First bites at the apple.

So what's on my iPhone and why is it any better than any other phone?

Unlike most phones you have to do a bit of prep before your iPhone arrives. Why? Well it doesn't work without itunes. It's that simple. No iTunes no iPhone. As a windows user I had never had any need for iTunes. I therefor installed the minimum that I could and said 'no' to any prompts that asked if I wanted it to be a default player etc. I then set up an iStore account. I had no plans to purchase anything but never the less had to set up an account and supply bank details. iTunes then created a complete copy of all my music files (lucky I wasn't short of memory because it didn't ask, or warn me that this would happen). It wanted to copy all the pictures from my PC as well. And all the movies. I stopped it and limited what files it could access. Less attention to detail here could have caused all sorts of PC conflicts and problems.

The next thing I wanted to do before the phone arrived was sort out some satnav software. My last two phones had this and I strongly recommend it. Now, previously, I had acquired this software without paying. With Iphone I'd heard this might not work. A quick Internet search however explained to me that, I could have the software but, I would have to 'jailbreak' my phone first. Further searches told me that jail breaking would invalidate the warranty and that the phone would crash constantly. That and the fact that every software upgrade would undo the jailbreak. Hardly worthwhile then?

My new phone was jail broken within 12 hours of arrival. By 13 hours it had satnav and it worked. By 24 hours all that worked was the satnav and I'd lost my phone provider, wifi, etc. Maybe jail breaking didn't work. Restored the phone to default. Tried again. Hey presto! Almost two months now and no issues. Satnav works a treat.

Since my previous phones did SatNav I'm not going to rave about that although the rotating screen and large display are fantastic. Also my download is a later version than I had previously.

Apps:


Well being a true Scot I went for a look at some free stuff first. Two of my most used apps came from this initial start. Metro.co.uk a daily free British newspaper and STV news, a Scottish Television news application. Metro can also do a download if you're struggling for Internet. STV has all the headlines and provided you get 3g coverage can show bulletins at the same time.

My next fave is actually a website so you need to favorite it with safari. iphone.tvcatchup.com For users in the UK this should be essential. Basically all the digital free view channels live. What's more it actually manages to stream live TV with almost no Internet signal. The only time it's let me down so far has been the world cup. Not sure if it's the broadband signal or if the site gets over subscribed but otherwise it's excellent.

Then comes Stanza. An e-book reader with loads of free books. As a gadget lover I've always wondered if the Sony or amazon book readers were anything more than a gimmick. When I saw that this was free I thought I'd try it to see how it worked. Bloody hell! The sepia background, font, font size and spacing actually make it, not only possible but, pleasant to read on the small screen. Within the software there are links to download books direct to the phone or you can download them to your PC and use something like Box net to load them to your iPhone.

Box.net This I discovered because of Stanza above but it's important in it's own right. It's one of the ever popular 'cloud' services that let you save files from your PC to a web space, and download them to your phone or another PC from that space. Added to the mix it can read word, excel and pdf files on your iPhone.

AppBox Pro. Dubiously enough the only application I have paid for yet you can get it free. I discovered that some of the so called free apps come with loads of advertising so decided that 50 pence was a worthwhile investment to avoid the ads. This is just a collection of useful gizmo's that use the iPhone interface. Some like the day calculator, and unit converter are just a spreadsheet function created for you, others use updates when your phone is in wifi to get up to date info such as currencies. It's got a ruler, a spirit level, a torch (turns your screen bright white), it even has translation software. Available free or for the 50p premium without ads.

Yell.com. Just the yellow pages website but laid out in a way that suits the iPhone. Combine this with Google Earth/google maps and you've got a pretty powerful tool that will find your GPS location, find businesses near that location and even phone any of the numbers it finds with one touch rather than having to copy them down. It's actually like the adverts for the Iphone promise.

Wordweb and wikipanion provide an on/offline dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia and, importantly for me, use UK spelling.

The trainline.com is another online service that's been optimized to work well with iPhone. When you switch it on it can use your GPS location to find the nearest train station or you can manually enter details of the journey that you want to make.

I'm also using something called Fliq Notes. A nice straightforward software for keeping and categorising notes.

Nightstand is an alarm clock function which you probably don't need but which uses the HTC flip clock that my last phone had. It's free so why not.

Cinema Times (UK). The wife loves this and it works very well. For some reason they also do cinema times England, Wales, Scotland but just download the UK version. Set your fave cinema and it will get the latest listings from the net. Cool

I also have stopwatch and that mad program that can name any song, Shazam, as well as a version of spider solitaire. With the exception of the satnav and the 50p I paid for the premium version of AppBox all of the above were free.

In addition to this I have over 500 music files and forty or so photos. That and some paid for apps that I wont mention because I haven't paid for them. Try apptrakr.org if you want to know more.

A lot of these apps work using the Internet and/or the GPS. It's fair to say though that they download when the Internet is available but will still work when it isn't. The dictionary, book reader, newspaper etc can all work perfectly without a connection.

My old HTC touch could have done almost all of the above. It just didn't. The programs weren't in your face or as easy to access so you didn't find them. I believe that android is working to reverse this trend but, until then, it's an apple a day for me.