The northlondonhippy

After my recent flurry of posts about my new iPhone 3G, I’ve noticed lots of new vis­i­tors attracted to my site by this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. With the rumours of Apple plan­ning on shift­ing 45 mil­lion more of them next year its likely to remain a pop­u­lar topic for some time.

And with good rea­son as the iPhone is the most pow­er­ful pocket-sized device avail­able so far thanks to the abil­ity to add addi­tional appli­ca­tions that extend the func­tion­al­ity nearly to infin­ity. It truly is a Swiss Army Knife of gadgets.

As a result of my recent health prob­lems, I’ve pretty much had the last month with noth­ing but time on my hands and my iPhone in my hands. I’ve barely put it down, its the first thing I fon­dle when I wake up in the morn­ing and the last thing I stroke before drift­ing off to sleep.

As much as I adore my iPhone, and believe me I do, I’m not going to lie to you about the smooth­ness of the expe­ri­ence. I’ve been suf­fer­ing with some of the issues and prob­lems you may have read about; apps crash­ing on launch, apps and updates not installing prop­erly and the dreaded poor sig­nal on the 3G net­work, but even with these nig­gles, it is still an amaz­ing piece of kit.

I believe the prob­lems I’ve had are address­able and Apple will be able to fix them through soft­ware updates. The last update, to 2.0.2 has already stopped the crashes on the phone itself and since installing it, I haven’t had a spon­ta­neous restart.

I did have to do a full restore though, as I had lost some apps when iTunes tried to install their updated ver­sions. It took a cou­ple of hours and the most recent back-up I had done was around a week old, so I lost some SMS mes­sages and a few other bits of data, but the phone is now work­ing well.

The 3G issues per­sist for me and it could be that the cov­er­age where I live isn’t that great, but I have trou­ble believ­ing that, since I live in Lon­don. I hope it improves and soon.

I’ve installed dozens of apps already, stretch­ing across 5 home screens and I thought I would share a few inter­est­ing ones with you, that you might not have heard of yet.

Sim­plify Media
Sim­plify Media is very cool, it allows you to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion (unpro­tected tracks only, noth­ing with iTunes DRM), over wi-fi, Edge and 3G to your iPhone and it really works. In real terms, it means there is no stor­age limit on your iPhone, it will hold as much as your Mac or PC at home. You install a small piece of soft­ware on your net­worked com­puter, install the app on your iPhone, log into both devices with the same account and your entire musi­cal col­lec­tion mag­i­cally pops up on your iPhone and you can play any track! The app is cur­rently free, but after 100,000 down­loads, they will start charg­ing for it. Grab it while you can!

Sol Free Soli­taire
There are many ver­sions of this pop­u­lar solo card game, but I like this one, mainly because it is free. I’m not much of a gamer, but I used to play Soli­taire on Win­dows PCs and its nice to have a ver­sion to play on my iPhone. The inter­face is smooth, you tap the card you want to move, then tap the card you wish to move it to and it away it goes. There are sev­eral vari­a­tions to play, my favourite is Klondike 3,

Dual Level
This is another app that’s free, which makes it prefer­able to the paid ver­sions. Its a sim­ple idea, when you start the app, the screen turns into vir­tual hor­i­zon­tal and a ver­ti­cal spirit lev­els linked to the built in accelerom­e­ters. You can use it to level hang­ing pic­tures or any­thing else you might use a spirit level for — very cool!

iVote
This is a sim­ple app which lists poll ques­tions for you to respond to, rang­ing from pol­i­tics to per­sonal, with the results avail­able for you to break down in var­i­ous ways. It’s more geared towards Amer­i­cas (like almost every­thing online!), but it is a fun app and a real time waster. I like it!

WhosHere
Of all the social net­work­ing apps, this one shows the most promise with its sim­ple, yet focused func­tion. It’s a chat app that uses your loca­tion to show you other iPhone and iPod Touch users and their approx­i­mate prox­im­ity. In other words, its a loca­tion based chat appli­ca­tion which is very clever. You fill out a pro­file with as much, or as lit­tle (or noth­ing) and tap the near but­ton — you are then pre­sented with a list of peo­ple, their pro­files and the approx dis­tance from you. You can set the prox­im­ity of your search from as lit­tle as 5 miles up to 3000 miles. You can also blur your loca­tion, up to 2 miles from where you really are, so you do have options to main­tain some pri­vacy. The app’s user base seems to be grow­ing fast and yes, this one is free too.

Pho­to­Swap
Pho­to­Swap is very new, its only been avail­able for less than a week (at the time of my writ­ing) and I find it strangely addic­tive. The premise is sim­ple, you take a pho­to­graph on your iPhone and the app sends it to a ran­dom stranger, while you receive a photo from the same ran­dom stranger that receives yours — that’s the photo swap. Once you receive a photo, you have the option of reply­ing directly to that per­son with another photo, effec­tively hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with iPhone snaps. I’ve received all sorts of pho­tos; city sky­lines, beach views, people’s homes, pets, all sorts really. And before your sick imag­i­na­tion con­jures visions of body parts, I’ll dis­ap­point you — I have yet to receive any­thing offen­sive and there is a “report” but­ton to tap if you do. The app allows you to chose a user name, plus one line of descrip­tion for a mini-profile (accessed through the main set­tings via the home screen not directly from the app) and you can choose to show your loca­tion on a map. I would sug­gest turn­ing off the loca­tion stuff if you are at home and only use it when you are out in pub­lic. It might sound a bit strange, but try it, I think you will agree that there is some­thing very endear­ing about using it.

This is just a small selec­tion of apps that have caught my atten­tion, there are lit­er­ally over 1000 of them avail­able already, with more being added to the App Store every day. Have a look, I’m sure there are some that will appeal to you too.

And I’m still wait­ing for the two apps I’ll pay for, Tom­Tom nav­i­ga­tion soft­ware for the car and a Sling­Player client. I’d lay you odds I have both before the year is out!

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