The Colossal Short Story Collection includes more than 2,000 stories--all for 99 cents.
Great news for fans of short fiction: The Colossal Short Stories Collection just landed in the App Store packing a whopping 2,222 public-domain works.
There are, of course, other story collections available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but this is by far the largest one.
You'll find authors ranging from H.G. Wells and Mark Twain to Leo Tolstoy and Ring Lardner. All the greats are here, along with plenty of authors known mostly in scholarly circles.
The app lists them alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, that's the only way to peruse the collection: you can't browse by story title, and there's no search option.
On the plus side, Colossal offers a font-size slider, automatic bookmarking (meaning it returns you to where you left off in any given story), manual bookmarking (for easy revisiting of a selected page or story), and a variable-speed auto-scrolling option.
If you've balked at the idea of reading books on your phone, perhaps because you think the screen is too small or there's too much page flipping involved, this might be a great way to start.
The average story in the Colossal collection takes 10-15 minutes to read, so it's like you get to test-drive e-books without committing to (or paying for) an entire novel.
The app has an introductory price of just 99 cents, meaning it's a no-brainer for anyone who likes to read. Even after it jumps to its permanent price of $4.99, it might just be the e-book bargain of the century.
A ton of cell phones and smartphones are released in a year's time. Trust us, we've seen most all of them. However, not all handsets are created equal and some are more popular than others. If you're curious to see which handsets people are clamoring for, well you're in luck. We've compiled a list of the top 10 popular cell phones and smartphones for 2009 and put them into a pretty slideshow for your viewing pleasure.
As you peruse the gallery, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, the list is based on the most-viewed products to date by CNET users in 2009, and not just those released this year. As such, you'll find a number of older products on the list since they've obviously been on the site longer than the newer ones. Also, many of the models were highlighted on our Top products list.
All that said, it's pretty interesting to see what's still popular these days. Check it out for yourself and see if your phone made the list.
Call me a sucker for the holiday season, but at this time of year I just can't get into mowing down zombies and blasting TIE fighters. I need games that put me in a more, well, merry frame of mind.
Thankfully, the App Store has no shortage of holiday-themed entertainment. I've rounded up five festive games for players young and old.
Flight Before Christmas puts a cute, Santa-themed spin on Flight Control.
Christmas Match A holiday spin on the classic memory game, this one's designed for younger players. It has falling snow, jingle-bell sounds and music, and, of course, holiday-decorated cards to flip. Price: 99 cents.
Crazy Snowboard--Holiday Special I respect my bones too much to snowboard in real life, but I do love a good snowboarding sim. This one puts you in a Santa suit and sends you grinding down the slopes, where you'll smash past elves, candy canes, and, for some reason, zombies. Kooky, yes, but still great fun. Price: $2.99.
Flight Before Christmas It's Flight Control meets Christmas as you help Santa plot a flight path, delivering presents to all the houses while avoiding other air traffic: jets, helicopters, even UFOs. If you can hit multiple houses without altering your path, you score combo points. It's a great twist on an iPhone classic. Price: 99 cents.
Triazzle Holiday puts your puzzle-solving skills to the test--festively!
Santa's Run The game that Grinchmas should have been (and may yet be--updates are in the works), Santa's Run tasks you with flinging presents to various houses' chimneys and doorways. A power meter controls the strength of your toss, while wind speed and direction can affect the path. Plus, you play across four different backgrounds. Not a ton of replay value here, but it's fun while it lasts. Price: 99 cents.
Triazzle Holiday Remember Triazzle, the classic puzzle game that made a dazzling iPhone debut last summer? This four-level holiday edition adorns the puzzles with Christmas lights, ornaments, nutcrackers, and even dreidels for my fellow Red Sea pedestrians. Price: 99 cents.
Speaking of holiday apps, don't miss the cool Dr. Seuss Camera--Grinch Edition I mentioned a few days ago.
In the meantime, hit the comments and let me know what holiday-themed apps are visiting your iPhone or iPod Touch this year.
The Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble uses smartphones as primary musical instruments.
(Credit: University of Michigan)Generally, cell phone noise is pretty much the last thing you'd want to hear at a concert. But it's all the audience will be getting at a Michigan recital next week. And that's the way it's supposed to be when the Michigan Mobile Phone Ensemble hits the stage.
Orchestra members are University of Michigan students winding up a fall course on turning mobile phones into musical instruments. The course merges engineering practices, mobile phone programming, and sound synthesis with music performance, composition, and interactive media arts.
The iPhone musicians broadcast their creations through custom-built speaker systems worn around the wrist.
(Credit: University of Michigan)Rather than just playing a bunch of converging ringtones, the students use their devices to create new interactive sounds in live performance. Their instruments of choice are currently iPhones and iPod Touches, and they use custom-built speaker systems worn around the wrist to broadcast their original artistry.
"The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance," said Georg Essl, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and music at the school who is teaching the course. "We're not tethered to the physics of traditional instruments. We can do interesting, weird, unusual things."
At their end-of-semester concert in Ann Arbor Wednesday, students will be doing more than firing up apps that turn the iPhone into an organ or ocarina. They have spent the semester building apps themselves and using touch screens, microphones, GPS, compasses, wireless sensors, and accelerometers to create sounds when they run their finger across the display, blow air into the mic, or tilt or shake their phones.
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Technically, there's no reason the Zune couldn't have a huge game library.
(Credit: Microsoft)While there's no shortage of handheld game systems on the market--the Nintendo DS and DSi are still selling well and the PSP continues to hang in there, while the App Store expands its catalog every minute--one of the seemingly no-brainer bets in the mobile gaming realm hasn't happened yet: the Zune.
We say "no brainer" for several reasons:
- Microsoft has a successful gaming platform in the Xbox 360, emphasizing online and downloadable gaming.
- Microsoft, compared with Sony and Nintendo, is best able to take on Apple in terms of a media-management software store and the ability to build an equivalent music/games/movies catalog, and making that product PC compatible.
- The Zune HD now plays games.
The first point is obvious. The second is debatable, but we say this because Sony, while having a decent media library on PSN, just isn't historically great at building cross-platform software for syncing the PSP, and Microsoft's global software reach is simply stronger. The third is technically true--Microsoft launched a small collection of completely free-to-play, ad-supported games for its OLED-screened Zune HD last month, and one of them happens to be an adaptation of Project Gotham Racing.
It's an interesting prospect (and one we've wondered about before) because the Zune HD processor, an Nvidia Tegra, has both HD processing muscle and 3D graphics capability. We downloaded and played with all the Zune HD games currently available--all 12 of them--with some curiosity to see if the Zune could compete as a game device.
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(Credit:
Bhautik Joshi)
Correction posted at 1:56 p.m. PST to clarify how Joshi attached the lenses to his phone.
The iPhone 3GS has a 3.2-megapixel fixed-lens camera and that seems to satisfy most users, but not Bhautik Joshi. The iPhone 3GS has a 3.2-megapixel fixed-lens camera and that seems to satisfy most users, but not Bhautik Joshi. The engineer at ILM R&D fitted optical drive lenses to the Apple phone's case, then stuck on a few PVC pipes to accommodate his 18-55mm Canon glass.
Personally, I think this this hack is way overdone. I'm pretty sure your modded iPhone won't fit in your pocket anymore and stability will be a major issue. Also, pictures taken with the modified lens actually look worse than before it was tweaked (Joshi responds to comments about image quality here). But if you're brave (or free) enough to try out this time-consuming hack, here's the link for the instructions.
The photo taken with the modified version is on the right.
(Credit: Bhautik Joshi)(Source: Crave Asia via Gizmodo)
Perhaps you have already become used to Verizon's Droid tossing names at the iPhone like an 8-year-old boy behind his teacher's back.
However, the latest ill feelings directed at Apple's little cutey seem beyond even anything heard in an elementary school.
In a new TV spot, Droid asks an important question: "Should a phone be pretty?" To which many sane people would say "yes," and many emotionally challenged beings made of metal would say, "Huh? What?"
Its answer--the latest in its presentation of the Droid as a robotphone--is to hurl metallic-tasting custard pies as if the Apple store was a state fair.
"Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?" belches the ad's rhetoric, clearly referencing the iPhone, while wrapping the pie in a question.
I know many Socratically-inclined Apple fanpersons will object to the notion that beauty is only skin deep. But they will surely rail against the mere suggestion that the iPhone is digitally clueless.
Of course, this ad implicitly suggests that the Droid is, well, one of Cinderella's sisters, which might well affect its abilities to entice certain sectors of the populace.
Actually, the suggestion is more than implicit, for the deeply hirsute voice declares: "Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth, no."
So do you wait for a design that is pretty and is, as this ad so elegantly puts it, "racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast" or do you have to compromise?
I know they say you can't have everything in life, but surely there must be some very attractive engineer out there who can give us everything in a few square inches of cell phone.
For just $9.99 you can stuff a stocking with the cool, practical HiJack Headphone Splitter Keychain.
(Credit: ThinkGeek)What do you get for the iPhone user who has, well, an iPhone? After all, the device itself is the gift that keeps on giving. Am I right?
Anyway, I've rounded up five iPhone-friendly items for the holidays. Whether you're shopping for a Secret Santa gift for a co-worker, a stocking stuffer for your hubby (or missus), or something to round out the latter nights of Hanukkah, one of these should fit the bill.
1) A gift card...that later turns into an iPhone stand! Start with any gift card--Starbucks, iTunes (duh), or whatever--then tell the recipient to bring it back to you after it's used up. Following these simple Instructables instructions, do a little waving-your-magic-wand thing and turn that card into a cute, clever, portable, and virtually indestructible stand. Who knew a gift card could keep on giving?
2) The world's best (?) battery pack Blogger Josh Bancroft calls this Monoprice iPhone Backup Battery Pack the "best $15 you can spend," and I'm inclined to agree. For just $15.23 you get a 2200mAh battery, which is good for roughly two full iPhone charges. Just one problem: It's currently on back order. Well, you can always print a photo from the product page, write "coming soon," and stuff that in the stocking.
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What's new? Let's start with the Now Playing and What's Hot buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Fans of Midomi, the song-identifying app for iPhone, will still recognize the app when the iPhone prompts an update to version 3.0, even if they don't recognize the new name: SoundHound. The app's core remains the same with its outsize orange button you tap to sing, hum, or record a song you want to ID, buttressed by another button for shier folk to speak the artist or song name, and a text field for old-fashioned typing. What's new is big, and it centers on two additional tabs below, one that lets you browse music trends and another that links up to your iPod library.
Tap "What's Hot" to pull up trend charts for the most popular songs on the Midomi network; the songs that are played more through Midomi than they are on the air; and a list of the most recently "grabbed" tunes that SoundHound and Midomi.com users have identified.
Following any musical entry pulls up an info page from which you can flow into an artist bio, bookmark or share the details, buy the song via iTunes, or watch available YouTube videos. A new lyrics feature presents the words to the tunes within the Midomi app; if that's not available, tapping the "lyrics" button produces Google search results, still within the app.
Midomi's SoundHound also cleverly hooks into your iPhone's iPod library through the "Now Playing" button. The songs you play through SoundHound get funneled into the Midomi network, so you can rapidly interact with your ditty as you would had you sought it out by typing, talking, humming, or recording the tune. Even better, SoundHound can show lyrics for your iTunes song as it plays. Likewise, if your music search turns up a song you've already got, an icon denotes the fact, and lets you play the tune from your own collection.
The robustness of the lyrics feature and the trend charts crowd in on TuneWiki's territory, and threaten to overtake it. Shazam, the other popular music discovery app, could also find itself on SoundHound's lunch menu, except for its loyal following and free price. Even the premium Shazam Encore may continue to appeal to some for its now slightly cheaper price tag and a handy offline mode, but its features pale in comparison.
The cost of owning Midomi 3.0/SoundHound does jump in this release from $4.99 to $6.99, presumably to accommodate the cost of licensing lyrics, though we haven't been able to confirm this yet with the app's publisher, Melodis. What we do know is that with this release, SoundHound is jetting to the front of the music discovery pack, which can only mean more sophisticated improvements down the line for its competitors.
Kent kicks off the podcast this week by reminding our dear listeners that Verizon iPhone rumors are just rumors. Until Steve Jobs says differently, he's not ready to believe a thing. New New Yorker Bonnie is taking the week off, but Nicole signs on to give her take on Android fragmentation, a costly new LG phone and the quality a Rock for Verizon.
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Verizon iPhone rumors are just rumors
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Upcoming reviews
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