which cut down the number of listed songs.
That said, iFM has its limitations, including a notable one: the software depends upon both location services and an Internet connection to acquire the station names and current track details, which makes it more useful on the go for iPhoners than iPod touch users, at least those who aren’t connected to Wi-Fi when they’re listening to Navigate. On the iPhone, iFM quickly figured out where we were and gave us a list of stations with some details on what was currently playing. In tests with a second-generation iPod touch, iFM initially requested use of location services—Skyhook—to figure out where we were, and oddly came up with San Francisco rather than our actual location in New York. We exited the app and went to Maps, which pinpointed our exact location within seconds, and on restarting iFM, the app did so as well. For those with more persistent location service problems, a manual region setting screen is available, and most users will only need to use it once. Additionally, iFM initially refused to install on the first-generation iPod touch, and Griffin’s App Store description didn’t list it as compatible with that device. [* = Following our review, Griffin updated the App Store listing to add first-gen iPod touch compatibility, saying that its omission was accidental.]
While iFM’s station and track details aren’t quite as impressively implemented as we’d hope, they suffice for a free app. In the pre-release version of iFM, Griffin used a nice white-on-gray interface for its stations, which has shifted to a more plain black on white list of station numbers, names, and genres, with the current artist in smaller gray letters underneath. While this main station list updates on a certain set schedule, it’s not minute-to-minute current, and for some reason, clicking through to some stations with “no recent information” will display artist, song, and album information anyway, though it appears to be outdated and inaccurate as the list suggests. Click on other stations and you’ll see details for a song that’s not playing any more. [** = Following our review, station and song-tracking provider Mediaguide told iLounge that it “passively monitors” over 2500 terrestrial radio stations in 150 markets, without cooperation from the radio stations, and uses a digital fingerprinting system takes 5-10 seconds from the start of a track to identify what it is, hence the lag. According to the company, it provides its findings in realtime to iFM, which then procures album art, artist bios, and the like from other sources.]
In other words, and due in part to technical limitations, iFM isn’t precise; it’s a blunt tool attempting to match data it has retrieved from Mediaguide to whatever’s actually on the radio, and though it updates that data with regularity, it’s not quite realtime, or perfect. A potential fix would be to enable iFM to read data from the Navigate remote, which has an RDS radio data chip inside and sometimes gets updated artist and track details before the application does; this could, however, have its own issues. In any case, our guess is that this level of two-way communication isn’t possible with the current version of Navigate, but with the release of iPhone OS 3.0, it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see Griffin and other companies releasing apps that talk properly with wired and wireless accessories. An updated version of Navigate might well be necessary.
That brings us to iFM’s final issue—one that could be blamed on the Navigate hardware, iFM software, or Griffin’s approach to getting its products to talk with each other. Every time iFM is launched, it puts out an audible, disturbing beep that can be heard through the Navigate headphone port unless Navigate has already been switched into radio mode—a step that needs to be taken on the accessory itself—and also through any other Dock Connector accessory that might be connected. This beep is actually a quick series of tuning tones that is supposed to tell Navigate to change stations, and gets filtered out only when Navigate’s radio mode is activated, instead causing what sounds like a tiny gap in the audio when stations are changed. On other devices, it never gets filtered, and sounds loud through speakers every time a channel is selected. This implementation is a less than totally thrilling workaround to create accessory and app compatibility, and Griffin suggested back in January that the sound would not be audible in the shipping product. The fact that it’s here, despite Griffin’s decision to ship multiple revisions of Navigate—some early ones apparently without iFM compatibility—is a real disappointment.
On one hand, iFM Radio Browser is hard to dislike: whether or not you’re using Navigate, it enables you to find out more or less what’s currently playing on the radio, and what was previously playing on a given station, as well as enabling you to quickly learn about the artist and iTunes availability for given songs. To the extent Griffin is offering it for free, and leveraging Mediaguide’s information to enable iPhone and some iPod touch users to get better informed about their local listening options, it’s a good little app. But its Dock Connector noise, the related need to manually switch Navigate into radio mode, and lack of ideal performance in procuring current track details keep it from being all it could be; the noise in particular is an annoyance that takes the app out of our general recommendation category. This 1.1 version of iFM Radio Browser is a good start, but it needs some more work before it will qualify as a real selling point for either Navigate or other radio-equipped accessories.
[Editor’s Note: This review was updated following publication with updated iPod compatibility details as per Griffin and more specifics on the Mediaguide technology as per Mediaguide; it remains otherwise in its original form.]

eReader eBook Application

Description:
eReader allows you to read premium eBook content right from your iPhone including top book authors like Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, James Patterson, Nora Roberts and many more! It also has the ability to add personal content.
Features:
Read Premium, Unsecured and personal eBooks and electronic documents.

Duck Duck Moose Design Old MacDonald

Back in February, we were seriously impressed by a $1 children's educational application called Wheels on the Bus from a company called Duck Duck Moose Design, which managed to create a wonderfully illustrated, interactive book from the classic children's song -- complete with 12 different versions of the song that varied in language, instrumentation, and even the user's ability to customize the song with his or her own voice. Now the company has returned with its second product, Old MacDonald ($2), which preserves the same general formula for a different song.
That song, of course, is Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and there are nine versions of it here: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Piano Trio, Cello, Violin, and Kazoo, plus a sing-along version where you’re given verses to recite one-by-one for recording by the app. Each of the pre-recorded versions is easy to understand, with cute, well-enunciated phrases that loop until you’re ready to turn the page of the virtual book.
This time, there are 12 pages in the book, not including its introduction and settings screens, making for a longer reading and playing experience than the eight-page Wheels on the Bus—assuming you can get a child to sit still for that long. And Duck Duck Moose has outdone itself on the illustrations: the previous version’s were impressive enough in the sense that they were drawn and colored with a distinctive style, but in Old MacDonald, they pop with color, better shading, and greater detail, making even better use of the iPhone’s screen. Though the interactive elements remain very simple, including animations of animals and people within the illustrations as you tap or swipe on them, the screens include smoother background and foreground animation than before, some funny enough to elicit giggles from adults, others just right for kids.
Only two things struck us as a little less than ideal in Old MacDonald. First, the title continues to lack a fully guided mode that just tells the full story, complete with automated animations, in the event that the child doesn’t know how or want to interact with the on-screen characters. Instead, it loops the same verse over and over until someone—adult supervisor or child—flips the page. Additionally, unlike Wheels on the Bus, this app departs a little from the theme with a few elements that aren’t totally farm-like, and might be better-suited to adult viewers than kids: UFOs and aliens start popping up in a cow page a la South Park, for instance, reappearing in a pigeon stage. Similarly, bulldozers, bears, and frogs all wind up on the farm, as well, while horses, roosters, and rabbits make no appearance. The pages that are here are cute and fun, but they’re not all as theme-appropriate as they could be.
Of course, kids won’t mind. And most adults won’t, either. Old MacDonald is, like its predecessor, a beautiful little application that demonstrates the value of the iPhone and iPod touch as interactive teaching tools for kids. With music and artwork this good, electronic books leave old fashioned ones with only one chance of surviving: the comparative price and fragility of the playback devices.

Digiot Pocket Lint

Pocket Lint ($3) from Digiot is a simple balancing application with support for multiple accounts. The main view displays the user’s accounts, along with an edit button for deleting accounts, and an add button for adding new accounts. Users can give new accounts a name, an initial amount, and select from checking or savings.

In the account view, the app lists transactions according to one of three options along the bottom: withdrawals, deposits, or all. Each transaction is listed by name with the resulting balance listed below in a hard-to-read neon green; the transaction amount is listed off to the side. Clicking on an individual transaction allows the user to edit the name, amount, date, and notes, and delete the transaction. Up and down navigation buttons in the upper right allow users to browse through transactions without switching views. Finally, a menu item in the iPhone’s Settings app allows users to select whether or not they’d like their account balance to appear in a badge over the Pocket Lint icon on the home screen.

While it achieves the basic functionality that it claims to offer, Pocket Lint does little more, and does not offer the special features nor the stellar interface needed to make it worthy of its asking price when compared to other competing apps.

Deskescape Budget

Budget ($2) from Deskescape is a fairly complex budget management application. Unlike the majority of its peers, Budget does not deal with individual accounts, instead letting the user set up multiple budgets in different categories, all of which have their own separate transaction listings. The application opens to the main view, which lists all the various budget categories, including those which are currently unused, each with a bar underneath the name that indicates how much of that category’s budget has been spent. A quick financial overview at the bottom lists total income, total expenses, and savings.
The edit button in this view allows users to delete categories; the add button brings up a menu letting users add a category or transaction, or set a budget. An info button found next to the financial overview leads users to an area menu where they can export transaction data, run a savings report, or view help information. In the savings report view, users can choose a time period for the report to cover, with results displayed in both text and chart form. Similarly, users can choose the time period and data set for their exports in the data export screen.
Tapping on a category in the main budget view leads the user to that category’s main screen, which shows a list of recent normal transactions, and features buttons that allow for the setting of that category’s budget, deletion of current transactions, and the addition of new transactions. The add button leads to the new transaction screen, where users can enter an amount, description, date, and notes, while the advanced budget button leads to a screen where users can set up reoccurring payments or income streams, with the ability to add a description, budget, start and end month, day due, and turn reminders and auto actual features on and off.
It’s not for everyone, and it’s not exactly a pretty application, but what Budget does, it does well, and for a low price. Users wanting to keep track of individual accounts would do well to look elsewhere, but for users wanting to keep detailed budgets for every expense they have, Budget is definitely worth a look. It’s worthy of our general recommendation.

Design by a knife Pennies

On August 25, 2008, we reviewed a collection of 15 different personal finance applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in a roundup entitled iPhone Gems: Every Personal Finance Application, Reviewed. This review contains a review of one application from that roundup; additional comparative details can be found in the original full story.
Possessing what is by far the most aesthetically pleasing interface of any currently available personal finance applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, Pennies ($3) from design by a knife aims to offer simple balance and spending information for one account. Using a tabbed interface, it offers a quick view of this month’s spending, a listing of individual transactions, and a view of past months’ spending history.
The tab labeled “this month” offers a single widget-style box with a fuel-style gauge that goes from full to empty, reflecting the amount of money remaining in that month’s budget. Setting the monthly budget amount is as simple as clicking on the top of the gauge and moving a slider. Next to the gauge is a listing of the three top expense categories, as well as stats showing the average amount spent per day and the total number of expenses thus far that month.
A large add expense button at the bottom lets users add transactions, selected from pre-determined categories including general, food, amusement, travel, household, auto, hobby, electronics, personal, and groceries, each with its own related icon. The amount is entered using a numeric pad below the category listing. Expenses are listed in their own view on graphical representations of slips of paper, one for each day’s transactions. Clicking on an individual expense allows the user to enter notes related to that expense.

Connor Wakamo Balance

On August 25, 2008, we reviewed a collection of 15 different personal finance applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in a roundup entitled iPhone Gems: Every Personal Finance Application, Reviewed. This review contains a review of one application from that roundup; additional comparative details can be found in the original full story.
Balance (Free) from Connor Wakamo is a simple one-account finance application, functionally similar to a digital check register. The application’s main screen lists recent transactions, with deposits in black and debits in red, each with its name, date, and amount. Hitting the add button brings up the new transaction screen, where users can enter a name, amount, date, type (deposit or withdrawal), and notes for the transaction; hitting the edit button allows the user to delete transactions. Tapping on a transaction lets the user view and edit the entry’s information.
Balance’s action menu presents the user with two options: export transactions and add password. When the user taps export, he or she is taken to the iPhone’s Mail application, where a new email has been opened containing both the exported data and brief instructions on how to save it into a .csv file. In our testing, we were able to successfully export and save the data supplied by Balance; the file opened in Excel without issue.
The app’s add password command brings up a numeric keypad to set a password; this can be changed to an alphanumeric keyboard in Balance’s section of the iPhone’s main Settings menu. Passwords can be changed and removed from within the app’s action menu. From the app’s section in the Settings menu, users may also choose to sort transactions by most recent first or earliest first. As one of only two free applications in this roundup, we were a little surprised to see Balance outclassing some of its for-pay peers. The addition of an export option, no matter how basic, is appreciated at this price level, as is the ability to protect data with a password. With a simple, straightforward interface, a nice feature set, and its free price tag, we feel Balance is worthy of our high recommendation; a little additional graphical flourish and addition of multiple accounts would make it even stronger.

Connected Flow Exposure and Exposure Premium

On August 8, 2008, we reviewed a collection of eight different Flickr applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in a roundup entitled iPhone Gems: Every Flickr Application, Reviewed. This review contains a review of one application from that roundup; additional comparative details can be found in the original full story.
Yahoo!‘s Flickr service is the top photo-sharing site online; its large userbase, friendly, clean interface, and open API have allowed it to grow to storing over 2 billion photos, and developers have created iPhone and iPod touch apps that work directly with the service. Note up front that all of the apps share two common limitations: iPhone OS 2.0 currently limits uploads of previously stored-in-iPhone or -iPod photographs to a maximum resolution of 640x480, with in-application camera functionality available as a workaround. Additionally, in order to show a preview but maintain a full-resolution image, the preview image shown after taking a photo with an in-application camera is normally cropped in one manner or another. Again, all of the apps are affected by these limits; it’s only a question of whether the developers find smart ways around them.
Exposure and Exposure Premium are fairly well-rounded Flickr photo viewers. Both versions of the application offer the same functionality and will be reviewed as one: the free version places small, generally unobtrusive ads at the top of each page, while the Premium version removes these ads.
Once the Flickr authentication process is completed, users are presented with an interface similar to that of Apple’s iPod and Remote applications, with a dark navigation bar at the bottom, complete with a “More” tab that offers the user the ability to choose which shortcuts appear in the bottom navigation bar. Users can browse their own photos—either grouped together, by set, or by tag—or photos of their Flickr contacts, by group, date, or individually. They can also explore Flickr’s currently featured photos, and see photos taken nearby thanks to use of the platform’s Location Services. Options for searching Flickr and viewing favorited photos are also included.
Clicking on an individual photo presents the picture on a black backdrop, with a simple menu for viewing the photo’s info, and a Done button for moving back to the prior page. There is no way to move from photo to photo from within the expanded view when viewing groups of photos from different people — you must be viewing a specific contact’s photostream for navigation buttons to appear. On the plus side, the Info screen for each photo does allow for the viewing and posting of comments, along with the standard description and tag information. Users may also choose to favorite the photo, post a link to Twitter, mail a link to the photo, or open it in Safari, all from a “Share Photo” menu.
Overall, while the application sports a decent interface and worthwhile browsing features, its inability to upload photos, and its small navigational oddities leave it short of our general recommendation. The company behind Exposure, Connected Flow, is planning a separate Flickr uploading app called FlickrExport Touch, which could really have been better integrated here. For iPod touch users or those not concerned with Flickr uploading, Exposure’s not a bad choice at the free level, but we feel the Premium version, with its $10 price tag, is pretty close to outrageous given its more fully-featured, lower-priced peers. You don’t get $10 of value by losing the ads, so stick with the free version if you want to try Exposure at all.

Connected Flow Exposure and Exposure Premium

On August 8, 2008, we reviewed a collection of eight different Flickr applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in a roundup entitled iPhone Gems: Every Flickr Application, Reviewed. This review contains a review of one application from that roundup; additional comparative details can be found in the original full story.
Yahoo!‘s Flickr service is the top photo-sharing site online; its large userbase, friendly, clean interface, and open API have allowed it to grow to storing over 2 billion photos, and developers have created iPhone and iPod touch apps that work directly with the service. Note up front that all of the apps share two common limitations: iPhone OS 2.0 currently limits uploads of previously stored-in-iPhone or -iPod photographs to a maximum resolution of 640x480, with in-application camera functionality available as a workaround. Additionally, in order to show a preview but maintain a full-resolution image, the preview image shown after taking a photo with an in-application camera is normally cropped in one manner or another. Again, all of the apps are affected by these limits; it’s only a question of whether the developers find smart ways around them.
Exposure and Exposure Premium are fairly well-rounded Flickr photo viewers. Both versions of the application offer the same functionality and will be reviewed as one: the free version places small, generally unobtrusive ads at the top of each page, while the Premium version removes these ads.
Once the Flickr authentication process is completed, users are presented with an interface similar to that of Apple’s iPod and Remote applications, with a dark navigation bar at the bottom, complete with a “More” tab that offers the user the ability to choose which shortcuts appear in the bottom navigation bar. Users can browse their own photos—either grouped together, by set, or by tag—or photos of their Flickr contacts, by group, date, or individually. They can also explore Flickr’s currently featured photos, and see photos taken nearby thanks to use of the platform’s Location Services. Options for searching Flickr and viewing favorited photos are also included.
Clicking on an individual photo presents the picture on a black backdrop, with a simple menu for viewing the photo’s info, and a Done button for moving back to the prior page. There is no way to move from photo to photo from within the expanded view when viewing groups of photos from different people — you must be viewing a specific contact’s photostream for navigation buttons to appear. On the plus side, the Info screen for each photo does allow for the viewing and posting of comments, along with the standard description and tag information. Users may also choose to favorite the photo, post a link to Twitter, mail a link to the photo, or open it in Safari, all from a “Share Photo” menu.
Overall, while the application sports a decent interface and worthwhile browsing features, its inability to upload photos, and its small navigational oddities leave it short of our general recommendation. The company behind Exposure, Connected Flow, is planning a separate Flickr uploading app called FlickrExport Touch, which could really have been better integrated here. For iPod touch users or those not concerned with Flickr uploading, Exposure’s not a bad choice at the free level, but we feel the Premium version, with its $10 price tag, is pretty close to outrageous given its more fully-featured, lower-priced peers. You don’t get $10 of value by losing the ads, so stick with the free version if you want to try Exposure at all.

Catamount Software PocketMoney

Having initially been released on the Apple Newton 14 years ago, PocketMoney ($10) from Catamount Software is a finance manager offering management of potentially unlimited financial accounts. Upon launch, users are dropped at a main account screen containing each account previously set up, as well as their balances. An add button permits creation of new accounts, an edit button enables the deletion of accounts, a gear button provides access to the app’s preferences, including toggling the pop-up tips on and off, setting a password, and choosing a currency, and an eye button lets users choose which accounts appear on the main screen and what balance to show, from future, cleared, current, or available balances.
The new account screen gives options for name, type, icon, expiration date, account #, institution name, phone number, website, ATM fee (to be applied to each ATM transaction), limit (either credit or balance limit, based on the type of account), check number (add the number of the next check in the account and the app keeps track automatically), and notes. An account view screen offers a list of recent transactions, an add button to add new transactions, a tools button that lets users run account, category, class, or payee reports, each with a pie chart provided by Google Charts. It also includes the ability to adjust the account’s balance, and an eye button to provide nearly complete control of which transactions are listed, the order in which they appear, and the amount of information shown for each.
Each transaction offers editable fields for the date, account, to (payee or payer), amount, ID#, a cleared toggle for checks, category, memo, and class (for classification). Luckily, the program provides an eye button at the bottom of the transaction detail view that allows users to toggle the ID#, cleared, category, memo, and class fields on and off, as well as a toggle to adjust the position of the category to above or below the payee.
PocketMoney will likely be familiar to any user of the app on another platform, but for others, the app’s built-in tutorial system is terrific. The first time it is used, alert-style pop-up windows appear above each screen, explaining in detail how to use the application. Unfortunately, PocketMoney isn’t so complex an application as to warrant such a guide; it lacks key functionality offered by other applications in its class, despite its $10 price tag. It’s not as overpriced as Bankarama, but it’s still high enough to keep from earning our recommendation.

Business Proffessional Ringtones for iPhone

Description:
This is the only collection of ringtones for the iPhone that is appropriate for the workplace!
The creators of this product were tired of the one semi-professional ringtone that shipped with the iPhone.
To solve this problem we created a large collection of iPhone specific ringtones. These are all digitally mastered, recorded, and then tested on the iPhone.
Features:
This package includes:
- A LARGE collection of ringtones.
- NO VOICES, RAPS, BARKS, or MUSIC.
- Perfect for the workplace, getting that promotion or sale.
- No hidden fees, subscriptions, or recurring billing.
- Real ringtones and digitally mastered tones.

Archibald’s Adventures

Description:
Archibald is an action puzzle game with a lot of features - you start as a boy on skateboard, but soon you will roll in robotic vehicle capable of riding on walls and ceilings, fly on jet device or remotely control mysterious floating bubble able to switch distant mechanism or transport objects.
Archie and crazy Professor Klumpfus are stuck in the professor’s mansion. The latest experiment of the goofy scientist went all wrong, and weird lifeforms escaped from their containment. Now a paranoid central computer locked both heroes up!
Features:
- Go through 114 levels in this mind blowing action puzzle platform game
- Experience innovative gameplay with many unique features of the hero: transportation of objects, riding on walls and ceilings, flying with a jet armchair and more
- Use your wit and fast reaction to avoid nasty dangers of the mad scientist’s mansion
- Use the professor’s device pod to climb the walls or his artificial intelligence matter to solve riddles
- Encounter lots of weird and funny lifeforms running loose in the levels!

Apple MobileMe iDisk

hough Apple's MobileMe - a web-based mail, contact, calendar, photo, and now video storage and synchronization service - launched with a series of significant performance problems, the company has spent the last year trying to remedy them, add new features, and placate disenchanted customers. This week, Apple released MobileMe iDisk, a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch, which offers users the ability to access up to 10 Gigabytes of files that were transferred from their computers to Apple's "cloud-based, available anywhere" servers, as well as access to publicly-shared files from their contacts. As with many first-generation MobileMe features, the MobileMe iDisk app has its hiccups, but it does take another step in expanding the service's appeal.

Mac subscribers to MobileMe find iDisk as just another one of the “Devices” on the left side of their Finder windows, initially sitting empty but for a collection of folders with labels such as “Documents,” “Music,” “Pictures,” and “Software.” Drag a file from one folder on your Mac over to either the iDisk icon or one of its sub-folders and, assuming you have a connection to the Internet, you’ll generally see the file transfer over to Apple’s server via that Internet connection. Do this with as many files as you’d like until you reach the limits of iDisk’s storage capacity, and if they’re iPod or iPhone supported movies or videos, iWork, Microsoft Office, or PDF files, you’ll be able to use the MobileMe iDisk app to play them on your iPhone or iPod touch wherever you can get access to the Internet. Most of our files transferred fairly quickly, but we did have a full-on Finder lockup when trying to transfer an PDF file directly from iTunes to iDisk, a real rarity by Mac standards. The same file transferred fine when the machine was rebooted and the file started on the desktop rather than in iTunes.

After entering your MobileMe account information into the application, you’ll be presented with a screen-filling list of your files and folders, complete with circular icons that indicate whether individual files are being publicly shared with people or not; anything you drop in the Public folder gets shared with everyone by default, and anything else can be shown to individuals only. Just click on the circular icon and an e-mail window pops up, sending people via e-mail a direct link to the file, which can be viewed with their web browsers. Public folders for your contacts or non-contact individuals can be accessed via a tab at the bottom of the screen, and a list of recently viewed files is maintained for your reference.

Under ideal circumstances, which we’ve found to be generally the case for music, video, photo, and document files, the only thing you’ll need to be concerned about when using MobileMe iDisk is transfer time. Because the iPhone and iPod touch are wirelessly fetching files from the Internet, Megabyte and multi-Megabyte files may take a minute or so to load, depending on the manner that you’re connecting to MobileMe’s “cloud.” Wi-Fi and iPhone 3GS cellular connections are pretty speedy, generally, but we’ve seen hiccups: one of us was able to get a 17MB PDF file to load quickly over Wi-Fi, but the other had it fail multiple times mid-load, succeeding only on attempt #4 when we monitored the Wi-Fi iPhone 3GS for the 8-minute duration of the load, and prevented its screen from shutting off mid-transfer.

Notably, the application also has an interesting and smart little feature: caching. Using a slider, you can allocate “Local Storage” to the app, enabling it to hold between 50 and 200MB of non-audio, non-video files in its own cache so that you needn’t reload everything when you return to view something a second time. For obvious reasons, this increases the app’s footprint on your device to the extent that files have previously been loaded, but you have control over how much or how little you want to keep around.

Almost everything we tried to play back through the MobileMe iDisk application worked, and smoothly if not beautifully. Music files with embedded album artwork played in a generic QuickTime video player without any visual accompaniment, and video files used the same QuickTime player but obviously performed both video and audio. Notably, the video was not degraded when on a cellular connection, preserving the same quality as the original version rather than introducing artifacted, lower-resolution images as alternatives.

PDF performance wasn’t quite as impressive. In addition to the loading times, we had mixed results with getting PDFs to render properly; some looked perfect, others had glitches such as missing images. And some files, such as contact cards, showed up as nice-looking icons but wouldn’t open.

As a free application for MobileMe users, MobileMe iDisk is a nice little program, enabling web-based access to content that you want to share or just not stuff into your iPod’s or iPhone’s limited storage capacity. Apple still has some work left to be done to make the MobileMe environment more reliable on the desktop side, and the performance better on the pocket device side, but what’s here is a good start.

Apple iPhone OS 3.0

Apple's first-generation iPhone OS was revolutionary. Its second-generation version introduced iPhone and iPod touch users to the App Store, which unquestionably was a much bigger hit than even Apple expected, as well as adding Microsoft Exchange support for enterprise users. By comparison, the brand new iPhone OS 3.0 doesn't initially seem to have a single home run feature -- many users will remember it as a consistent base hitter, or "the version that should have shipped with the first iPhone" -- but it actually packs extremely significant under-the-hood improvements, some of which won't be fully appreciated for weeks or months to come.
We’re highlighting many of iPhone OS 3.0’s new features in depth through two extensive iLounge articles—the Complete Guide to iPhone OS 3.0, and Instant Expert: Secrets & Features of iPhone 3.0—so we’re not going to rehash their content all here. Instead, this review looks at the 10 key changes iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod touch users can expect from iPhone OS 3.0, as well as issuing a recommendation to iPod touch owners regarding its current value for Apple’s $10 asking price; iPhone and iPhone 3G users will get the new OS for free and thus have little reason to skip it. We also note iPhone 3G S-only features at the bottom of this review; though they’re implemented in software, they will be discussed in our separate iPhone 3G S hardware review since they’re specific to that device.
Please note that the list below is not in rank order; it is merely designed to highlight features of special interest to our editors and readership.
1. Spotlight and Search
Though the iPhone’s Home screen remains virtually untouched from earlier versions of the OS, a tiny magnifying glass option at the bottom of the screen clues you in to a new screen that sits off to the left of the main page: swipe over to it and you activate Spotlight, a feature that can search your iPhone’s database—everything from e-mail headers to apps to iPod media—for words you enter into a search field. Spotlight works quickly to show you multiple types of content that are all available to you from a single touch of any of the listing buttons; you can limit the parts of the device it searches using Settings.
In addition to this Spotlight feature, some of the integrated apps—and third-party apps—now have search fields hidden at the tops of their listings. Flicking downwards on the iPod list of songs, or your list of Notes, or your e-mail accounts, for example, will bring up this search field. You can even search e-mail header content that’s sitting remotely on your e-mail server, a nice touch. All of the searching features work well, but this main Spotlight window is the key shortcut for finding anything on your iPhone or iPod touch, and especially impressive.
2. Landscape Keyboard
The second major feature addition to iPhone OS 3.0 is widespread landscape keyboard support, which now enables e-mails, text messages, notes, and app-created text to be composed using Apple’s larger, wider keyboard—triggered by turning the device on its side. For the many users who have struggled with the iPhone’s standard vertical keyboard, this larger one may well prove more accurate and easier to use on a daily basis.
At least, somewhat. In our testing, we occasionally encountered accidental accelerometer-based flips of the keyboard from one position to the other, and wished we could lock the iPhone into a widescreen mode for text entry. Additionally, it was obvious that Apple hasn’t figured out quite yet how to deal with reformatting the content that goes above the keyboard to make the most of the wide screen. Text messages, for instance, are too sharply divided on the left and right hand sides of the screen, and require scrolling to be read in full rather than occupying most of the white space there. There’s still a lot of real estate occupied by the status bar, and possibly too much by the keyboard itself, in part due to Apple’s continued use of a 480x320 display rather than something higher-resolution with the ability to fix more text above the keyboard. Landscape mode is a big addition, but some user interface tweaks could make it even better.
3. Cut, Copy, and Paste
One of the most requested additions to the iPhone OS was cut, copy, and paste—effectively, a clipboard system to let users transfer text and images from one application to another, or between two different places in the same application. Apple has implemented this feature with an attractive set of black and blue buttons that pop up when you hold your finger down briefly on the screen in certain applications: the black buttons let you “Cut, Copy, Paste” when the clipboard is empty, or “Select, Select All, Paste” when there’s something stored there, with changes to the button options as appropriate to given apps.
Once text has been highlighted, little blue pins appear on the left and right of the selection area, waiting to be dragged to the appropriate left and right positions; a zoomed-in view appears under your finger to help fine-tune the their placement. On web pages, the text selection box has top and bottom points as well, enabling you to resize the selection area in some cases to grab more or less formatted text. Pictures and web links can be selected individually for copying without any blue resizing pins.
While this feature adds considerable additional power to the iPhone and iPod touch as tools for email and MMS composition, it also creates small interface issues that have come up during our use of iPhone apps. For instance, the black buttons sometimes appear—with a brief delay—when trying to do nothing more than move the cursor. Selection of web page content isn’t as straightforward as one might imagine due to the varied types of content that may be on a page; if you touch a link, for instance, you’re not given the option to copy more of the page’s HTML than that. Apple has made choices here that address the average user’s most common needs, but some additional polish in speed, manner of appearance, and versatility of selection could help cut, copy, and paste feel a little smoother.
4. Voice Memos
Added to the iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S, and iPod touch 2G, the attractive new Voice Memos application allows users to record voice samples from either a built-in or connected microphone, then trim it, e-mail it, or synchronize it back to a computer with iTunes. It presents an image of an old-fashioned microphone with two buttons, one for recording, the other switching between a stop button and a menu button. The menu button calls up a list of prior recordings, allowing you to select any recording to trim it or e-mail it directly on the iPhone. Trimming is the major feature that’s missing from many earlier voice recording applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, and Apple makes it as simple as can be here.
Those interested in technical details of this App should note that it records in two modes without user adjustment. When used with the iPhone’s integrated or cabled included monaural microphones, files are recorded at 44.1kHz as Apple Lossless files in monaural rather than stereo mode, with roughly 325kb/second bit rates. By comparison, bottom-connecting stereo microphones such as Blue Microphones’ Mikey enable stereo recording, with a roughly 460-490kb/second bit rate. These rates will vary based on the complexity of what’s being recorded. Files have both date and time stamped generically, and are automatically synchronized to iTunes when you connect your iPhone or iPod touch to the computer via USB. Competing applications offered wireless voice memo synchronization, but Apple’s e-mail feature achieves much the same effect.
Updated: Note that compatibility of prior stereo microphones varies: Griffin’s iTalk Pro does not appear to work on either the iPhone or iPod touch 2G, while Mikey appears to work on both, as does Tunewear’s stereo recorder; Belkin’s TuneTalk Stereo sometimes works, and sometimes has issues.
5. Multimedia Messaging (MMS)
Available only to iPhone 3G users—and for now, those outside the United States—Multimedia Messaging (MMS) enables an iPhone to send and receive instant messages containing text, photos, audio, and/or video. Because this feature is not currently supported by AT&T, we haven’t been able to properly test it in the United States, but we’ve seen how it works on non-U.S. networks.
Apple’s old application, Text, has been replaced by Messages, which still presents all users with a half-screen keyboard, a bubble to type text in, and a Send button. On MMS-capable networks, Messages also displays a camera button that enables users to choose images to include along with the text. Video from the iPhone 3G S will reportedly be able to be sent over networks as well, subject to strict limitations on the size of the files. Audio files can be shared directly from Voice Notes, and are encoded in a format called .AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) so that they’re capable of being played on the iPhone as well as other cell phones.
Of equal importance is the iPhone OS 3.0’s ability to actually receive multimedia messages, a capability that has been conspicuously lacking from the iPhone family since 2007. Incoming picture messages and audio messages from two phones on two different networks worked without problems. After receiving an image and displaying a thumbnail, the iPhone offers an arrow that lets you see and save a full-sized version of the image.
The jury is still out on whether the MMS feature will work as well in the United States as it does outside, and how well it will work with video. We’ll let you know what happens when AT&T activates the feature later this year.
6. Multi-Photo E-mailing and Deletion
It may seem like a minor addition to the iPhone OS, but in practice, it’s huge: it’s now possible for users to select up to five photographs to share via a single e-mail, or a larger number to simultaneously copy or delete. For those who have been using the iPhone’s camera to aggressively send photos to services such as Flickr, or just to share them with friends, this feature addition will make life a lot more convenient.
7. iTunes Video Downloading
iPhone OS 3.0 expands the capabilities of the mobile iTunes Store application by adding a new Videos tab, complete with sections for Movies, TV Shows, and Music Videos. The limited real estate on the iPhone and iPod touch screens restricts the number of titles spotlighted by the Store, making the Search button considerably more important if you want to find something that isn’t currently being featured. You’ll also need enough storage space to hold the file in its entirety, as well as a sense of how big the video is: if it’s over 10 Megabytes in size, you’ll only be able to download over a Wi-Fi network; if it’s less than that, you can grab the video over 3G.
In concept, the ability of an iPhone or iPod touch to download videos directly from iTunes without the need for a computer should be huge. Practically, however, it has its limitations. Video transfers take a long time: we’ve read reports of full-length movies requiring 45 minutes to download, but in our first 802.11g Wi-Fi test, an iPhone 3G said that it would take 9 hours to download a 1.7GB video before actually requiring 3 hours to complete the task. Another video took a little longer to download than it would have taken to watch live from beginning to end.
These speeds will vary dramatically based on the network you’re using and other conditions, but unless you have a really long layover, don’t expect to hop onto airport Wi-Fi and have a movie ready to watch on your phone before your flight begins. It may or may not happen. By comparison, music videos and TV shows are almost always shorter, and therefore require less time to transfer.
8. Stereo Bluetooth Streaming
Stereo Bluetooth streaming enables the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S and iPod touch 2G to send their app and iPod audio—from music, podcasts, and videos—over the air to a wide range of wireless stereo earphones and speaker systems. Notably, their integrated track-changing controls do not appear to be supported by iPhone OS 3.0; Apple’s devices merely send very good-sounding audio directly to the headsets and speakers, and allow that audio to be interrupted for lower-fidelity phone calls or play/pause commands, nothing more.
We’ve discussed this feature at great length in a separate article, noting that it has considerable benefits under most usage scenarios, as well as a few hiccups that range from minor to fairly serious. It remains to be seen whether Apple will be able to fix these issues in future iPhone OS 3.x software releases, or whether it will leave them in “best we can do” conditions due to limitations of older iPhone and iPod touch hardware.
9. Snappier General Performance, with Offsets
Though it’s hard to quantify, iPhone OS 3.0 feels a little more responsive than its predecessors when it comes to certain tasks: snapping pictures, opening Safari pages, and loading certain apps all seemed to be a little faster, though the specific improvements were sometimes difficult to quantify. Some of the web pages we loaded over Wi-Fi on a 2.2.1 iPhone loaded just as quickly as on a 3.0 iPhone 3G; others loaded faster on the new iPhone. iPhone OS 3.0 is a little quicker at taking still images than before, and appears to be a little better at producing sharpened, higher-contrast snaps of black text on white paper. Lens differences or software, we’re not 100% certain, but we think it’s the software.
These improvements are offset by some odd performance slowdowns that we noticed on our iPhone. Safari’s thumbnail page-changing screen, for instance, seemed to take longer to open than before; hiccups after content had been Cut or Copied were obvious, and the occasional unwanted presence of the Select, Select All, Paste pop-up also slows down text entry on occasion. Based on our testing, the average user will find that iPhone OS 3.0 is more responsive in some respects than was its predecessor on the same device, but that it also has its own new performance issues to work through.
10. Restrictions (aka Parental Controls)
Though increased Restrictions mightn’t initially seem like a positive feature of the iPhone OS 3.0, this feature—also known as Parental Controls—enables parents to hand off iPhones and iPod touches to kids with less fear that they’ll be misused in some way. In iPhone OS 2.0, Restrictions was limited to six items: on and off switches for Safari, YouTube, iTunes, Camera, installing apps, and viewing Explicit-labeled iPod content. Now the feature has been expanded.
In addition to those switches, the iPhone now lets the owner turn off the device’s location awareness across all apps, as well as specifically disallowing in-app purchases, plus movies, TV shows, and apps with specific ratings. The part of this that matters is the app ratings restriction, which may enable Apple to finally segregate yet ultimately offer App Store content—currently rated “17+”—that may have previously been objectionable to some users, and rejected from the Store for that reason. Apple has only hinted at this in discussions of the new Restrictions feature, but it appears to be likely.
What Else: Push Notifications, Tethering, Find My iPhone, Safari AutoFill & More
One exciting feature of the iPhone OS 3.0 that users have not really seen in full swing quite yet is Apple’s new Push Notifications system, which lets users avoid running multiple apps at the same time, eating battery life in the process. Rather than keeping a news reader or instant messaging application open, waiting for new content to appear, this feature lets you close the application and have a message of some sort—text, a small badge, or a sound—appear on your iPod or iPhone whenever something new comes through. In text form, whatever you’re doing on the iPhone will be interrupted by a notification, just like receiving a text message in prior versions of the iPhone OS.
It’s completely unclear at this point whether Apple’s servers will be up to the task of delivering notifications reliably to millions of iPhone and iPod touch users, as well as whether these notifications will become overwhelming as multiple applications simultaneously seek to send updates to the same small iPhone or iPod screen at the same time. Users will have the ability to turn off notifications on an app-by-app basis, as well as on a type-of-notification basis, both potential ways of mitigating the flow of pop-up-windows. For whatever reason, this notification feature was promised in iPhone OS 2.0 and pulled before release; hopefully it will be reliable and manageable from day one.
Additional iPhone OS 3.0 features, such as Tethering, Find My iPhone and the new AutoFill functionality of Safari, will affect users under specific usage scenarios: for an additional monthly fee, Tethering will enable iPhone users to use their devices as modems for their computers via either USB or Bluetooth; AT&T will apparently support this feature later in 2009. Users who lose their iPhones or iPod touches may be able to locate, recover or wipe their devices from afar if they subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service ($100 annually), and activate the feature on the device. AutoFill lets frequent Safari web users store passwords and other form-based information that can be automatically filled in when visiting similar web pages in the future. As with Push Notifications, these and other features will impact many iPhone and iPod touch users, and almost certainly positively.
Penultimately, there are also a number of features that fully require implementation by third-party iPhone developers, including In-App Purchasing, in-app playback of iPod music, and many, many more. These iPhone OS 3.0-specific additions are noted in our Complete Guide to iPhone OS 3.0, and their impact won’t be fully appreciated until applications begin to appear with the features in place.
iPhone 3G S Features
Without going into great detail, iPhone OS 3.0 also includes software features that are—for the time being—only accessible to iPhone 3G S users. They include:
Accessibility. New accessibility features are supposed to enable the iPhone 3G S to magnify the screen with up to five times normal zoom, flip the display to white on black for higher readability, and activate spoken VoiceOver reading of on-screen content, plus new gestures to control the iPhone in VoiceOver mode. It’s unclear why these features are not offered on prior iPhones and iPod touch devices.
Voice Control. This feature enables phone dialing and iPod music playback to be controlled through voice commands, apparently requiring additional processing power found in the iPhone 3G S. A special Voice Control application is used to power this feature.
Digital Compass Support. A magnetometer is built into the iPhone 3G S to permit the device to know its own orientation at any time, complete with a piece of software to show you its findings. It also aids Maps in spinning the Google maps to the current orientation, should you prefer to see it.
Video Recording and Still Image Autofocus. iPhone 3G S’s Camera application now toggles between still and video recording modes, supporting an autofocus 3-Megapixel still camera and a 640x480 video camera, both major enhancements to the existing iPhone and iPhone 3G camera hardware.
Nike+ Support. iPhone 3G S gains the Nike+ functionality that was added to the iPod touch 2G but omitted from the iPhone 3G and original iPod touch.