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I don’t know who did this, why they did it, or how you’d even think up such a ridiculously crazy killing tool, but this is the most awesome weapon I have ever seen. If I were in a knife fight and someone came at me with this thing, I’d probably crap myself (Note: I have never been in a knife fight, nor do I ever intend to be).
Words With Friends
Category: Games
Last Updated: November 1st, 2009
Current Version: 3.0.4
Size: 2.7 MB
Price: Free ($2.99 For Ads-Free Version)
Words With Friends is quite possibly the most addicting and fun online game I have yet to play on the iPhone. Easily the hands-down best word game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Words is a must-have for any fan of word games. Although there is still room for improvement, as I will touch on later, this game takes the classic board game of Scrabble, of which I am also a huge fan, and mixes things up a bit to presumably avoid getting sued. Essentially, the rules are exactly the same as Scrabble, but the double and triple letter and word tiles are rearranged and some of the letters have different values. There is of course an offline mode allowing you to hand your phone back and forth and play with a friend, but where the application really shines is the online play. If you have friends with an iPhone you can send an invite to them through your contacts list (It searches your contacts’ emails to see if they have a matching email on record with a game account) or you can enter their Words username. If you don’t have friends who can play or are just looking for a challenge, you can also have the game automatically search for an opponent and assign you to someone random. Games can be played at a very quick pace or sometimes you only end up making a move every once in a while and the game can stretch over days. For those slower-paced games, it even uses push notifications to alert you when it’s your turn, if you so desire. Don’t worry, though, if an opponent takes too long to play they will automatically forfeit after several days of inactivity. If you’re as hooked as I am and get impatient waiting for an opponent to play, you can also play multiple games at once, up to 20 simultaneous games – a number which makes my brain hurt.
To be fair to an otherwise incredible game, I will be touching on the improvements that I briefly mentioned earlier. First and foremost would simply be an option to mute the game’s sounds without completely silencing your phone. Aside from that, any other improvements would simply make an already great game even better. For starters, some sort of statistic tracking would be fantastic. Even if it isn’t something along the lines of a global leaderboard, just seeing some local stats such as your own win/loss ratio, your best scoring word, and other similar stats would be fantastic. It would also be nice to have a published word list or for them to simply just use the TWL that is accepted by clubs and tournaments across the country. It would also be nice to see the potential score of your word as you are placing down the letters and maybe highlight the placed letters in red if they do not form a valid word. Last, but certainly not least, would be the ability to more easily rearrange your letters when it is your turn and allowing you to move them and test placement while you are waiting for the other player to make their move.
Aside from the improvements I just mentioned, some of which are hopefully already being worked on by the developers, this game is absolutely fantastic. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are looking for a good time sink, install the Word With Friends. You will not be disappointed.
Note: I originally posted this over at Chai Life, but felt it deserved a place here as well.
Emoji Icons are a rather extensive set of icons (Emoji being the Japanese word for what we call emoticons or smilies) that are common in Japanese text messaging and web sites and are essentially have been standardized in Japan. They are available on the iPhone and are very fun to use, but it takes a bit of trickery to get them unlocked. Here’s a step-by-step on how to unlock them. Once unlocked, you can sent them in text messages, emails, or whatever else you can type on the phone and they will be viewable by anyone who has a phone or computer that supports them. Even other iPhone users, even if they haven’t done these unlocking steps themselves. So, without further ado, here’s how to unlock them:
- Install the “Spell Number” app at the iTunes App Store. Don’t worry, it’s completely free.
- Once installed, launch the app.
- In the box, type this exactly: 91929394.59
- As soon as you have that typed in, without doing anything else, press your ‘Home’ button.
- From your home screen, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards.
- Choose International Keyboards, then scroll down to Japanese, click it, and turn on Emoji.
- That’s it! You’re done! Thought it might be harder? Too bad. You can delete the app now, unless you feel you need it for other purposes. Whenever you’re typing, there will now be a little icon on the bottom left to switch back and forth between Emoji and English (or whatever other languages you use).
Here’s a small selection of the 461 emoji icons now available to you:
As with pretty much every tablet rumor to date, this is pure speculation, but Apple has apparently recently acquired the domain name iSlate.com which has fueled the tablet rumor frenzy machine in to overdrive with name speculation. This seems like a perfectly logical name choice for Apple, but if the tablet rumors are true we’ll know quite soon.
The following record was what the whois info for islate.com used to show, although it now points to a domain registrations and trademark protections company named MarkMonitor, which Apple has used in the past.
It’s been a long time coming and after months of slowly chipping away at the market share of actual units sold, the iPhone has, according to comScore statistics, surpassed Windows Mobile in the actual number of total users. This huge step for the iPhone is due to the usage of Windows Mobile devices holding ground over the last year but not really gaining any additional users, whereas the iPhone’s userbase has been continually growing.
Here’s the raw data, for those that like numbers:
| Month: | February | May | July | October |
| No proprietary OS | 206,825,938 | 203,920,230 | 200,981,682 | 196,773,054 |
| Apple | 5,258,504 | 5,744,018 | 6,630,298 | 8,970,049 |
| 427,914 | 797,633 | 894,159 | 1,020,364 | |
| Microsoft | 6,807,554 | 7,040,584 | 6,659,579 | 7,131,797 |
| Palm | 2,398,755 | 2,406,244 | 2,626,151 | 2,843,534 |
| RIM | 9,668,977 | 12,202,058 | 13,080,555 | 14,963,238 |
| Symbian | 888,532 | 889,232 | 1,042,052 | 1,297,965 |
| Source: comScore | ||||
IMDb
Category: Entertainment
Last Updated: December 8th, 2009
Current Version: 1.0.0
Size: 0.5 MB
Price: Free
IMDb likely makes just about anyone’s list of the absolute best websites on the Internet, but for an extremely long time there was a void for users of smart phones or other mobile devices. Not only were there no decent applications that could access it’s formidable database of everything related to TV and Movies, but there was no officially supported mobile website. That era, however, is now at an end.
With the release of an official IMDb app for the iPhone, you can now easily and quickly access virtually any information from your phone that you would be able to access from your computer. You can quickly and easily access movie show times at a theater near you, see what’s on TV, read about upcoming movies, see the latest box office results and there’s even a fun little page called “Born Today” which will tell you which people in their database share a birthday on whichever day it happens to be. The real gem of the app, however, is the search box at the top of the first screen that allows you to search IMDb. This is where most users will likely spend their time, looking up actors, directors, movies, shows, or any other information you could possibly want to know in regards to just about any movie or TV show ever created and everyone who worked on them. This is exactly what makes IMDb the Internet gem that it is. There is no way for me to count the number of times I have used IMDb while watching TV or a movie (not in the theater, of course) to read about the actors, see what else they’ve been in, or just learn some fun trivia about them. Having this app available makes that habit much easier to do. Anyone who has an iPhone and is a fan of movies should be installing this right now, if they haven’t already.
I saw this elsewhere on the ‘net and absolutely had to share it here. Want your own copy? Click it to buy it from Amazon.com
When addressing investors at a UBS conference in New York yesterday, AT&T’s head of consumer services, Ralph de la Vega, reiterated AT&T’s focus on improving its network, while simultaneously slamming their line of smartphones, specifically the iPhone 3GS, as being the cause of poorer quality service. This, as anyone familiar with AT&T will already know, is not new news. What was intriguing about what he said, however, is that they will inevitably be charging that high-bandwidth users more for what they use. Wait, what!? Isn’t the whole point of buying an “unlimited data” plan that you get unlimited usage? To be fair, according to de la Vega, 40 percent of AT&T’s network capacity is consumed by a mere 3 percent of smartphone users. Most of which can be attributed to activities such as streaming video and music by apps on the iPhone.
In hopes that someone high up at AT&T is reading this post, here’s a quick definition that you clearly don’t understand, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: un·lim·it·ed
Pronunciation: \-?li-m?-t?d\
Function: adjective
Date: 15th century1 : lacking any controls : unrestricted (unlimited access)
2 : boundless, infinite (unlimited possibilities)
3 : not bounded by exceptions : undefined (the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy — Sir Winston Churchill)
Admittedly, new media, streaming, and heavy smartphone usage is a huge drag on the network, but for AT&T to continue prospering in to the next decade the correct solution is not to charge the heavy users for what you already market as unlimited. Smartphones are not a fad and are not going to go away. They’re going to keep evolving and the demand for higher data rates is going to continue to grow, so stifling your users will only push them in to someone else’s arms.
The news on the Apple vine today comes from Yair Reiner, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co., who is making the prediction that Apple will begin ramping up production of a long-rumored Tablet in Februrary, to prepare for a March or April release. His report claims that the tablet will include a 10.1″ multi-touch LCD display using LTPS LCD technology, which is the same tech used on the iPhone.
Among the juiciest of the new rumors is his claim is that Apple has been contacting publishers to discuss a deal that would allow them to release their content through online stores, such as those for Amazon’s Kindle
As with any Apple rumor, nothing is written in stone and only Apple knows for sure what its plans are.
If you’re one of the many, many, many iPhone users throughout the States who are tied to AT&T and getting frustrated with the endless dropped calls, AT&T has a solution for you. There’s a free new app available for your phone called “AT&T Mark The Spot” [iTunes Link] which was developed any deployed by AT&T themselves to help them figure out where trouble spots are an, hopefully, improve their coverage map and reduce dropped calls. Simply put, the app allows you to send the location it happened along with any info about the problem (Dropped Call, Failed Call, No Coverage, Data Failure, or Poor Voice Quality) directly to AT&T. Chances are, the more people that download and start using this app, the quicker and more motivated AT&T will be to improve their network. Needless to say, be sure not to use this while driving and instead wait until you can use your phone safely.
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