iPhone Approll

(Credit: CNET)

On Wednesday, Amazon announced the throwing open of its virtual doors to iPhone and iPod Touch users everywhere with Amazon Mobile, a free app now available in the iTunes App Store.

It's a pretty nice offering that simplifies the search experience for products found not just on Amazon.com, but also on partner retailers Target and Macy's.

The bulk of the app is dominated by a search bar you can launch either from the home screen or from a separate Search screen. While there's a tiny promo area on Amazon Mobile's home screen, the app completely omits browsing by categories. The vast majority of shoppers probably beeline to their wanted product, but there should be an option to browse from the More menu.

The surprise feature is one Amazon is trying on for size that lets you snap a photo of a product to jog your memory later. In addition, the app will try to find the product in Amazon's catalog. Amazon Remembers, as the feature's called, was a little slow when we tried it out, but found our products in the end.

This visual shopping assistant is a great feature that replicates many others we've seen for iPhone and Google Android. SnapTell for iPhone (free) is also more flexible, pulling in data and price comparisons from IMDb, Barnes and Noble, and Wikipedia, along with Amazon.com.

However, Amazon Mobile's advantage to registered members is its simplified purchasing that honors 1-Click buying and Amazon Prime, and its memory for items you've flagged in your wish list, shopping cart, and now, photo bank.

(Credit: CNET)

On Tuesday, the first promotional codes that will make iPhone apps free to some users began trickling out of the App Store.

Apple is finally bequeathing apps developers with a way to let some media testers review an app at no expense and reward or attract a few lucky users. (The first invite has already floated into my in-box.)

This is Apple, so there are limits. Fifty promotional codes per product, to be exact.

Also, as wonderful as it is to see the passcodes allowed and implemented, they are not free trials. Developers angling to hook new customers will still need to lure them with free, light versions of the software or the less popular approach of offering an app free for a limited time and then ratcheting up the cost when the window closes.

Still, we're happy to finally see some leeway for developers, who will also get a reprieve from issuing gift certificates that often lose them money as a workaround for letting select reviewers evaluate apps for free.

(Via MacRumors)

Voice-transcription service Vlingo has launched a really fantastic new iPhone application (download) that lets users talk into their phones to search the Web, dial contacts, and update their status on Twitter and Facebook. Much like Google's iPhone app which was released early last month, users are able to do all this without ever having to use their keyboard.

The big difference between Google's efforts and Vlingo's is the addition of Yahoo search, meaning users can pick the search engine of their choice. You're also able to auto-dial contacts by speaking their name. This, along with speech-to-text search of Google Maps, and the social network status updates gives users the utility of TwitterFone and the SayWho iPhone application in one piece of software.

I've been using the app over the past week and found it to be far more useful than Google's offering. It may be missing the really great (though iPhone SDK rule breaking) option to raise the handset to your head to begin a search, but it makes up for it with quite a bit more utility right from the get-go. The voice dialing is also exceptionally cool. Early on in the iPhone's lifetime there were a handful of jailbroken applications that let you do this, and they were genuinely useful before the inclusion of contact search. The added benefit of using Vlingo's system is that it cooks up a special voice recognition profile for your phone book since you initially have to send it in for processing.

The Twitter and Facebook update tool is also really well done, offering you a preview of the text before you send it, as well as a text counter to show you how many characters you have left. You're able to make any edits in case the transcription flubbed your words too. After having used TwitterFon and having its mistakes set in stone, this is a godsend.

Going forward the one thing that would really push this app over the top is a built-in browser, giving you option to open up search results within the app itself. Currently it jettisons you out to Safari, which you must then exit and re-open the Vlingo app if you intend on doing another voice-powered search.

Vlingo is free and should be available in the iTunes app store in the next few hours. Below are some screenshots of its interface. We'll have a video of it in action shortly.

Vlingo lets you update your Twitter and Facebook status, look up and call phone contacts, and search the Web--all with just your voice. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Update: I've embedded the video below, and the app is now live.

(Credit: CNET)

Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.

The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go calibrates your location twice every time you open it, a repetition that quickly wears thin. Providing advanced search options to find, for instance, sushi restaurants nearby for under $30 would make the app immediately more winning.

iTunes App Store reviewers have also thoroughly picked a bone with the app over a "cheesy" link to other apps created by Zagat's mobile publishing partner, Handmark, and "frustrating," "misleading" information about the cities and countries covered. It's true that Zagat Survey is strongest in metropolitan US cities, with passable international coverage in the UK, Italy, and France, and some world cities, like Tokyo, Toronto, London, and Rome. Handmark should more explicitly list those cities to minimize the backlash.

It's also true that Zagat To Go will best serve the foodies who want to "cut through the garbage" found on Yelp's and Urbanspoon's iPhone apps and be funneled to finer dining. Big-city diners dedicated to Zagat's yearly survey have in this iPhone app a slightly more economical and much more convenient and interactive option than toting the book with them on travels near and far, or viewing the cramped mobile Web site from the Safari browser.

Update: 12/2/08 at 3:40 PM. Handmark commented in an e-mail that a new release being submitted to iPhone's App Store for approval today will request location access upon launching the app for the first time. A button on the main search screen will let you manually update your new location.

How many iPhone apps does it take to make 10,000? It all depends on how you do the counting.

(Credit: 148Apps)

Apple watchers this weekend have been ruminating on the overall tally and on the counting methods following a report on 148Apps, a site that keeps tabs on iPhone applications, seen here in its entirety:

In just 142 days, the iPhone OS app store has added over 10,000 apps! An amazing feat for any platform. To commemorate this we've put up a special page. More on this after the weekend.

10,000 apps!

(We'll hazard a guess that there are actually on the order of 10K mini icons on that "10,000 apps!" special page. A listing to the right side of all those icons gives the total number of apps as 10,091.)

MacRumors.com, meanwhile, quibbles with the overall number, even as it says the actual 10,000 active app mark should be reached "in the next few days":

While several sites have reported that 10,000 iPhone Apps have been released into the App Store, the actual number of active iPhone apps that can be downloaded is about 9,676 as of today's count. The discrepancy comes from the fact that many apps have been removed from the App Store for various reasons (trademark infringement, discontinued apps, pulled and released).

The biggest category of iPhone apps, according to 148Apps, is games (2,333), followed by entertainment (1,122), utilities (1,015), education (737), and productivity (517). The average cost of the apps is listed at $3.12; about one-quarter are free of charge, while one is listed at $899.99.

(Credit: CNET)

As the holiday season approaches, get-togethers have a tendency to grow...merry. After slurping up a couple spirited mugs full of glogg or 'nog, will you know when you're fit to drive home?

You might if you've tracked your drink intake with Buzz Buddy for iPhone and iPod Touch ($0.99). It can't guarantee you'd pass a breathalyzer test, but this blood alcohol calculator gets close.

After entering your gender, weight, and whether you've already consumed alcohol, you'll tap the drink type you're about to imbibe--standard measures of beer, wine, cocktail, and shots. That means if you're sipping a strong Belgian ale or Long Island iced tea, you had better 'fess up.

Using your weight and gender, Buzz Buddy will graph your calculated blood alcohol level over the hours, helping you predict when your levels will get back into the safety range. If you spill over from sassy to sloppy, the colored indicator will supposedly shift from green to yellow to red and you'll be warned that your blood alcohol level is far too high to drive. A small bug in version 1.0 kept the indicator green even as we "chugged" enough booze to fell a mule.

We have some other ideas for expanding Buzz Buddy's possibilities. What about calling an emergency contact from within the app? Or viewing an in-app map detailing late-night munching spots nearby? Entering submissions to the graph retroactively, to account for the drinks you may have forgotten to add as you got swept into your evening, however, is a more urgent request.

With a button you can tap to call a cab and arguably helpful tips to instill a sensibility for responsible drinking, Buzz Buddy is a good idea--as long as you have the the presence of mind to use it.

Color-blind players are not the main audience most developers think of when plotting their games.

They're not who Nitzan Wilnai of VGViews originally built for either when the Tetris-like games Tatomic ($4.99) and Tatomic Lite (free) first became available for iPhone and iPod Touch. Yet enough players requested a color-blind mode that Wilnai got to work.

In color-blind mode, green atoms become purple. Too bad the background still looks red, orange, or brown.

(Credit: CNET)

The color-blind mode, found in the Options menu, swaps Tatomic's green-colored atoms with purple ones. In the free version, players must connect chains of same-hued atoms to clear the row, reminiscent of Tetris's iconic puzzle. The full version of Tatomic, however, gives you 30 levels and two additional modes--one in which you must create puzzle shapes, and another that will only clear an atomic chain when you attach a radioactive atom catalyst.

We tested both of Tatomic's color modes on one of CNET's own color-afflicted, who appreciated the difference right away, but still registered the blue atoms as white in both schemes.

It mattered little--he proclaimed the game "All the fun of the Large Hadron Collider, but without the risk."

Video host Blip.tv has just launched support for iPhones letting mobile users view the entirety of its video collection on the go. Like visiting the site on your computer, you can both browse and search through Blip's videos and get them to play without having to download a special application.

As a result of the upgrade, Blip.tv's embed code can now point iPhone users directly to the .m4v QuickTime stream while still delivering the Flash version to users with it installed. Unfortunately this does not carry over to previously embedded Flash-based Blip.tv videos. Visiting an earlier post where I embedded a Blip.tv video, it still shows up with the giant Flash-fail icon.

Blip.tv's CTO Justin Day tells me there's no way to add backward compatibility to these old embeds, but that video publishers can go back and manually update the video to support it.

Below is an example of the new content portal iPhone users are greeted with:

Watch Blip.tv shows right on your iPhone with a new content browser that streams QuickTime files.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Update: Here's a how-to video posted by Day. You should be able to view this if you're reading from your iPhone.

Until Apple blesses the iPhone with a camera worth talking about, you're just going to have to improve photos by transferring them to your desktop to edit.

Not so fast, slick. Picoli for iPhone ($4.99) is a handy little photo editor that does a great job touching up entire photos--you can color-correct images by using a slider, flip the image, and apply a few effects, including converting to sepia tones.

Watch our First Look video to see how Picoli works and see if you should download a copy for yourself.

Related:
>>All iPhone apps

(Credit: CNET)

It isn't so much the technology behind Zumobi's free app Ziibii that refreshes RSS on the iPhone and iPod touch as it is its presentation. Ziibii, which means 'river' in Algonquin*, extends the metaphor to depict posts from your various RSS feeds as rafts floating along a stream of information.

Watching posts float by is fun concept--for a few minutes at least--and one that's heightened by the fact that stories, photos, and friends' status updates appear in random order as a round-up of all your RSS subscriptions.

Ziibii's feed flexibility is good, but not great. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube are represented, and you'll also be able to add presets from Ziibii's list of popular sites or add your own favorites. Hopefully soon, Ziibii will make it easy to select more popular sources and aggregators, as does Viigo's thorough RSS reader for other platforms.

Of course, not everyone appreciates this 'blended' view, nor the unconventional current-cum-display. My Type-A fellows can escape to a listed view of feeds and flick in either direction to see more mish-mashed headlines. When you're ready to read up on one feed at a time, the Filter button temporarily hides stories from all but your selected source.

Ziibii earns brownie points for including an in-app browser when you want to read a full article, and for being able to post stories to Twitter or e-mail them to a contact.

With the exception of a small library of feeds, Ziibii is an excellent and creative alternative to your iPhone's RSS reader.

*Fun fact: The 'ssippi' in 'Mississippi' is derived from 'zibi.' The etymology according to Wikipedia: "(cf. Illinois mihsisiipiiwi and Ojibwe misiziibi, "great river," referring to the Mississippi River.)"