Posts tagged with "iPhone"

The iPhone 4 Solar Charger

I haven’t had any problems with the iPhone 4 battery so far (I managed to make it last 38 hours once), but in case you were wondering if there was a way to use solar power to get more battery life - well, here it is.

The Frostfire Mooncharge Hybrid Solar Battery Case For iPhone 4 gives your device 5 extra minutes of calling or 50 minutes of stand-by mode with 20 minutes of direct sunlight, but if you charge the battery inside the case via USB you get 5 additional hours of calling. So, not really powerful when it comes to solar charging - not unless you leave the phone in direct sunlight for a couple of hours.

The case comes at $70.  [Frostfire via GigaOM]

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Folio, Universal PDF Reader - 3 Codes Up for Grabs

When the iPad came out, GoodReader sold like hotcakes. It was one of the very few apps that allowed iPad users to read .PDF documents on their new device, and it was priced at $0.99. It still is, actually. GoodReader was full of features, maybe too much for an app that didn’t really care about having a “plesant” UI and user experience. For weeks, people were forced to use GoodReader - there was no better alternative.

Eventually Apple shipped iBooks with PDF support, and a couple of new interesting 3rd party readers were released in the market. Fast PDF, for example, is the app I’ve been using all along to transfer documents on my iPad (and iPhone) and read them.

Folio, universal for iPhone and iPad, aims at becoming your default choice for importing documents, read them and organize them.

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Notified Reinvents Notifications on iOS

With iOS 4, hardcore iPhone users and bloggers (including me) expected Apple to dramatically improve Notifications. Notifications (either push or local ones) are those translucent-blue alert boxes that pop up in the middle of the screen when something happens. SMS? Alert box. Twitter DM? Chirpy notification, and so on.

Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Android or WebOS, but notifications on those operating systems are less intrusive and, at the same time, more useful than iOS’ ones. iOS notifications appear once and you have to do something to dismiss them. Once they’re gone, they’re gone: there’s no way to view all your past notifications, or undo a dismissal to get the last alert box back. As I said, they’re intrusive: a notification can get in your way when playing a game or watching a movie, and there are no settings to tweak to make notifications work for you. They’re just alerts going on and off when something happens.

Apple didn’t implement a new notification system in iOS 4, and that won’t happen in 4.1 either. There’s an app available in Cydia, though, called Notified, which is reiventing notifications on iPhones and iPods. Does Notified really bring to iOS the notifications Apple should have made? Read more

The iPhone Floating Forecaster

This is supposed to be some sort of 3d display for weather information, but I’m not really sure how it works. From what I see in the video though, there’s an iPhone running a custom application which lets you control a panel with 30 air guns and ping pong balls on it.

You touch a spot on the grid, the corresponding air gun raises a ping pong ball on the panel. Isn’t this uber-cool?

I know, I know - it’s also pretty useless. Still, we had to post this. [via TUAW]

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World’s Fastest Texting on iPhone 4 [Video]

Can you imagine writing the phrase:

“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human”

on the iPhone 4 virtual keyboard in 20 seconds? That’s Gumball Tech’s blogger Brian Sweet did, becoming the world fastest texter. I’m pretty sure that there’s someone faster than Brian out there, so if you’re reading - you just have to record a video of your performance and tip us.

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Squirrel 2: Elegant Financial Management App. Reviewed.

I have a problem with financial apps for iPhone, and it’s not just that I can’t stick with one. It’s that none of them has managed over time to support my needs and change its core structure according to them. See, it’s easy to keep track of expenses: I can either create a text file or a spreadsheet and start putting data in. But when it comes to an application, I want more. Ok, there are developers who clearly state they’ve built a lightweight tool to keep track of your finances. But when you advertise your new app with the “manage your finances on the go” catchy line, I expect more than a simple list packed inside a nice UI.

Sadly, that’s what seems to happen every time. The iPhone 4 came out and I thought, hey - maybe this is the right time for developers to focus on creating a full-featured and flexible financial app for iPhone. New iPhone, new creativity - right? Not so fast. Remember the word flexible, because more on this later.

Two weeks ago I bought Squirrel 2, a new and beautiful app for iPhone which aims at becoming your weapon of choice for “managing your finances”. I gave it a try. It also comes with a Mac companion to sync with, but when I say I want to manage my finances on the go (out of the computer I use to write stuff), I don’t want sync or backups or companions or whatever. So, these are just my impressions of Squirrel 2 for iPhone.

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