I'll be rating the Apps on a star scale from 1 - 5. I'm rating them in terms of how I think they live up to their potential as advertised by the program description. All of these apps are free.
Mobile MySpace: (4 Stars) - Mobile MySpace works exactly as you'd expect and it's much, much better than using the mobile web site, especially if you're an iPhone 1.0 user stuck with Edge from time to time. You can view your friends list (by top freinds, all friends, people who are online and people who have an upcoming birthday), see who is online, post photo's directly from the phone's camera, read comments and messages sent to you and post comments and send messages yourself. It's a great little app if you use MySpace. I've found that I use it a lot more now that I have this app than I ever did before so if you already spend to much time on MySpace watch out
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It's a great app that puts the most common features of MySpace at your figertips. My only minor gripe is that you have to fill in a captcha before you post your first comment during a session (additional posts in a session don't have that requirement) which I think is kind of stupid considering that you already have to authenticate with valid MySpace account and that you're in an external iPhone app which to me should eliminate the necessity for a captcha but perhaps it really is necessary. It also lacks IM functionality. I don't use MySpace IM but I know some people who do and that is the only other major feature I can think of that you might expect to see in this app that isn't here.
Remote: (5 Stars) - I love this app. You can control both iTunes and the Apple TV right from the phone over your WiFi home network. It works very well and the interface is great. You can look right at the iPhone to see the Coverflow image of the tune or video that is playing.
Light: (5 Stars) - This one gets a 5 star because it completely and utterly lives up to all of it's possible potential. It allows your phone to double as a flash light as best that the iPhone can. I'm often arriving home late at night and I've got a key ring with about 20 keys and most look similar. Finding the right key to get into my house can often be a challenge if I've forgotten to turn the outside lights on so prior to this app I'd unlock the phone, hold it to the key ring and try keys until the light went out, unlock the phone again and repeat until I could find the right key. With this handy little app I can forget about all that and since the light is white it's brighter.
Shazam: - (5 Stars) - This is an awesome music identification app that will record several seconds of a song, upload it to a server and return information about the track (title, artist, album, etc). Once you've identified a song you can "tag" (save) it in the app. You can tag an unlimited number of songs and do some cool things with them after you've tagged them like like click a button to be taken right to the song in the iTunes store and e-mail your list of tagged songs via the mail app.
WeatherBug: - (3 Stars) - You can track weather at an unlimited number of locations and it gives you a lot of information in addition to the current temperature like wind speed and direction, today's high and low, the heat index, humidity percentage and the dew point. It also gives you weather information two days out from the current day. That information consists of a the high and low and an incon representing the kind of weather to expect. By clicking on the day you get a more detailed breakdown of conditions during the day and during the evening.
My problem with this part of the app is that it would have been since to be able to see more than two days down the road. 5 - 10 days out would have been nice and it would have also been nice to see a more detailed forecast either for morning, afternoon and evening or (even better) an hour by hour forecast.
It has a "Radar" feature which overlays current weather patterns onto Google maps. The only problem is it doesn't automatically center the map over the current location so if you want to monitor the weather in another state you have to manually zoom out and than manually move the map over to any other areas you want to check out. When you change locations I think this should happen automatically.
It also contains a "Camera" feature that you can click to see live shots taken by external cameras in various locations near the location you've currently selected.
NYTimes: - (4 Stars) - About to board a plane or enter some area where you won't have a WiFi, 3G or Edge data connection for a period of time? If so and you'd still like to be able to read the New York Times then this app is for you! It's like having a real copy of today's New York times at your fingertips complete with pictures for some of the top stories of the day. The user interface is great and navigating between sections and stories is a breeze and as I mentioned the best feature is that it caches the data it downloads in the app so once you've downloaded it you can view the data even if you don't have a WiFi, 3G or Edge data connection. There are two downsides to this app. First, a small banner ad displays at the bottom of stories when you read them but IMO that's a small price to pay to have the contents of the times in front of you. If you have a WiFi or 3G connection you can download the days content fairly quickly but it takes forever over Edge.
VoiceNotes: - (4 Stars) - This is a straightforward voice notes application that lets you record voice notes and give them a title. You can easily re-arrange their order and delete notes you no longer need. A built in search feature allows you to search through your notes by title. The only feature that I can think of that this handy little app is missing that I might like to see would be the ability to send my voice notes as an attachment via e-mail.
Urban Spoon: - (5 Stars if you live in or near a large city in North America, 1 Star otherwise) - If you often have trouble deciding on a place to eat this fun little app allows you to determine your location and have a restaurant near you randomly selected. The app automatically determines your location then allows you to shake the iPhone (or click a Spin button) and it will randomly select a restaurant using the following criteria (area of town, type of cuisine, average cost of a meal). You can lock any of the three categories so if already know the area of town in which you'd like to eat and/or the type of cuisine and/or the average amount you want to spend then you lock the category or categories in question and the select a random restaurant that fits that criteria. You can then view information about the restaurant like it's address and phone number (and of course tap either to view the area in Google maps or to dial the phone number) and the percentage of Urban Spoon users who like the restaurant and the total number of users who have voted. You can also view restaurant reviews from sites like Citysearch and view reviews of the restaurant by major local newspapers.
Be warned though that this app lives up to it's title and if you don't live in or frequent a very major urban area with lots of restaurants to choose from (think the top 25 - 30 cities by population in the USA and a few major cities in Canada) then this app won't be of any use to you unless you're traveling there. It also requests to determine your location each time you open the application. It would have been nice if the program could save your last location so if you were still there it wouldn't have to be determined again.
Where: - (2 Stars) - Great location based app in theory but it's a bit buggy and will kick you out from time to time. The app will determine your location and can show you restaurants located near you, Starbucks located near you and, more importantly, works with data from gasbuddy.com to show you gas stations in your area and what they are charging for a gallon of gasoline. It also includes a free service that you can sign up for that will show you the location of your friends if they have also signed up with the service. There are some other cool features in the app as well but the bugs frustrated me. I think this application has a ton of potential but I'd hold off on installing it until the bugs are fixed.
LocalPicks: - (3 Stars) - This app will determine your location and show you a list of restaurants in your area from the TripAdvisor.com database. You're given the following information about the restaurant initially: name, type of cuisine, a star rating and distance from your location. You can click a restaurant to see the following additional information: address, phone number, price range and a Google map showing the location of the restaurant. You can click a "Reviews" button to see reviews of the restaurant posted to the web site.
I found that the cuisine listed as being served at some of the restaurants in my area was not correct and that there weren't many reviews posted but since I live about an hour north of Detroit that didn't surprise me. All in all it's a handy app if you travel often and want a quick way to get an overview of nearby restaurants. This app could be made much better if it allowed users to rate restaurants and submit both reviews and corrections to the listing if you found a mistake right from the app.
