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.

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?

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!

Our Most Handy Travel Accessory

Wow, it’s been a month since I’ve posted anything here! That’s primarily due to the fact that I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling and vacationing with my wife, Rosemarie. We’ve actually had two honeymoons in the past month – one in the Cayman Islands and one in Orlando.

During our travels I found one device that I carry to be of most usefullness to my wife and I – the Richard Solo 1800. This is an iPhone recharger par excellence!

It’s got enough watt-hours to top off both of our iPhones and charges them about as fast as plugging them into a power adapter. This device comes with a USB charge cable that can be plugged into a computer USB port or its own power adapter. When it’s so hooked up, if an iPhone is connected to it the device charges the iPhone first before recharging itself.

In addition it comes with a very handy car-adapter plug that can power two USB cables at once. This means that we were able  to plug the Richard Solo charger into the car-adapter, plug an iPhone into it, and then plug an Apple sync/charge cable into the second USB port and thus be able to charge the Richard Solo, my iPhone, and my wife’s iPhone all at the same  time.

I can’t tell you how many times we used this device to top off our iPhone batteries, but it was pretty much constantly in use. All-in-all, it was the most useful gadget we carried with us – making sure that no matter how much we used our iPhones they always had sufficient power.

Cradlepoint PHS300

I recently purchased a new device that has turned out to exceed my expectations for it. I just love it when that happens!

The device is the Cradlepoint PHS300. It’s a portable device that creates a WiFi hotspot that accesses the internet through a cellular USB modem. It works great with my AT&T USBConnect Mercury cellular modem.

The main reason I bought is was my experience in the Cayman Islands, which I related here in a previous posting. I needed to be able to access the Internet through WiFi in order to use Skype on my iPhone  to make calls. Skype doesn’t work over the AT&T 3G network, only over WiFi. So my wife, Rosemarie, and I found ourselves constantly scrambling around the island looking for free WiFi hotspots. Luckily, we found an abundance there.

Nevertheless, this experience really got me thinking. There are a few key iPhone applications that are blocked from directly using the AT&T cellular network and require a WiFi connection – applications like Skype and Sling Media Player. So why not get a device that would allow me to carry my own mobile WiFi hotspot around in my pocket and have access to the Internet through it wherever I was able to access the AT&T cellular network, i.e., pretty much everywhere I travel in the US.

The Cradlepoint PHS300 is just that device. So far it has worked flawlessly. It’s got a rechargeable battery good for a couple of hours usage, and includes an AC adapter for when electrical outlets are available. In addition is has provided me with an unexpected benefit – better connectivity at my work location with my current consulting client. I’ve written here before of my problems in getting a decent AT&T 3G connection in the part of the building where I’m now working. Well, it turns out that if I put my AT&T USBConnect Mercury cellular modem into a vertical orientation (see picture above), I get a great signal there! So, I’m using the PHS300 at work all the time and not even plugging the AT&T USBConnect Mercury device into my Asus 1000H anymore. I can even carry the 1000H into conference rooms on the floor I work and still maintain a usable WiFi connection to the PHS300.

End result: I’m really happy with the PHS300!

Using the iPhone Outside US

I just returned yesterday from a 9-day honeymoon  in Grand Cayman. During our time on the island, both my wife and I used our iPhones extensively, even to make calls back home to our kids. How did we do so without going broke from international roaming charges? I’ll tell you.

First of all, I signed up for AT&T’s International Data Roaming plan at the minimum 20MB level. That seemed quite adequate for just a 9-day visit for checking email and occasional web surfing. In fact I ended up using just 15MB of data. One surpise for me was the fact that the built-in Map application worked pretty well on Grand Cayman, so we used it a couple of times – once to help us find our way back to the hotel when we were quite lost. It was slow with Grand Cayman’s Digicel’s Edge network, but it worked!

For calls home we used Skype. We had free WiFi at our hotel and the coverage there was great. We had a strong WiFi signal even when sitting on the beach behind the hotel. In addition, we found quite a few restaurants on Grand Cayman that offered free WiFi through Cable and Wireless Hot Spots. This allowed us to make Skype calls and access the Web and email a lot faster than with the Digicel Edge network.

So, between a small International Data Plan and free WiFi, our iPhones were completely usable and proved extremely helpful in navigating around Grand Cayman and staying in contact with our family.