Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad’s Pick: iPhone 3G S

The iPhone 3GS is my pick for the week! Though the outside may seem old, it is “all new” on the inside! Look for my post about what I specifically like about this model of iPhone, till then! [$199/$299 on subsidy - Apple link]

[Easy out! - Ed]

Chris’ Pick: iPhone 3G S

Is there anyone who wouldn’t pick the iPhone 3GS as the pick of the pick?

[Apparently not! - Ed]

James’ Pick: Mophie Juice Pack

As with most of us TiPBers, I use my iPhone for everything, which causes the battery to drain by noon. Enter the Juice Pack. I am able to recharge the battery in the go so I can still check the latest news from TiPB. A must for the heavy iPhone users out there!

[Let me guess, for the iPhone 3G S?! TiPb's iPhone Store actually carries Mophie products for ALL generations of iPhones. b'okay? - Ed]

Leanna’s Pick: The Sims 3

The Sims 3 on iPhone 3GS - I have always been a fan of The Sims and was disappointed when it didn’t meet my expectations on iPhone 3G because of lag and crashes. On iPhone 3GS, however, The Sims 3 is a great game and I have yet to experience any performance issues. I now control my sim (named affectionately after my dear husband) with smooth scrolling, quick load times, and zero lag thanks to iPhone 3GS! [$9.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick: TxtDrop

TxtDrop is a web-app that allows you to send text messages to anyone’s cell phone (it also supports international users; however, it is not an iPhone web-app). I was initially concerned about privacy, but after reading their Private Policy (and viewing other trust-website-lookups), it look safe. If you are worried about getting spammed you can add your phone number to their block call list. I thought this was a nice as I have never found a “truly” free text messaging as some of the apps that do this still cost to purchase them [Free- Web link]

Rene’s Pick: BeeJiveIM 3.0

I was worried when I tried some beta Push Notification apps. The alerts themselves were great, but the apps took a long time to load, login to their own servers, and fetch the original data. BeeJiveIM 3.0 helped assuage those worries. It’s quick — on the iPhone 3G thank you very much! — and when you add BeeJiveIM’s already great functionality with iPhone 3.0 push convenience… swoon

Apple, what’s taking so long to approve this?!

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3G S, Mophie Juice Pack, the Sims 3, TxtDrop, BeeJiveIM 3.0 - TiPb Picks of the Week

Filed under: iPhone, App Review

Pity the poor iPhone 3G owner who now has to grapple with reality; yes, what was until Friday the world's coolest smartphone is now simply a piece of yesterday's tech, as current as a punchcard and as enduring as a wax cylinder recording on a hot afternoon. No, not really -- the iPhone 3G is just as cool as it was a week ago, and for $99 it's a relative bargain. Still, there's some envy on the wind.

Some of our readers have apparently been so dazzled by Apple's enthusiastic promotion of the new iPhone 3G S that they were fooled into believing that the hardware-linked features of the 3G S (the compass and the voice controls, specifically) would be made available on the 3G with the delivery of the 3.0 software update. They have written to us, irate and frustrated, wanting to know what happened to their promised features. We sympathize, and we want to help.

There is, as it happens, a way to get one of the marquee features of the 3G S -- voice control -- onto your iPhone 3G or original iPhone. The vlingo app, available free in the App Store since December of last year and also available for Blackberry & Windows Mobile, gives you voice command dialing from your address book, map search, Yahoo web searches, Twitter/Facebook updating, and more. The recognition quality is quite good; it's worked as well as Google Voice Search for me in most cases.

Vlingo is quite a bit slower to recognize audio on the 3G than the built-in Voice Control is on the 3G S (unsurprisingly, considering the horsepower boost on the new phone); it also does not allow iTunes control, while Apple's tool does. Despite these drawbacks, it's fun to use and very slick. Update: As Eitan points out in the comments, vlingo's speed is not necessarily limited by the local processing power, since it depends on the remote server for audio analysis.

One of the major points of contention regarding vlingo, and a cause of many negative reviews on the App Store, is that the app does have to do something a little bit touchy in order to enable voice dialing: it asks if it can upload your contact names to vlingo. While this is a necessary step if you want to use voice dialing, and while the company says it does not include phone numbers with that upload nor does it use the information for any purpose other than creating spoken profiles to recognize the names of your contacts when you speak them, there are plenty of users who aren't comfortable with this step. If you're not OK with it, you can still use vlingo without the voice dialing feature; at that point, however, it's not dramatically better than Google's Voice Search.

You can watch a video demo of vlingo in the 2nd half of this post. If you've got other workarounds or third-party apps that help 3G owners level up with their happy 3G S comrades, please let us know.

Continue reading Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones

Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Vlingo adds voice control to older iPhones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's been a few days since iPhone 3.0 was released to the public and there's a lot of stuff in there! We've been playing with the software for quite some time and decided to compile a list of our favorite new features. Some of these are very high profile features, but we're hoping that we'll be able to point out a few things you haven't discovered yet. Read on for the big list!

Moving icons to different pages on the Home screen seems to have always been an arduous task. We posted a tip about this very thing a while back, but the iPhone 3.0 update has made things even easier! Before the update, moving icons to a new page meant it would take up space on each page as you moved it across. Now, moving an icon holding it at the edge of the screen will continue scrolling to the next page until you move it away. Give it a try! It's much better!

The most anticipated feature of the iPhone 3G S is arguably the ability to record video. It looks great, and you can post it to YouTube right from your phone! But how do you import the full-quality video? Mac users will probably say "iPhoto," but you may not want to open up such a big app for a quick import. The quickest way we know of is to use the Image Capture app which sees both photos and videos recorded on your iPhone. Just open it up, find the video, drag it into Finder, and there you go!

Windows users can get at their iPhone 3G S videos in Windows Explorer, similar to the way you import photos.

Check out a video we imported below!

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

It looks like our European friends will get first crack at an advanced turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone/iPod touch. MobileNavigator Europe [App Store] requires the 3.0 software, and looks to be fully featured:

• 2D and 3D map displays
• Can be used in portrait and landscape format
• Branded UI features such as Reality View Pro, Lane Assistant Pro & "real signpost display"
• Speed Assistant with adjustable audio-visual warning
• Direct access and navigation to contacts saved in the iPhone's address book
• The latest NAVTEQ maps, 2M+ European POIs (points of interest)
  
• Navigation is automatically resumed after an incoming phone call
• Quick access to user-defined POIs in the area and along the route
• Take Me Home function with a single click

This software is the first of several apps coming for the iPhone. The TomTom app that will work in the U.S. has been demoed and coming soon. Garmin, one of the premier GPS manufacturers is going the other way, and will release their own phone with navigation built in, but the project has been troubled and much delayed. Telenav has pre-announced its iPhone offering and suggested that customers keep an eye on the company's Twitter feed.

The Navigon app is US $94.99 (!) this month only, then the price goes up (!!!). The Navigon website doesn't yet show a list of the supported countries, but it's displayed in iTunes and is quite extensive (Albania to Vatican City with Estonia, Macedonia, San Marino & Slovenia + more in between). The app supports ten different languages and will automatically switch based on the selected language for the iPhone itself. The download weighs in at 1.65 GB.

This quick release of high quality navigation software should set mouths watering for a release over here, but I'm a bit troubled by the pricing, as you can buy a pretty fully featured low-end navigator for only a few more dollars.

Update: Our readers have also mentioned Gokivo, with a continuing US$9.95 a month subscription, and Sygic, which provides turn by turn navigation in Austrailia and New Zealand.

Thanks to Gaspare for the original tip and our alert readers for more suggestions!

European nav app first out of the gate for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

European nav app first out of the gate for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Hardware, Video, Odds and ends, iPhone

Ahhhh. The smell of new electronics, released from their cardboard box after a week long journey from Shenzhen, China to Highlands Ranch, Colorado. The texture of a clean, fresh iPhone encased in its plastic wrapper. The fun of finding not one, but two little Apple stickers in your package.

Yeah, it's unboxing time at the Sande household. It's my turn to take you through the delivery of not one, but two iPhone 3G S phones on 6/19/09, followed by the luscious views of a young, unsullied iPhone being taken out of a box and activated (well, not quite).

For those of you who bought your iPhone 3G S's on Friday, this will be a fond remembrance; if you didn't buy the latest iPhone, this is a cruel temptation to get you to exercise your credit or debit card at your local Apple or AT&T store. Enjoy the view!

iPhone 3G S Launch: Unboxing video, Steve Sande style originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

iPhone 3G S Launch: Unboxing video, Steve Sande style originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Throwing any last remnants of fragile self-consciousness to the four winds, I break out my subpar French and very rusty Italian and Mandarin Chinese (Aiya!) and see if, even under the onslaught of terrible accents, Apple’s new iPhone 3G S Voice Control can still do as it’s told.

Note: the accent appears to be key. If you say a command in French, you can’t pronounce the following name English-style and expect good results (though Chinese seemed much more English name tolerant). However, I tried some (poorly rendered) regional accents at the very end and that didn’t seem to be a problem.

If you’re multilingual, or have a colorful twang to your speech, give it a try and let us know how Voice Control works for you!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb Video: iPhone 3G S Multilingual Voice Control Challenge

Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Review

Continue reading TUAW First Look: MapQuest 4 Mobile

TUAW First Look: MapQuest 4 Mobile originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

TUAW First Look: MapQuest 4 Mobile originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs received a liver transplant about two months ago, according to a news report in the Wall Street Journal.