BackSeason of plenty for your iPhone
Season of plenty for your iPhone
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CRICKET
A must-have for cricket fans, MobiCast captures a direct feed from Cricinfo. And it’s got it all: from live, ball-by-ball updates, scorecards, match schedules, news, photos to podcasts from the likes of Tony Greig and Geoff Boycott, one-on-one interviews, and much more.
FOOD & DRINK
BigOven dishes out more than 1,60,000 recipes for convenient on-the-go lookup. Fish out what you want by keyword, recipe name, or even ingredients. Accompaniments include a decent food dictionary, as well as storage and substitution tips on hundreds of grocery items.
From A Goodnight Kiss to KGB to all the regular run-of-bar tipples, Drinks Free leaves you shaken and stirred with its range of 5,800 cocktail recipes.
ALSO TRY: Cocktails
AUTOMOBILES/GPS
Forgot where you parked your car before rushing off to the market? Try Take Me to My Car. This “parking aid" program uses GPS to record your car’s position on Google Maps, and then guides you to the parking spot later. It’s slow, but it works.
If you’re phobic about keeping tabs on your vehicle’s mileage, Carro is what you need. This super simple application tracks your car’s fuel input between two tank top-ups via its odometer readings.
ALSO TRY:iDialUDrive, Milog lite
HEALTH
Medical Calculator aids medics and the wellness-minded compute useful formulas and equations in a trice. It encompasses cholesterol and pregnancy wheel calculations to pro stuff such as a steroid converter, IV infusion rate and scores of other computations.
TheCarrot is a wonderful app to track your health, nutrition and fitness. From diabetes, hypertension, asthma, weight, cholesterol issues or even your running and swimming activities, it logs them all via your hand-held mobile instrument.
ALSO TRY: iMapMyRun, A.D.A.M. Symptom Navigator, BinauralBeats
DOCUMENTS
Documents is a superb mobile mini-office suite that allows not just viewing but also editing and managing Word documents and Excel spreadsheet files on your iPhone/Touch. You can also sync files with your Google Documents account and upload/download documents whenever you want.
Ideal for reading lengthy Web pages, Instapaper saves your Web pages for reading later, even when you are in offline or airplane mode.
WORLD NEWS
By aggregating and caching info when you’re on Wi-Fi, BBCReader allows you to read articles or watch slideshows of the day’s newsbreaking images even when you’re offline or experiencing a lousy cellular connection.
Cooliris brings you world events via an amazing cinematic picture wall that responds to the iPhone/Touch motion sensor. YouTube 3D searches, wallpapers, music videos, channels, image searches (and saves).
ALSO TRY: NYTimes free RSS
INDIA NEWS
Web app NDTV Active is tops for its full-service, user-aware mobile channel that offers fairly prompt real-time updates, limited interactivity and user personalization.
News India fetches you general, sports, entertainment, technology and business headlines from across several news sources.
MUSIC LEARNING
Think you have a keen ear for music? Test your auditory astuteness with Karajan Beginner. A music and ear training app, it imparts pedagogy on recognizing chords, intervals, scales, tempo and pitch. Ideal for budding musicians and all those learning music theory.
ALSO TRY: Mini Piano, Violin, DigiDrummer Lite
MUSIC TOOLS
Like a song or a riff and want it, but can’t identify it? Play it, sing it, hum it, key in some lyrics, or just whistle it to Midomi and the program will ferret it out for you from anywhere on earth. The ultimate music search tool, this amazing wizard can identify tracks, point you to the iTunes store if you want to buy the song, or lead you to related YouTube videos.
ALSO TRY: Shazam
AUDIO TOOLS
Flycast, a mobile streaming radio app, grabs streams from over 1,000 digital stations. It boasts music of all genres (Bollywood to Broadway, smooth jazz to salsa, rock to R&B), news updates, tech talk, politics, sports... Everything untethered, on the trot.
If the spoken word is what you want, also fetch Stitcher for hourly/daily news from CNN, Reuters, CNET, NYT, WSJ and others.
GETTING THINGS DONE
While there’s nothing to substitute good old pencil and paper, tools such as Zenbe that sync to-do lists on the iPhone/Touch with our PCs will work wonders for some of us.
Don’t have time to type in the text? Say it out loud and record your reminders through ReQall. This application can also remind you of appointments, shopping lists and ideas via email or calendar alerts. It can even comprehend key words such as “buy" and “meet".
ALSO TRY: ShopShop
IM & TELEPHONY
Over Wi-Fi, you can metamorphose your iPhone or Touch into a Skype handset with Nimbuzz, using its voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) calling prowess.
Apart from Skype, you can use the app on Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, Facebook and more for all those in-a-jiffy VOIP calls, instant messaging and social networking.
ALSO TRY: Fring
SPENDING
An app designed to help you maintain a running account of your daily expenditure, Balance is an uncomplicated, idiot-proof replacement for a pencil-paper account book. It maintains a list of credits and debits to your account, automatically recalculates the balance, and can export all the data to a worksheet via mail whenever you want.
ALSO TRY: QuickBank
WORD POWER/ FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Lastminute Languages provides very handy German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese phrase books for travellers and vacationers. These also include audio snippets for words and phrases to help you learn pronunciation.
There are several free dictionaries out there as well. The best of these include WeDict,Dictionaire and Aa Dictionary.
ALSO TRY: Vocabdaily, Sound Smart, Word of the Day
MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS
Need to get out of a boring meeting? Use Fake-A-Call to simulate a call after a specific interval—or at a specific time—and excuse yourself!
Download The Scream and deploy the iPhone/Touch’s motion sensing abilities to emit a scream the moment anyone touches or picks up the device.
Transform your iPhone into a virtual, ice-cold frothy mug of lager beer with hyper-realistic, accelerometer-driven capabilities as you simulate your glugs with iPint.
ALSO TRY: TickleMe, Banner Free
Write to us at businessoflife@livemint.com
CONNECT
Desire
The Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition, a 2.45-pound, inch-thick netbook with a price tag of $700, features a peony-decorated outer case, and a nearly full-size red keyboard with matching silk sleeve. The “digital clutch" is best suited for email and instant messaging, and comes with a built-in webcam and microphone. Added features include one gigabyte of memory, an Intel Atom processor and a choice of 16 GB or 60 GB hard drive. It also features a 10.2-inch diagonal, edge-to-edge BrightView Infinity display. ©2008 / The New York Times
Buy
The Nokia N97, at $600, has a 3.5-inch screen and a Qwerty keyboard. It runs Symbian S60, and it allows you to browse the Net, send emails and view maps using Wi-Fi or cellular networks. Most importantly, it holds up to 32 GB of media and applications, meaning it could replace a media player and a laptop. It also has a five-megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Although you can make and receive calls, the N97’s storage capacity and programs make it considerably more powerful than a standard cellphone. ©2008 / The New York Times
Get
This glossy black Verbatim keyboard integrates a pair of stereo speakers into its top edge, and everything is powered by a single USB cable connecting it to the computer. For $75, it is is available in separate Windows or Macintosh versions (go to ‘www.verbatim.com’). In addition to a bass-boost button and volume controls, special keys manage music playback from the keyboard. On the downside, it lacks its own USB ports to plug in a mouse. It offers backlighted keys for typing in dim rooms and a built-in microphone for taking Skype calls. ©2008 / The New York Times
Hear
A British-based audio company, Atomic Floyd, has incorporated Twist2Fit technology in its TwistJAX Acoustic Steel in-ear buds so you can rotate the buds for a custom fit. Once in place, the silicone buds will help ensure a tight grip, while the outer surface of the earbuds, which are made of a softer grade of silicone, will help protect the more delicate part of your ears. The TwistJAX also comes with a 24 carat gold low-distortion 3.5mm audio jack and a cable splitter to resist tangles. Compatible with iPods and iPhones, it sells for about $140. ©2008 / The New York Times
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