How about something useful? Something that helps you use your iPhone to its greatest potential?
Here's a look at some apps that will let you make the most out of your iPhone whether it's your battery life, e-mail, texting or more.
Battery
There are, approximately, 8 gazillion applications that enable you to see how much battery life you have left. It's hard to say which is the best, as they all do pretty much the same thing. Many are free, and most of those have three stars; some are paid, and they range from three to three and a half stars, for the most part, in average ratings. So we chose to go with BatteryMagic, as it has both free and paid (BatteryMagicPro) versions, as the app has hundreds of ratings.
Many of the battery apps have both free and paid versions and most do the same thing.
BatteryMagic will tell you how much time you have left on your battery for:
The pro version adds the ability to tell if you'll be able to see a full-length movie with the battery life you have, a notification when your battery is fully charged, the ability to switch from 3-D to 2-D to conserve battery life when you don't need 3-D capability, plus skins to customize the battery image with colors, images or patterns (like zebras?).
There are, approximately, 8 gazillion applications that enable you to see how much battery life you have left. It's hard to say which is the best, as they all do pretty much the same thing. Many are free, and most of those have three stars; some are paid, and they range from three to three and a half stars, for the most part, in average ratings. So we chose to go with BatteryMagic, as it has both free and paid (BatteryMagicPro) versions, as the app has hundreds of ratings.
Many of the battery apps have both free and paid versions and most do the same thing.
BatteryMagic will tell you how much time you have left on your battery for:
- 3D Game Play
- Game Play
- Talk Time
- 3G Internet
- Wi-Fi Internet
- Video Playback
- Audio Playback
- Standby Time
- iPod Video Play Time
- iPod Audio Play Time
The pro version adds the ability to tell if you'll be able to see a full-length movie with the battery life you have, a notification when your battery is fully charged, the ability to switch from 3-D to 2-D to conserve battery life when you don't need 3-D capability, plus skins to customize the battery image with colors, images or patterns (like zebras?).
Sometimes you need to check your to-do list or your reminders quickly and don't want the bother of unlocking your phone, navigating to the app and opening it. iNotify enables you to put certain notifications on your unlock screen so all you have to do is wake up your phone to see what's next on your list.
You can customize colors and even set up different wallpapers through the app, for different to-do lists or goal-setting or other notifications, changing them out as you're done. Heck, you could put your grocery list on there if you wanted. It's 99 cents, too, so it won't break the bank.
AppBoxPro has gotten a lot of thumbs up for having a whole bunch of utlity apps in one: battery life, clinometer, currency converter (195 currencies), date calculator, countdown/days until, flashlight with adjustable brightness, holidays from 83 nations, loan calculator, periodic calculator, price grab, random number generator, ruler, sale price calculator, system info, tip calculator, 52-language translator and a unit converter with 17 categories.
This month, the app is supposed to add customizable themes, a calculator, a strobe and new graphics to the flashlight, nine more languages to the translator, holidays from 11 more countries, and a "secure wallet" app. December should bring a dictionary.
This app has gotten more than 2,500 ratings and has a solid 3.5 average rating in the App Store. And right now it's 99 cents "for the holiday season," though it's usually $1.99.
The AirMousePro lets you convert your iPhone into a wireless mouse or trackpad.
It uses the phone's built-in accelerometer to translate your hand motions into mouse movements. The main uses it's touted for are for controlling your "home-theater PC" or for giving a presentation. Its features:
- Accelerometer based mouse
- Trackpad (full screen vertical and landscape modes)
- Media keys and Web keys
- Application notifications - Remote keyboard with modifier, function and arrow keys
- Programmable hotkeys (can be set to run a program or keyboard combination)
- Scroll pad
- Multi-touch gestures (scroll & right click)
- Password protection
- Custom sensitivity settings
- Foreign-language keyboards
- Support for Bonjour or static IP
- No screen size limitation. Works with multiple monitors
Many user complaints about the iPhone camera focus on the lack of a flash, so if you're not in good light, you're outta luck.
There are a few apps that strive to fill this void:
Flash for Free, a free app, has nine different flash effects and undo functions. Basically, you take your photo, apply the app to it and brighten it. It has more than 13,000 ratings and just two stars, but it seems that's at least in part due to a major bug in the previous iteration. It won't help if you took the photo at night, some remark in reviews, but if you have a photo that needs to be lightened just a wee bit, for free, you can't beat the price.
Camera Flash and More is a much newer app, with just slightly more than 50 ratings, but averaging 4.5 stars. As the name implies, it adds flash to your photos - and you can add it multiple times to increasingly brighten it. It also allows you to darken photos if they're overly bright. It also allows you to convert your photos into black and white or sepia or give it a metallic sheen. You can also invert the photo for funky effect if you like. It's 50 percent off right now, just 99 cents. The next version will allow you to share your fixed-up photos with friends.
Another major complaint people have about the iPhone camera is its lack of zoom. HD Camera attempts to resolve that, with up to 4x digital zoom with real-time preview.
It's $1.99, but only has 14 ratings, averaging 3.5 stars. The developer's website links to an unclaimed GoDaddy! page, so it's uncertain what kind of support there may be for this app, but it was only just accepted into the app store last month. The developer also has an app, Action Freeze, which enables the user to take a non-blurry photo of a child or animal that's constantly fidgeting. This app has nearly 40 ratings and is averaging 4 stars.
SpeedTest is the iPhone app of the well-known website, allowing you to test the speed on your ISP. This way, before you complain to your provider that your wireless speed is for the birds, you can test it to make sure it's not just your phone or a momentary blip.
It's been used a lot; a free app, it has a solid 3.5 stars after nearly 23,000 ratings.
C'mon, you know you would prefer if your messages or notes showed actual emoticons instead of just the old-fashioned colon-dash-close parens when you send a text message on your phone.
Enter iEmoticons, which does just that. Googly eyes, flowers, hearts, smileys and even a smiley with a SARS-like mask on it. After nearly 3,000 ratings, it has 3.5 stars in the App Store (99 cents) and it works on Notes, SMS texting, e-mail and other apps.
Let's face it. AT&T doesn't have the top 3G network around. Fortunately, you don't have to completely rely on the phone network to use your iPhone, you can use a wireless connection.
WiFiFoFum scans for 802.11 networks and gives you a plethora of information about each it detects:
• SSID
• MAC
• RSSI (signal strength, shown as a number or in an icon)
• Channel
• AP mode
• Security mode
• Available transmission rates
You can then connect to the network of your choice, provided it's unlocked or you have the password. And so you don't have to go through the same process every time to figure out where the best Wi-Fi networks are, it allows you to create logs of access points. They can be viewed on the iPhone's maps app or you can send it by e-mail so you can access the information from your laptop - you just paste the link in the e-mail into Google Maps.
You can save passwords, and the main list is sorted by signal strength, so you can easily see which networks to try first.
For $2.99, the app has more than 500 ratings, averaging 3.5 stars.
It can be frustrating when your iPhone is sluggish or is crashing and the first thing most people assume is that it's AT&T's fault. But it isn't always due to the not-best-3G network in the nation.
System Activity Monitor allows you to check your:
- Runtime (RAM) memory usage
- Storage (Disk) usage
- All running processes
- CPU usage
- WiFi and Cellular IP addresses
- MAC addresses
- Device information
- Battery level
One testimonial claims Apple Tech Support suggested the user get SAM to help diagnose the problem he was having. It's $2.99 and has 3.5 stars after nearly 300 ratings.
What if all you want to know is how much memory you have left on your iPhone? Whether you can download that Paper Toss game app everyone's been talking about?
The free Disc Space app will tell you how much space you have in total (in case you can't remember if you sprang for the 8, 16 or 32 GB), how much is in use and how much you have left. Nearly 1,000 ratings, averaging 4 stars.
It's one thing if someone e-mails you a link to look at, another thing entirely if they e-mail you a Word file or a PDF.
A relatively new app, File Viewer enables you to look at PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. It supports these file types for data, images and media:
- doc
- xls
- ppt
- pps
- txt
- rtf
- htm
- xml
- csv
- docx
- pptx
- xlsx
- jpg
- bmp
- png
- tiff
- gif
- mp3
- wav
There are a whole bunch of reasons you might want to have a text-to-speech app on your iPhone.
You might want to make it easier to get through a document or e-mail someone sent you and you're on a train or bus or in a car and reading it is a little hard as you're jostled around. NeoSpeech, the parent of NeoJulie, offers TTS in several languages: English, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, with both male and female voices.
Its iPhone app, NeoJulie, so far only offers the English-language TTS, with the "Julie" voice. With 30 ratings, it's averaging 4 stars.
Speak It markets itself slightly differently.
"Have you ever wanted to prank call someone, but your voice gave you away?" And they helpfully remind you to turn off your caller ID before you call your friend to prank him or her. But it's also billed as a way to make announcements elegantly, by plugging the phone into a PA system.
It offers American and British male and female voices. With more than 430 ratings, it's averaging 3.5 stars. More voices appears to be the most requested change. It'll run you $1.99.
Videos/Photo privacy
Video Safe ($3.99) and Picture Safe ($1.99) promise to protect your videos and photos from prying eyes, especially useful if you've uploaded your porn collection to your iPhone.
You can import photos or videos into the app, or shoot them directly from inside the app, which protects them with a password. And to stop snoopers from digging deeper if they type in an incorrect password, you can set it to send them to a "safe area," with a collection of "generic" images. It also enables users to quickly hide any image or video from a passer-by's view with a double tap.
The app also allows you to organize photos by subject matter, so it doesn't just have to be used for ... NSFW images.
Video Safe has nearly 3,000 ratings and Picture Safe more than 5,000 ratings and both average 4 stars
OK, this one's not really practical, and most iPhone users probably have never seen a rotary telephone in their own homes. But Rotary Dialer allows you to use a virtual rotary dialer, complete with authentic sounds.
It's 99 cents, has multiple themes for various looks, and has more than 2,000 ratings, averaging 3 stars. The main complaints appear to be that it's not authentic enough - i.e., it dials too quickly. But can you imagine if it really took as long to dial as a real rotary phone?
Quicky Browser allows you to save pages and sites you want to look at but might not have a chance until you're out of 3GS or Wi-Fi range. Say, when you're on the subway or on an airplane (though that's beginning to change).
Pages are saved without images and ads, so they load faster and don't use as much stored memory. It comes with full-screen browsing, hiding the toolbar. It can be used as a regular browser, too, loading your homepage immediately, but not storing any browsing history. You can lock the rotation, too, so in case you accidentally fumble your phone, the image on your screen doesn't tumble over and over itself.
It still has the Google search bar and allows you to e-mail a link to the website and you can use the same gestures as Safari - open pinch or double-tap to zoom, etc.
It has about 40 ratings, averaging 3 stars, though the newest version accounts for half the ratings and is averaging 4 stars there. It's 99 cents.
Sure, everyone says you can find everything in Google. But what if you can't? Or if you have specific sites you want to search for the same type of content on?
Search It allows you to move from one site's search to another without having to retype your query. It allows you to search for the same term on Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, USPS, FedEx, UPS, Twitter, Flickr, Allrecipies, WebMD and Urban Dictionary.
It's a pretty new app, with just 9 ratings, but all but one of those were 5 stars. It's 99 cents.
There are some people you probably find yourself e-mailing often. Mail Quick! allows the user to, with one or two clicks, open an e-mail template already addressed to a person on your favorites list.
Users can either choose one person they e-mail very often and just by clicking on the app icon, an e-mail addressed to that person opens, or they can enter multiple addresses in the app and tapping the icon gives users a pop-up list you can choose from. You can preset additional CC: recipients and subject lines.
It's 99 cents, and relatively new. With 15 ratings, it averages 4.5 stars; though there were a couple of negative and average ratings, no one left a negative review, so it's not clear what their issues were.
If you manage several websites and travel a lot, you may need to check in on the sites to make sure they're running smoothly. Alternately, if you're just surfing your regular sites and are having trouble loading them, you might want to figure out if it's your service or the site itself.
SiteStatus allows you to input whatever sites you want to monitor and it keeps an eye on their network status. It also allows you to:
- Refresh all sites with one click or a shake
- Give your sites easy to recognize nicknames
- View the HTTP status code and message
- Launch your sites on Safari
There are a ton of utilities out there, some useful, some not. If you want some basics that really going to provide bang for your buck, here are five recommendations: AppBoxPro, Quicky Browser, File Viewing, WiFiFoFum and SpeedTest. Those are probably the ones you'd use most in your day-to-day life. Some of the others can be quite useful as well, such as Flash for Free, and others are just for fun - iEmoticon, for example, but if you had to choose the ones you're most likely to use and be glad you have on your iPhone, the five mentioned are probably the best bets.
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