Saturday, April 4, 2009

I review all of my iPhone Apps

Here's a quick review of all of the applications I currently have on my iPhone.
Text: What it was meant to be. It lacks picture sending and text forwarding, though, so that's a little disappointing. 4/5
Calendar: Pretty intuitive, goes into infinity as far as I can tell. The option for repeating events is nice, but I think some holidays should be pre-added, like Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years, etc. 5/5
Photos: Shows all downloaded images and taken pictures. The Slideshow option is an interesting touch, but it's unintuitive with management of picture folders. (You can't make them or delete them without the help of a computer.) 3/5
Camera: Decent quality, but even though it registers that a picture was taken sideways, it will save it as a portrait photo in Photos, which is annoying. 4/5
Settings: Pretty self-explanitory, but not all apps have settings, when it seems they should. 5/5
YouTube: Up to par with internet speeds for the iPhone, it lacks some of the features that Youtube has though, like "More From". 4/5
Stocks: Pretty intuitive if you follow stocks, but it seems to be sort of silly to have pre-programmed in. It should be downloadable. 5/5
Weather: It tells you the weather. Yay. 5/5
Clock: A nice little app. It has world clocks, alarms, stopwatch, and timer. Very nice. 5/5
Calculator: Pretty cool. Turning the phone to landscape gets you more complex actions such as cos, sin, tan, square roots, and a bunch more stuff that I never use. A graphing calculator would be nice, because as of right now, there aren't any decent ones for sale. 5/5
Notes: A nice little app to write whatever in. The option of emailing the notes is nice. 5/5
Maps: I rarely use this app, but from what I have, it is excellent. It's relatively fast, and it has tons of options to calculate distances and travel time. 5/5
App Store: It lets you download more apps. 5/5
iTunes: It lets you access iTunes. It seems like it should be combined with the App Store, though. 4/5
Contacts: Good organizing, very useful. My one complaint is that it should save what you've written so far in a contact if you exit before finishing. It's annoying to retype phone numbers and addresses. 4/5
Wikipanion: A very good application for looking up things on Wikipedia. It hides graphs and large images and gives you the option to view them, which is excellent for speed. It also is very intuitive with working between it and the Safari app. 5/5
Dice Bag: An app that rolls dice. It has a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, percentiles, 3 d6's, and 4d6's with one removed (Useful for creating D&D characters.) The randomness of the dice rolls have been called into question in comments for it, but it seems pretty good to me. 5/5
Units: An app that converts measurements and such. Has a lot of choices. 5/5
Translator: A decent translator app. I think it accesses Google translator or something. It has serious gaps in its vocabulary, though. 4/5
Google Earth: An app that emulates Google Earth. It's pretty slow, but pretty neat too. It's got a lot of options. 4/5
Dots Free: A good iteration of the popular Kids-menu past-time. Allows Two player or one player, or zero player (You watch it play itself)! The AI is moronic, though. 4/5
FourFree: Connect Four. Has the same playing choices as Dots Free. The AI is excellent. 5/5
Checkers: Has same player choices as the previous two. AI is decent. 5/5
Scribble: An interesting drawing app for the iPhone. It has a very limited choice of colors, but you can take photos from the Photos app. 4/5
Topple: A fun stacking game. You stack the blocks with the touch screen, and tilt the iPhone to keep the pieces balanced. 5/5
Tap Tap Revenge: Like Guitar Hero, but for the iPhone. Has a large library of free downloadable songs, and it takes advantage of the accelerometer with directional notes at points. 5/5
Cube Runner: A fun app with simplistic graphics. You endlessly go forward, dodging randomly placed cubes the whole way. Apparently it has downloadable map sets. 5/5
Shazam: One of the most popular apps for the iPhone. It listens to music and tells you what it is. It seems to work about 60% of the time for me. It'd be cool if you could sing or hum a tune and it would give you a list of possibilities. 4/5
Quickvoice: A sound recording app. It's extremely quiet, and you can't connect it to the computer. Of course, it's the free version. 3/5
Backgrounds: A large, regularly updated gallery of images sized for use as your iPhone wallpaper. Very cool. 5/5
Echo: "Simon" for the iPhone. That's it. It lacks options. It would be nice to have it speed up. 3/5
Zippo Lighter: An app that shows a lighter. Tilting the phone changes the direction of the flame, and holding it upside down or touching the flame makes the phone vibrate. It has a large-ish selection of designs for the lighter. The flame is pretty low quality, though. 4/5
PapiJump: An app where you endlessly climb up a tunnel by jumping from platform to platform. Highscores are held on the internet, so it redirects you to the Safari app to submit scores. Needs a high score list for just your iPhone. 4/5
Tunnel: Just like the Calculator game. Tilt the phone to navigate through the endless tunnel. The simple graphics are pleasing, and the high-score system is relatively intuitive. 4/5
Crossbones: A pirate themed matching game. I got it when it was free, now it's $2.99. Pretty fun, with good AI. You get a new hand by shaking the iPhone, which is really annoying when playing it in a vehicle. I wouldn't pay for it, though. 4/5
Trace: A platforming game where you draw a path through the level. Sort of unappealing graphics, poor hit detection. The controls are in a tiny bar at the bottom, which makes it very hard to react quickly without missing. Low replayability. 2/5
DuckDuck: A game where you bring different colored ducks to whirlpools matching their color by tilting the phone. Appealing graphics, but it gets retarded when there's twenty ducks on the screen and you're trying to navigate them around. It has a lot of options for the design of the pond and weather. 4.5/5
BubbleWrap: An app where you pop as many bubbles in bubble wrap as you can in 45 seconds. As soon as it ends, it goes to the highscore screen, which has ads all over it, so you accidentally hit one, which redirects you to the App-Store. You lose the highscore when this happens. Needs alternative game modes. 3/5
Darts: A poor dart shooting app. The AI is idiotic and easy on the hardest setting. 2/5
Ultim(ate Coun)tdoun: An interesting app where players hold onto a portion of the screen as the timer quickly counts down towards zero. The player closest to zero without going into the negatives wins. It needs different game modes, maybe AI, and the name needs to be shortened so it isn't "Ultim...tdoun" on the menu. 4/5
iShoot: A fun artillery-tank game where you buy weapons and fire them at other players. It has a large list of maps and weapons, and the game modes are customizable to take out certain maps, change tank health, change the economy, add or take out weapons, etc. Very polished off. 5/5
FallingBalls: A silly game where you dodge circles of varying sizes as they bounce across the screen. Good use of the accelerometer, and good hiscores. It's also very cool that they only put in ads between games. My only complaint is that it won't let you restart until all of the balls have bounced off the screen, so it's annoying when you die and a ball slowly makes its way across the screen. 4/5
Frotz: A poor choice of names for an app (look it up on Wikipedia, NSFW). It's got nothing to do with its namesake, though. It has a list of text-based RPG's and a lot of downloadable ones from the interwebs. 4/5
Brick FREE: A breakout game with powerups. I'm considering buying the full version. 4/5
Tap Tap (Revenge 2): A "Sequel" To Tap Tap Revenge. It's got better graphics and different songs, but is the same game at heart. It seems to crash often, though. The high-score system is pretty nice, and there seems to be a community behind it. 4.5/5
SpawnLite: An app where you watch a bunch of color-shifting lines swim about the screen. You can direct them by touching the screen, and make them explode into a ton of lines by double tapping the screen. 4/5
Bix Lite: A pretty fun game where you trap or avoid balls bouncing around by hurrying across the screen and filling it in so it's a certain percentage full. I'm considering buying the full version. 4/5
geoDefense: A tower defense game with vector graphics. It's pretty fun, and it has special towers that suck up shrapnel from destroyed enemies and use it to power up it's fellow towers. It's pretty difficult. 5/5
Pocket God: A fun game where you torture a bunch of cute islanders on an... island (INO,RITE?) It's updated every 8 or 9 days for free, which is cool. You can check out their blog at pocketgod.blogspot.com 5/5
FlightControl: A fun game where you direct different flying vehicles to their respective areas. you have to make sure they don't crash. It's actually pretty stimulating. 5/5
Textfree Lite: An app that gives you free texts. The texts are sent to a server or something and then forwarded to the intended receiver. The lite version gives you a 15 text a day limit. It'd be better if it would redirect reply texts to the text app, but it can't be everything. I'm actually confused how it can be economical, but then again, a text only takes a couple of cents to send (despite arguments from my friends.) 5/5
Mines Free: A Minesweeper game. Pretty fun, but the free version is Mehish, with only two sizes. The graphics also don't look like minesweeper, and are kind of unappealing.
Skype: A decent emulation of skype. It's pretty slow, but it's pretty cool for what I use it for. It's got pretty good quality for sound. Most people who complained about it were using it to call non-skype users, but isn't that what a cell-phone is for? A good skype app. 5/5
Phone: The cell phone portion. It's got different tabs for your contact list, your favorites, the numpad, and recent stuff. Just what it should be. 5/5
Mail: Checks your Email. It randomly doesn't receive some emails, which is really annoying, but it checks multiple email addresses, which is cool. 5/5
Safari: Internet. Very cool. It's got history and bookmarks, but it needs an orientation lock, because I often like to read stuff on the internet while I'm lying down. 5/5
iPod: The iPod portion, obviously. Decent sound quality, and good video quality. One problem is that all of my album pictures were overwritten with pictures for downloaded podcasts when I connected my phone to the computer, but that's a one time thing. 5/5

Wow. That was long. Obviously, this isn't an encompassing view of iPhone apps, cuz I delete the sucky ones. But there's my short opinion on all of my iPhone applications. I could delve into each one and give an individual blog post for most of them, but would you really want to read all of that? I didn't think so.

1 comment:

  1. Good reviews. I think you're misusing the term "emulate", however. The two things you termed emulations are actually ports.

    The reviews seem pretty unbiased and helpful.

    ReplyDelete