Pocket Casts bring one-touch podcast downloads
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2011 at 8:47 pm by Jason Cartwright
As a heavy podcast listener I’m constantly frustrated by Apple’s handling of podcasts. Each day new episodes of our favourite podcasts are released, so naturally you want to download all the latest. Well more than 3 years on from the release of the iPhone, there’s still no way to do it directly from the device. That was until today.
Of course you can set or force iTunes on the desktop to download all the latest eps at once, connect your iOS device via USB and sync the new content across. The problem is, I found myself turning on a computer just for this process – crazy considering the WiFi-connected world we live in today.
Pocket Casts is a brand new podcast app that arrived in the App Store today. For A$2.49 the price is absolutely good value for the functionality you get. To get started you can jump into settings and very easily import your existing podcasts from the iPod app. You can also Search for podcasts or manually enter a feed URL if your really keen.
Browsing the list of available podcasts is done by the first tab. Complete with album art, each podcast shows a badge to indicate how many new episodes are available. You can choose to download episode individually or stream them straight to the device. Best of all is that awesome ‘Download all’ button, with a single press you can get up to date in an instant.
The app gets even better when you realise background downloading and playback is also supported, allowing you go check Facebook while your waiting. There’s currently 3 different themes to choose from which just change the application highlight colour for a bit of personalisation.
For a 1.0 application, its extremely polished and something that’s been lacking from Apple’s own iPod app for more than 3 years.
iPhone 4’s front facing camera, now used by Skype
Posted Thursday, December 30, 2010 at 5:06 pm by Jason Cartwright
That’s right people, you can finally use front facing camera on your iPhone 4. Sure there’s FaceTime, but lets face it, nobody’s using it. Skype’s iPhone app has just been updated to version 3.0 allowing millions of users to video call on the go. Video calls can be made to Skype users on the desktop (either Mac OSX or Windows).
Both Portrait and Landscape orientations are supported, as is calls over both WiFi and 3G. Just make sure your data cap has plenty of breathing room as Skype video calls on 3G will count.
The way it works is you launch the app, sign in, then when exiting Skype continues to run in the background and will notify you via push notifications when someone calls you via Skype. Simply hit the Answer button and your call begins. Its all pretty simple, something I’m sure carriers aren’t that happy about. Assuming you have decent data included in your plan and most of your contacts on Skype, then your need to use the traditional phone calling will significantly decrease.
Skype have created a fairly comical video to showcase the Skype video calling experience on iOS.
Download the app now [itunes]
More @ Skype via TechCrunch
Optus iPhone customers get streaming ABC and SBS 24/7 free
Posted Monday, November 22, 2010 at 9:07 pm by Jason Cartwright
A very welcome SMS arrived today on my iPhone 4, alerting me to the fact there’s a new iPhone application from Optus available. It’s called Mobile TV and provides Optus iPhone customers with free access to ABC and SBS 24/7. As an added extra, there’s also the Today show from channel 9. Even better news is that streaming this content doesn’t count towards your monthly cap.
One downside is that you can’t connect via Wi-Fi, obviously so the app can detect your connected through the Optus network.
If your wondering why Optus would give this away for free, its really an entry into their premium mobile channel offerings. What I’d actually be interested in paying for is having IP-delivered video from all the free-to-air networks.
Available via iTunes
Review: WorldCard Mobile
Posted Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 10:20 pm by Jason Cartwright
Business cards are a fact of life in the business world. In the future we may all be carrying smart phones and using Bump to swap details, until then we still carry small pieces of cardboard with us. A reality that seems ridiculous when our contact list is completely electronic. So how do we bridge the gap between these two worlds ? Most of us manually enter details from the business card into our phones, then ditch the card.
WorldCard Mobile is an iPhone application that allows you to take a photo of a business card, that photo is then analysed using optical character recognition, then that data is paired with new contact fields. This is designed to save you time, manually inputting Name, Business, Address, Phone, Fax, Email and Website. So it sounds great in theory, but how well does it actually work ?
Below are two attempts at using the app to interpret the business card info. The first time missed a bunch of the data and got the Surname very wrong. The second attempt yielded much better results.
After extensive testing the app does an ok job, but far from perfect. There’s often information captured that ranges from a few wrong characters to complete garbage in fields. Admittedly the app has a hard job given the large variances in business cards layouts.
Overall the app gives you a great head start at converting analogue information to digital data. From there you will likely need to fix any mistakes, but overall the time spent should be less than entering manually. As to wether that time savings is worth the A$7.99 for the app, that’s a question you’ll need to answer.
There are other competitors in this space such as Business Card Reader which also sell for A$7.99. Results using that app are very similar to WorldCard.
More information @ PenPowerInc
Get the app @ iTunes
Australian Open app serves up free info
Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 11:20 pm by Jason Cartwright
There’s an awful lot of Tennis fans out there both in Australia and internationally, so this app is set to be very popular. The official Australian Open iPhone application is available for free, so don’t be fooled by the competition.
The features are also quite comprehensive, including the ability to watch:
- Live scores
- Upcoming schedule
- Draws
- Player information
- Maps
- Photos
- Tweets
- and more.
The Australian Open runs from the 18th – 31st January 2010, so get it before the action begins.
Tom Tom for iPhone released, disappointing
Posted Monday, August 17, 2009 at 8:50 pm by Jason Cartwright
Whilst Tom Tom can make an impressive teaser video (shown below), the resulting iPhone application, which is now available in the App Store [iTunes link]. It costs A$99.99 and is 157MB to download the application. There’s no clarification, but it’s probably safe to assume map updates will come at a cost. If your after the complimenting car mount, your out of luck at the moment, it’s not yet available and will cost extra.
It’s hard to avoid comparisons to dedicated GPS devices, but is that a fair comparison to make ? After all TomTom are using someone else’s hardware and OS. There’s also the other consideration of everyone’s individual GPS status impacting their decision.
Despite the dream of device convergence and doing away with yet another piece of hardware, for those of us who already own a dedicated GPS device that works perfectly well, there’d need to be an incredibly compelling argument (read: feature) to make us want to fork over another $100 for functionality we already have. Unfortunately I don’t see it.
Early reports from those that have bought the application:
- Accuracy is good
- Transitions between calls and navigation is seamless
- Only 1 Australian voice
- Visuals aren’t great
For those considering the investment, I suggest you watch the conversation about the application on Whirlpool.
More @ http://iphone.tomtom.com/
