Cellphone Sidekick

The iPhone is really quite awesome, and with all these amazing apps out there for it, it is even more attractive. So today we’re going to introduce you a very interesting game – the iHurt! The Loony Tunes smack’em up game for iPhone is really quite exciting, you should try it!

If you’re into goofy action cartoons and watching animated characters getting bashed up, this is the iPhone game for you.

iHurt takes inspiration from Loony Tunes and cartoon violence to create a game where the more you hurt yourself, the more you win. The gameplay? “Steer your character down Mt. Spinebreaker while hitting as many objects as possible in your quest to rack up the largest hospital bill in the history of the iHurt Championships!”

The main idea of this little game is: You’re falling down a hill, the idea is to bash your character into as many trees, rocks and mulitpliers as possible to maximise the hospital bill at the bottom of the hill.

Here’re some great features about this game:
1. The visuals are great, it’s genuinely quite exciting for an iPhone game with the ground rushing below your feet and trees flying past to either side
2. Accelerometer control by tilt is intuitive and easy to do
3. Integration with top scorers from twitter/facebook is a nice

And here’re some weaknesses:
1. Screen reaction is a bit slow to taps
2. Limited choice of character and scene
3. You look like a bit of a twat moving your iPhone around like it’s a steering wheel.

And it’s also important to note that iHurt is only a virtual simulation, a game, and should not be recreated at home in any way. The actions in the game are just what cartoon characters do for a living, they fall down and go boom. They are professionals in the world of slapstick, and also you wouldn’t like the hospital anyway.

It’s not at the level of top games like PocketGod – where the endless variation makes the play really addictive. But this is well visualised and the gameplay flows smoothly. Cartoon link-ins are fun.

All in all, this is a really nice game to kill time with, but you should always bare in mind that it is MERELY a game!

The iPhone app world is a well fertilized market, therefore we can see lots of apps for iPhone out there, really helpful ones, interesting ones, beautiful ones, useless ones…totally a sea of iPhone apps. And today we’re going to tell you about a quite weird one called iKaddish. Tell me what you’ve learned from the name?

Yes, it has something to do with Kaddish, very clever. Actually this is an app that teaches you Jewish mourning prayers.

I don’t know if this is an common need among iPhone users, but an app now helps you to pronounce a Jewish mourning prayer.

If you find it hard to master the intonation while reciting the ancient Aramaic text of the Kaddish, this app will definitely help you.

It’s a free tutorial program that displays the text of the Kaddish in the original Aramaic and English transliteration, and chants the text, highlighting each word as it is pronounced.

I guess it could be embarrassing getting it wrong on sombre occasions, so take the time to download this app and get it right.

And if you want another app to help you cope with the grief itself, try Personal Cemetery, an app that lets you make gravestones for people who have died. Only kidding. Even Engadget think it’s a bit shoddy.

The iKaddish is free on iTunes, so why not give it a shot? It’s free anyway, nothing to lose.

Lots of things you can do with your new iPhone, for there’re lots of different apps which do many different things for the iPhone, and that’s the one of the biggest advantages of modern smartphones. And today here’s a cute app for you: If you like to do self-measures, the TrakIt app for iPhone will  help you keep tabs on your life.

If there’s one thing people like finding out about, it’s themselves. So iPhone app TrakIt is probably onto a winner with their tracking yourself app. It doesn’t really do very much apart from provide a format for you to track things in: helping you help yourself, you know.

Describing itself as a “unique Goal Setting and Daily Tracking app”, TrakIt says that they ”enable users to track anything on a daily basis: Sales calls, blood sugar, pill taking, their weight, stock prices, billable hours, miles run, whether they worked out or not, or anything else they would like to track. Users can also take notes, set goals, and quickly see how they’re performing in relation to those goals.”

Obviously that is most useful if you have some particular area you want to improve on and certain goals you want to achieve. Like with a lot of stuff it’s down to how much effort you put in. Do you remember to record stuff?

Features of the app that make it useful include the ability to track anything. Other apps tend to focus on particular things like weight loss. There are three ways to input data – you can either input numbers (calls made a day); yes/no data (did you go for a run?); or an average (what was your weight?). Your progress and goals can displayed visually in a graph, and the app also generates an automatic To-Do list which can buzz you with reminders – “eat a carrot!”, stop looking at it, you can’t have cheese burger!

It’s part of a broader trend of tracking ourselves, taken to a sort of extreme by the people in this New York Times article on self-measurement. Something that has increased a lot with smartphones because of the convenience of updating something that is always available.

Available for $3.99, it’s actually quite pricey for an app, but totally worth it for some people.

We’ve showed you lots of cellphone apps already, some of which are indeed practical in life, and some are really fun. But this is definitely going to be the very most weirdest one, the ghost detection software will let you meet ghosts on your mobile!

Well seriously, if you watch the Discovery Channel, you’ll know I’m not kidding!

I’m not suggesting you suddenly morph into Jennifer Love Hewitt and start styling yourself as the UK ghost whisperer, but you can get a little closer to the paranormal if you wish by downloading cellphone ghost detection software.

Seriously. It’s free from the Discovery Channel if you sign up for their Most Haunted newsletter, and then you can use it to search for strange occurrences and patches of energy in your vicinity.

The software allows the phone to become an Electromagnetic field (EMF) fluctuation detector, which measures variations in data transmission times from your mobile, and can alert you if it detects unusually high fluctuations, which will have you running for your cross and bible. Apparently EMF is what all the top paranormal investigators use, so should you feel like starting up a sleuth business you’ll be well on your way.

Hah…This is really fun! And to be frankly, I would really love to know if there’s really ghost around me, do you?

This is the season for football fans, a season for soccer fans, for everyone who love ball sports, this is the merry time, and watching the World Cup Match becomes a really important thing in our life. This is the season for sweats and tears, for joys and cheers, but what if you’re stuck abroad? What a disaster! Don’t worry, the Footy Pubs App will help you.

Are you missing the USA vs England World Cup match right now? And you happen to be abroad, the Footy Pubs App should help you out. The Footy Pubs 2010 mobile application, the first of many mobile applications to come from Drinksin was launched on the Apple iTunes store this May. Nokia and Phones4U have also partnered up with Drinksin for the Nokia Footy Pubs 2010 application released 1st June, in time to promote and celebrate watching the World’s Greatest Football Tournament this summer.

How Footy Pubs 2010 works:

1 – Open the app and hit matches nearby
2 – View a list of pubs just around the corner showing World Cup matches that day

If planning ahead:
1 – Select Match Planner
2 – Pick your city/town
3 – Select the match you want to watch
4 – Discover pubs to visit to watch your favourite nation play.

The applications developed by Drinksin, work anywhere in the UK to bring you bang up-to-date World Cup match information. Get directions to all the pubs and bars showing this summer’s big games.Get fixtures and kick-off times in venues round the corner or anywhere you’re going. Pick a match then pick your spot.

Some main features:
1 – Uses GPS to find a pub or bar showing the match you want to see near your location
2 – Search and browse pubs and bars with matches showing & World Cup offers
3 – Tell your friends where you’ll be watching the match via Twitter & Facebook (Nokia version only)
4 – Use directions to easily find the nearest World Cup pub showing the match you want to see

This is like the best app ever for football fans, for more informations please visit www.drinksin.com/worldcupapp

Star Wars, Star Trek…American people are always dreaming of flying in the sky and the outer space too. When this is temporarily impossible for a human being to fly alone in the universe, why don’t we try this out in a nice iPhone game – the Beast Flyers is a game of battles in the universe at sky-high.

Take part in an exciting aerial adventure! Beast Flyers! is an action platformer that will have you fighting mythical beasts in the sky. Cling onto and control flying creatures using your magical energy rope! Play through a variety of missions including collecting magical sky crystals, avoiding dangerous obstacles like exploding rocks and lava spewing volcanoes. Experience different weather conditions like snow, rain and wind. Fend off vicious critters like sonar bats, winter owls and poisonous pterodactyls! Challenge giant beasts in epic boss battles! These include the phoenix of the flames and the lightning wyrm.

Seems pretty good, flying in the sky and fighting evil creatures, this is like your own sci-fi, and this is a really nice way to kill time on your iPhone.

I don’t know about you guys, but I sit in front of my laptop screen for like 10 hours a day or more, and sometimes I just get tired and I just start to hate computers. And then I would really want to find a job that has nothing to do with computers, but then I find the problem — There’s no such job!

Even garbage collection relies on computers somehow! Let’s see what the BlackBerry Binmen will do to the business.

Binmen are bringing Blackberrys to the high-stakes game of collecting garbage, proving that there isn’t a single job in the world where you don’t have to work with computers. The garbage collection agency “Biffa” is electronically equipping employees in an effort to speed up the service. They say staff can now communicated with home office and download maps, (but not Facebooks, twitters…this is more about business than entertainment) which raises the terrifying idea of trucks brimming with garbage tearing around at random in an extremely unpleasant version of Speed.

More usefully they’ll be able to instantly image examples of customers with overflowing bins or improperly-sorted garbage, so reality has finally caught up with the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists – there really is cellphone surveillance of your bins. And this new telecom-trash-tapping works both ways, with company-equipped GPS units able to track the trucks’ progress (and instantly tell them when they’re behind.)

I usually love cell phone games, and would like to have a taste of new cell phone apps, but I’m still new to this BlackBerry Binmen, and if you’ve got any further information on this, please tell me in the comments. And will this be an effective use of £1.75 million? Or would ten more trucks speed things further? Only time, and your trash, will tell. Let’s just wait and see.

iPhone is the one smartphone we all care about, whether love it or not, we do care about what new changes have been made, and what that will mean to us smartphone users. Well, now since the 4.0 beta 4 has been released for awhile, it’s time for me write something about this new firmware I guess, and there’s actually a few impressions to write about. So here I am.

iPhone 4.0 beta 4 was released to developers yesterday, and several sites have already jumped on the newest firmware and have published many of its little secrets. I’ve also been playing with b4 and am quite happy with it. So far, it feels even faster than b3. In non-scientific tests, the camera seems to load up faster (about 2 seconds) and even the video frame rate seems smoother. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all of the cool little changes in this fourth beta of iPhone 4.0.

Default app changes…

1. Mail: now shows number of messages instead of two chevrons. Looks a heck of a lot cleaner for it. Unfortunately, messages with attachments still get stuck in the outbox until you go there and manually send them off.

2. Calendar: this may be old news, but I swear there wasn’t an option to add notes to an event before 4.0b4.

3. Camera: Now loads in two seconds, resulting in fewer missed moments while you’re waiting for the damn digital shutter to open. Exposure adjustment also feels a bit faster now. However, load time and tap-to-focus video are, by far, the best camera features of 4.0 thus far.

System changes…

1. Multi tasking dock: This one feels much snappier. Comes up the moment after you double-tap the home button.

2. Replace: The “replace” option for correcting selected text no longer shows its suggestions in strange, bolded black/blue. They’re now in white.

3. Kickass new wallpapers: it’s been mentioned everywhere, but the new wallpapers for 4.0 are actually quite cool. Much better than the ones that came with iPhone 1/2/3.0.

Settings changes…

1. New dialogue for keyboards

 
2. Wifi added to network section (why isn’t 3G toggle below airplane yet?!)

App Store app notes…

 
1. Evernote works again! Maybe it’s b4, maybe it’s the newest update…but it works!

 
2. Canabalt still doesn’t; still crashes on startup

 
3. Mailroom is working again; had trouble in previous betas

Well, this is what I’ve got, and if you’ve got some other informations or disagrees, please let me know in the comments.

Weather condition affects our daily life, so weather apps are kinda essential. As we all have one or two weather apps on our smartphones, and not all of them are good enough, so basically we’re still looking for a really nice weather app to help us making our daily plans properly. So if you love cute cheeky apps, the Ice Cream Weather is worth a look.

Score one for the very cheeky app ideas.

Ice Cream Weather reports the temperature in your area (US-only — which sucks,since the app is also available in Canada) and displays a handy “melt meter” to indicate how quickly ice cream will melt, given the local temperature. You can customize the main screen to also display a scoop of ice cream, a cone, and your choice of toppings. If you start to crave the real thing (and not the ultra cheesy on-screen cone), you can then call up an ice-cream centric map of your area to find your local dairy bar.

Is this app really perfect, or so much more functional than others? Likely not. We’ve seen quite some weather apps more functional than this one actually. However, the idea and execution did, at least, bring a smile to my face, which is a lot more than I can say for most free novelty apps like this.

Overall, this is a nice app that tells the weather, and has some really interesting sweet functions, but still far from perfect. If you appreciate cheeky app interface this is really a nice weather app you’ll love. What you’ll love more is that this one is available for free.

One reason why cell phones are so popular today is that it really integrated lots of  functions, which means cellphones are really really convenient to our daily life. Communication is one thing and other sweet little but useful functions like alarms makes another. Well, as smartphones getting smarter and smarter today, there’re more and more interesting useful feature on a cellphone, however there’s still some simple functions we need, and today we’re going to talk about alarms, a little thing we use almost everyday.

So as busy as we are becoming nowadays, we always need a little remind for doing things on schedule, and a little alarm clock used to do good for the job, but eventually we need more, so alarm apps on cellphone gradually becomes a good choice. Here’s a great one for you: BugMe! Lite for iPhone: three alarms, no down payment!

I’m going to tell you how to get an ad-supported, sometimes-watermarked, three-alarm version of BugMe! absolutely FREE. Just visit the iTunes Store, search for BugMe! Lite, and download away.

Granted, it’s just the App Store version of a demo and I was being a tad dramatic, but, truth be told, I never really did need more than three alarms — even in the full version of the app. So if you just want to have a taste of this wonderful app, this may be a good chance!

It’s totally free now, and three alarms are usually enough to us, and you can buy the full version anyway after having a taste of the free one, so you really don’t want to miss this!