phone book

CallApp adds informative contact management to Android

Remembering all the details about a contact can be difficult if you're speaking with many people across many companies. To combat this issue, CallApp for Android will provide a wall of information about each person you're contacting.

You might be wondering: why do I need another app when I can add notes to contact profiles on my phone? Well, that little text box is definitely handy, but it simply doesn't compete with CallApp's features.

CallApp will let you see publicly available social media and other related information for individuals and businesses. For individuals this is helpful … Read more

Tales2Go bundles 20 holiday audiobooks into 99-cent app

I'm a longtime fan of Tales2Go, the iOS app that provides unlimited children's audiobooks for a flat monthly rate.

Tales2Go - Happy Holidays bundles 20 seasonal audiobooks into one app, with no subscription required. Instead, you pay just 99 cents. That's a great deal any way you slice it, and an outright steal for parents and schoolteachers alike.

The collection includes short stories, full-length books, and even a familiar poem or two. Here's a sampling:… Read more

'Colossal' collection: 2,222 short stories for iPhone

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'… Read more

CourseSmart brings college textbooks to iPhones

College textbooks are way too expensive, way too heavy, and way too tree-consuming. Electronic textbooks, on the other hand, cost less, weigh nothing, and leave forests alone.

You'd think Amazon's Kindle would be the logical place for e-textbooks to make their mobile-device debut, but CourseSmart's new eTextbooks app brings them to the iPhone and iPod Touch instead.

Specifically, eTextbooks is a companion tool for CourseSmart's textbook subscription service, which makes over 7,000 titles available for download or online viewing.

The app itself is free, but it displays only those books you've "subscribed to&… Read more

Simple phone book

MyPhone Book Dialer could not perform its functions of storing contacts and dialing numbers much more simply. Users will be able to jump right in, thanks to its simple design and quick results.

The program boasts an incredibly intuitive interface as far as the datebook goes. Field requirements are obvious and quickly inputted. The only snag was that users hit an arrow key to save their work instead of a Save key. Dialing a number was equally simple, but users may want to visit the Help file to ensure their phone is set up properly. Users will have an easy … Read more

Score the best deals on iPhone e-books

I love reading books on my iPhone, but I don't love e-book prices. I mean, digital content requires no printing, binding, shipping, storage, or heavy lifting--so why does Amazon charge the same price for the Kindle edition of "The Kite Runner" as for the paperback?

That's a debate for another day (though let me go on record saying I'd buy a lot more e-books if they were priced in the $1 to $4 range). For now, let's look at ways you can read on the cheap--or, at least, the cheaper--on your iPhone.

Look for freebies Stanza, one of my favorite e-book viewers ( just acquired by Amazon, incidentally), connects you with thousands of freebies. For example, check out the Random House Free Library, which currently stocks 10 mainstream e-books. (Best bet: Charlie Huston's superb crime-noir series, which starts with "Caught Stealing.") Meanwhile, there's Google Book Search, a browser-based solution that connects you to a whopping 1.5 million public-domain books. Point Safari to http://books.google.com/m. Look for deals E-bookseller Fictionwise already discounts its e-books, but you can stretch your dollar even further by setting up a "Micropay" account (i.e., a debit account). Most books come with a Micropay rebate, meaning you get 10 percent to 15 percent of the purchase price added back to your account. But sometimes Fictionwise runs rebate specials, as it's doing right now with J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series: Buy any/all of the books and you get back 100 percent. You can read Fictionwise e-books using eReader or Stanza. (Just make sure to choose titles that are available in the Secure eReader format.) Try before you buy Amazon's Kindle app lets you read free of charge the entire first chapter of any book in the Kindle Store. That's a great way to see if you like a book before plunking down your $10. However, you can't browse the store from within the app: You have to queue up your sample chapters from your browser. Not so with Shortcovers, an e-book viewer with a built-in bookstore that offers sample chapters for many titles (but only forewords for others).… Read more

Fully Equipped: Why people won't pay for e-books on the iPhone

I'm not sure why, but some analysts seemed a little surprised about Amazon's Wednesday announcement that it would begin offering Amazon e-books on the iPhone and iPod Touch and move beyond the confines of the Kindle.

First off, the company had effectively confirmed off-Kindle reading access in February, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Second, anybody who knows anything knows it's all about the razor blades (the e-books) and not the razor (the Kindle).

Like the game console world, the real profits aren't in the hardware but the software. Yes, the Kindle 2's hot … Read more

Why people won't pay for e-books on the iPhone

I'm not sure why, but some analysts seemed a little surprised about Amazon.com's announcement on Wednesday that it would begin offering Amazon e-books on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and move beyond the confines of the Kindle.

First of all, the company had effectively confirmed off-Kindle reading access in February, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Second, anybody who knows anything knows that it's all about the razor blades (the e-books) and not the razor (the Kindle).

Like the game console world, the real profits aren't in the hardware but rather the software. Yes, the Kindle 2's hot now, but to reach a larger audience, Amazon will eventually have to reduce the price for the reader and shrink its margins.

By contrast, the margins on e-books should remain pretty beefy, and you can imagine all the cost savings involved when you don't have to deal with warehousing and shipping physical books. It's a great business model.

But there's just one problem. While Amazon might be able to find a market for $9.99 books on the Kindle, the iPhone-iPod Touch world is a very different place. Very few people are willing to pay that kind of money for any sort of application, let alone an e-book.

In the Apple application world, the sweet spot for selling anything seems to be less than $4.99--and more like $.99 or $1.99. Sure, you're going to get some bestselling series with almost cult-like followings (read: "Harry Potter" and "Twilight"), but the vast majority of books being "sold" on the iPhone are very cheap--and rightly so because the overall iPhone-reading experience doesn't justify you spending $10 (or even $5) on an e-book. (See Nicole Lee's in-depth piece on comparing the Kindle 2 reading experience to that of the iPhone's).

Of course, the Kindle app isn't the first way to read e-books on the iPhone--there are already dozens of paid and free reader applications (and books-as-apps) available on the App Store. And taking a look at the list of top paid (nonfree) book or reader apps will give you an idea of how pricing works.

Books in the "Twilight" series, and one app called "50 Great Books for 10 Bucks," are the only ones in the top 20 that have a $9.99 price tag. Arguably, the perfect book for Apple's smartphone, "iPhone: The Missing Manual" (written by The New York Times' David Pogue), sells for $4.99. But it took a big hit in sales when the publisher tested a $9.99 price point.

Miyowa's InTouch5: Cell phone contact evolved

I remember my first cell phone being the Ericsson KF788. It had a three-line resolution on a black and white screen and an address book that had enough fields to store only a person's name and one phone number. If a friend had two phone numbers, I would have to create two separate entries. That was way back when, well, in 2001.

Cell phones have evolved so much since then, and, along the way, their internal address books have evolved right along with them. In the address book of today's smart phones, you can store almost any information … Read more