Applications

Sirius XM iPhone app expected very soon

Update 6/18, 9 AM EST: Sirius XM indeed launched its iPhone app early this morning. Alas, Howard Stern, MLB and NFL aren't available as part of the package but you can listen to 120 channels on an iPhone over 3G and Wi-Fi (and on an iPod Touch). We'll have full commentary up shortly but needless to say, some folks are already expressing their disappointment.

Rumors of the impending arrival of an Sirius XM iPhone/iPod Touch app have been circulating for several months, but there's now some hard evidence that the app will be arriving as … Read more

Google Maps acquires Android voice search, transit

This past weekend, Google introduced a new version of its glossy Maps application for Android phones. Version 3.1.0 brings with it several new features, including voice search to go with its text search field and transit and walking directions to go with step-by-step driving directions.

In tests, Google's voice search on Android was fairly consistent with other voice search apps we've tested. That is to say, a skosh inconsistent. Most searches for banal items of daily life like "shoe repair shop" and "coffee" plotted the sought-for neighborhood responses on the map. Once … Read more

DukeMobile iPhone app puts historical images in your pocket

Here's an interesting tidbit for students, scholars, historians, and folks who like purty pictures: DukeMobile, an app ostensibly designed for students of Duke University, just added a collection of nearly 32,000 historical images, all of them specially formatted for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I could blather on about it (and, truly, I do love to blather), but I think you're better off watching this impressive demo video:

The images come from 20 collections that cover topics like women's history, early American sheet music, and vintage advertisements. Duke will add new collections regularly as they become … Read more

YouMail's visual voice mail comes calling on iPhone

YouMail's visual voice mail app for iPhone may look less sexy than the sleek, crafted application interfaces we've grown used to, but in its first effort, functionality will be more important than form.

This last weekend, users of YouMail's freemium Visual Voicemail Plus service were able to start reading and responding to voice messages from iPhones. Like rival visual voice mail services, YouMail lets you manage voice messages like e-mail messages in exchange for making the service your default mobile answering machine. In addition to playing back voice messages in any order you choose, you're able … Read more

View and edit Word documents on your iPhone with Documents To Go

It's been a long time coming, but DataViz's Documents To Go has finally arrived in the App Store.

The software allows you to view, edit, and create Microsoft Word documents, while a companion desktop app (for Windows and Mac) enables two-way synchronization.

Needless to say, this should have business users dancing in the aisles (or at least doing a little Where the Hell is Matt-style jig).

Drawing on years of experience with Palm and Windows Mobile versions of Documents To Go, DataViz crammed in a laundry list of features. For starters, the company's InTact technology guarantees … Read more

A finger-friendly iGoogle returns to iPhone and Android handsets

Google has been once again revamped its iGoogle start page for easier use on iPhone and Android handsets. It lets you see and interact with your gadgets in a similar fashion to the desktop version, by making use of tabs and displaying content that runs in iFrames. The previous version, which was mysteriously discontinued by Google in late January, simply put everything into one, large vertical stream, and required you to go back and forth to get at different sets of widgets.

One nice feature that was not found in the previous version, is the option to set certain widgets … Read more

Five perfect puzzle games for the iPhone

Puzzle games and the iPhone and iPod Touch go together like peas and carrots (and they're nearly as good for you). They fit beautifully on the small screen, they have no awkward controls to master, and they're ideal when you have 5 minutes or 10 minutes to kill (and don't feel like killing things).

Here's a list of my five favorite puzzle games (so far):

Hanoi A beautiful rendition of the classic Towers of Hanoi game. The object is simple: move a stack of disks from one side of the board to the other. There's … Read more

Apple's Safari 4 tops 11 million downloads in 3 days

Apple's Safari 4 Web browser was downloaded more than 11 million times in the first three days of release, the company said Friday.

And more than 6 million of the downloads came from Windows users.

Since Safari 4's public beta release in February, Apple has touted the browser as the fastest in the world, when compared with other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer 8.

According to Apple, Safari 4 tops IE 8 and Firefox by three times or more when loading HTML Web pages. With its Nitro JavaScript engine, the company claims, Safari executes JavaScript almost … Read more

iPhone OS 3.0 revisited

Since Apple first unveiled the iPhone OS 3.0 last March, we've been impatiently awaiting its full release. Yes, we did manage to get a beta version of the update on the CNET iPhone--I even did a preliminary review--but we prefer to wait for the real thing to give our official evaluation.

Fortunately, we got our wish Monday at the WWDC 2009 keynote. During his portion of the presentation, Scott Forstall, Apple's senior vice president of iPhone software, announced that OS 3.0 will be released to the world June 17. We'll still have to wait until later this summer for AT&T to activate multimedia messaging and tethering, but all the other new features will go live next Wednesday for iPhone 3G, iPhone Classic, and iPod Touch users. Two days later, the new iPhone 3G S will launch with the full update.

In total, Apple is promising that the update will bring 100 new features, but we've barely scratched the surface. Once we fully evaluate OS 3.0, we expect that we'll find more. We were hoping that OS 3.0 would also include video recording and voice dialing, but those features will be available only on the new iPhone 3G S.

Though we've detailed most of the OS 3.0 improvements already, we wanted to revisit them following the keynote. Forstall mostly gave a recap of what we already know, but he provided more detail in a few areas and covered topics that we had not heard before. Here's what he had to say. … Read more