Those who don’t know what the hype was all about, need to not only get their hands on one of these babies, they need to play with one for a night and get it set to how they want to use it.
It took seconds to set it up (unlike problems in the States with AT&T), and if I hadn’t set my AppleID up in the days before iTunes NZ, hence i put in a buddies address from NY years ago, I would have been fully set up hours earlier.
So once that was set up, the AppStore was the first stop.
And very first on the list of downloads was the Apple application Remote. You can control iTunes on your computer with this App. So with Airport Express connecting my laptop to the stereo, I can control the music in the house with my iPhone, anywhere within my Wi-Fi network - too cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Second on the list was the New York Times reader. Almost redundant with full Safari web browsing available on the iPhone, but still cool.
Then the fun starts. Shazam, claims to be able to identify the songs you are listening to on the radio or TV etc. All you have to do is hold the phone to the speaker and it will identify the song for you. I’ve managed to stump it on the first two attempts and am loathed to hold the phone to the speaker with Keith Urban playing, so the Jury’s out on this one. Cool if it works, and not sure how it will go with the classic Kiwi collection.
Then there’s the game, iPint, in which you slide a beer along a busy bar top to your friend. This makes the most of the accelerometer and is of course just a fun free game. Your reward is a virtual pint of beer from Carling brewery in the UK. I like it.
But of course the coolest and most useless app available for the iPhone is the phoneSaber. All it is is a pic of a light sabre. You can choose the colour, but then the fun begins. It makes all the noises of a light sabre, it hums and whizzes all while you are moving the phone about. Give it a whip and it makes the sound of a lightsabre cracking into another one. All you need is two iPhones and before you know it, you have the most expensive light sabres out - all the sound and fun and no one gets hurt.
Then of course there are all the fun things like knowing what the temp in Vancouver, Boston and London, and of course what the time is there.
Lots of fun, and already thinking I should have gone with the 16GB version to accommodate all of the music, never mind.
