I spent the better part of Friday evening and Saturday installing IPhone 2.0 on my 1gen Iphone and going through the app store. I spent a couple of hours Friday night thinking that the new software had bricked my phone. Turns out I had not restarted my computer after installing the new version of Itunes even though it did not prompt me to. It took a few tries after the restart to get the Iphone to restore.
The
app store:
You can get to the app store from your Itunes store or from the new App store Icon on the Iphone. It even works over edge unlike the Itunes store.
There are quite a lot of applications ranging from free to (highest I saw) 69.99. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the pricing. You can flick a cow in the air for .99 cents (fun for about a minute I hear) but great apps like Pandora or ReQall are free. The interface on the Iphone is very similar to the Itunes store interface.
I am going to include some Itunes links They will open a browser page and then open Itunes so Don't click on them if you don't want Itunes opening. I don't know what happens if you don't have Itunes on your computer.
My paid apps so far: I have wanted an Ebook reader since I bough my Iphone so the first app I bought was
Bookshelf 9.99 It is the "official" version of Books.app for jailbroken phones. Seems OK but I can't get my .mobi files on it until I get the updated version.
I also bought
Band 9.99. It is a music creation program that lets you play a few different instruments, record and mix them. It has bass, piano, 12 bar blues guitar, audince sounds, and 2 drum screens. It is very good for annoying your family.
My free apps so far:
Pandora has got to be the best thing for finding new (to you) music. You create an account (I have had one on the computer for a while) then you create stations by picking a song and it will find song similar musically using about a gagillion parameters, if you like it you give it thumbs up and if you don't thumbs down, this way it learns what you like for that station.Pretty soon you have a radio station that only play music you like . It even streams over edge. They can't play a specific song but you can skip a few every so often. I have found a bunch of music I never would have heard of otherwise that I really like.
reQall is a reminder scheduling to do list program that Is free for now(I can't see it staying free, they have a lot of resources devoted to this one).
Say you are driving down the road and think of something that you need to do. Click "add by voice" say what you want and it will perform some speech to text wizardry on it and send it back to the phone. You can set it to remind you by a phone call, text message, or email, or maybe all three, I haven't gotten that deep into it yet.
Ereader is an ebook reader that reads books from, wait for it,
Ereader, oh and you can get the ereader format books from
Fictionwise their parent company also. It works pretty well. I would like more than the three font options and a tap to turn feature instead of the swipe to turn the page but I guess I would be accidentally turning the page a lot.
Shazam. Hear some music on the radio but the jock doesn't say who it is. Just hold up your Iphone and it will record a few seconds, send it off to the magic place and send back the title, album and links to Itunes and youtube.
I haven't really messed with this one much but it did correctly identify two songs in the noisy car.
Movies.app It will find your location(using the cell tower scheme on the first gen phones) and give you movie times and theaters near you. Id didn't come up with my local theater but then again its very hard to find that one on the internet even if you have the URL.
Cube Runner. It's a very basic game where you fly through cubes using the phones motion sensor to control it. It works very well and it gives me confidence that a paid game can have good control using the motion sensors.
Bloomberg. The financial site, you can get business news and stock quotes,. The graphs are expandable using the pinch motion which is kinda cool. It is a good bit better than the stock tracker that came with the Iphone
Yelp. It finds your location and give you reviews of things, near you. I everything from apartment buildings to restaurants to car lots. You can filter results to just one category if you want.
That's about it so far.
Things seem to be changing pretty fast so don't be surprised if some of the free ones are now paid and even maybe some of the paid ones might become free( I found some evidence of this in the reviews for some apps).
If you are thinking about an Iphone I hope I helped a little.