My Favorite iPhone Game

I’ve tried a bunch of games on my iPhone, and have enjoyed them all to a greater or lesser degree, but I think I’ve decided upon which is my favorite. It’s certainly the game that I’ve spent the most hours playing – Civilization Revolution. It’s challenging, can be played in long stretches or for brief intervals, has near endless replay value, and is just downright fun! It relies on strategic thinking rather than quick reflexes, which is a real bonus from the viewpoint of an old guy like me who did not grow up playing video games. If a turn-based strategy game sounds like fun to you, be sure to check it out! There is also a free “lite” version available in the App Store for getting a feel for the game.

Big Honkin’ Computer

We recently purchased a monster computer for less than $500 from Woot – a refurbished Gateway LX6810 Media Center. This bad boy has 4 Intel Dual-Core CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and a 640 GB RAID disk array. It’s also got an HD tuner (complete with remote), HDMI and DVI outputs, a host of USB ports – and boy does it fly. It came with Vista Home Premium and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen Vista actually seem fast. Based on a Consumer Reports recommendation I bought a Viewsonic 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor to go with this system and it provides a wonderful quality 1920 X 1080 (HDTV resolution) graphical interface to us.

We’ve just started experimenting with utilizing all of the capabilities of this monster system, but it’s already amazing to have so much computer power running right in our home!

Vlingo Voice-Enables iPhone

Vlingo is one of my new favorite applications on my iPhone. It voice-enables a whole bunch of functions and provides voice dialing, voice map searching, voice Web searching, and voice updating of Twitter and Facebook. It’s actually replaced three other applications on my iPhone that handled similar functions. The voice recognition works extremely well and I’m really happy with this application.

I also got a great tip from another Vlingo user that’s handy when you are driving: if you want to use Vlingo to voice-enable SMS messaging, just speak a Twitter or Facebook update, then prior to sending it to the social network just copy the resulting text and paste it into an SMS message.

Boxcar For Pushing Twitter and Facebook to Your iPhone

Boxcar is a wonderful little application that adds push notification services for Twitter and Facebook. Boxcar sends you a push notification anytime you receive a notification on Facebook. For example, when someone comments on your status it will send you a notification using the iPhone’s Notification Manager. It can also open the your iPhone Facebook application for you, if you wish.

Boxcar can also send you push notifications anytime someone mentions you on Twitter, or sends you a Twitter DM. It can open your Twitter iPhone application, too.

Finally, Boxcar will also do push notifications for email, but I don’t use this feature.

Favorite iPhone Apps

A friend of mine recently got an iPhone and asked me to share my absolutely must-have applications. Here’s the list of the applications that I use just about every day, and which I can’t live without:

Evernote - my auxiliary brain, it stores everything from travel reservations, to pictures of business cards (which are OCR’ed and searchable), to outstanding Web orders, to meeting notes – they are all there and quickly accessble.

Dialer - an amazing freeware app that provides voice dialing that works to the iPhone.

Google - the iPhone frontend to everyone’s search engine.

Twitterific Premium – my own particular favorite Twitter app.

DocsToGo – lets me view and edit Word and Excel work files on my iPhone

reQall – this app has changed the way I manage my ToDo’s, and allows me to enter them via voice.

Snapture – I seem to constantly change my photo taking application on my iPhone, but this is my current favorite and is far superior to the built-in app.

Facebook – terrific iPhone app for interfacing with Facebook.

Say Where? – Say where did this go, it’s not in the App Store anymore! Anyway, this freeware app allows me to speak a business category or name or an address into my iPhone and have it kick off a search for it in the built-in Maps application – great when you’re driving and don’t have your hands free.

Pandora - music, music, music, and free, too!

Kindle – this app has actually replaced my Kindle device!

G-Map US & Canada – the latest incarnation of the G-Map GPS program, it’s replaced my Tom Tom GPS unit.

Skype – free and/or very low-cost calling over WiFi

That’s it. What are yours?

New Computer Hard At Work

The picture shows my new HP Mini 5101 hard at work in the cafeteria of my current client in Indianapolis. It’s shown with my AT&T USB cellular modem and a Logitech wireless mouse. Although the touchpad on the HP is really nice, nothing beats a mouse.

After a few weeks with the HP netbook I’m still extremely happy with it. It’s very well made with an aluminum case, durable (even has a shock protection system for the hard drive), very fast (especially with the 7200 RPM disk and 2 GB of memory), and totally reliable. I highly recommend this little netbook for any traveling business person.

Finally Back – And With A New Computer

I’m finally back posting here again after a long absence. No excuses, other than the normal demands of a very busy life.

I’m back in NJ this week in my company’s office. As the picture above shows, I’m using a new netbook: an HP Mini 5101. It’s the enterprise version of the HP Mini series. It’s got 2 GB of memory and a 7200 RPM 160 GB hard drive. The faster bigger disk drive, and the additional 1 GB of memory over what I had in my old Asus Eee 1000H, results in very noticeable performance improvements.

I replaced the old Asus (my son now has it) primarily because I was running out of disk space on it (it’s got 80 GB), but I’m really enjoying the greatly improved performance of the HP. It’s really snappy! Time will tell, but right now I’m really liking this new little netbook.

reQall for the iPhone

I’ve recently started using a new and quite innovative Personal Information Manager on my iPhone: reQall. Three things about it greatly appeal to me. First it allows you to enter to-dos, appointments, and notes by voice as well as typing them into the iPhone.  Next, it stores all of these both locally on the iPhone and on the reQall servers, where you can access them via a Web interface. Finally, it supports the concept of shared to-dos in a really nice way.  My wife, Rosemarie, now uses reQall on her iPhone, too. If I enter a to-do that I want shared with her, it appears on her iPhone as well as mine. In addition, if she marks it as completed on her iPhone, it’s marked as completed on mine, too.

reQall requires signing up for an account, but the free standard version will sastisfy most people. I use the Pro version for $25.00 a year primarily because it supports syncing of my appointments with Google Calendar, which is very important to me. My wife gets along fine with the free standard version.

Favorite iPhone Travel Application

G-Map US East (and West, too) has become my absolute favorite iPhone application when I’m traveling in the US on business or for pleasure. Vastly improved since I last wrote about it here, it now provides audio turn-by-turn directions and has just about  all of the features of any dedicated GPS device. It’s completely replaced my Tom Tom GPS unit in my car and in rental cars. It’s really great having one less device to take with me when I travel!

Second Most Favorite Travel Gadget…

… has got to be my Cradlepoint PHS300 cellular to WiFi portable hotspot. As you can see in the picture above I even use it in my car. In fact, I’ve used it in my car while my wife or I was driving – both with my netbook and with my iPhone. I’ve used it to make Skype calls on my iPhone while driving myself.

It’s an awesome device that allows me to quickly and easily stay connected to the Internet, while bypassing any AT&T restrictions on iPhone applications, and just lets me get work done. I’m really loving it!