The free Point Inside app maps your favorite malls, showing you both stores and services.
Shopping is supposed to be fun, dangit! But it's invariably a hassle-filled experience, especially at this time of year.
That's why I never walk into a store without these three iPhone apps at the ready. They're all free, and they make shopping faster, easier, and sometimes even a little less expensive.
CardStar Newly updated with an improved interface and support for 75 additional merchants, CardStar replaces various discount, reward, and membership cards in your wallet. To digitize a card, just enter a merchant name and your barcode number. When you get to the checkout, pull up the onscreen barcode and hand over your phone for scanning. Just don't toss your actual cards until you've done some trial runs, as some scanners have trouble recognizing the iPhone's screen.
pic2shop Suppose you're at Borders, about to plunk down your cash on Brendan Benson's "My Old, Familiar Friend" (good call--best album of 2009, IMHO), but then you wonder: Is this the best price? Find out fast with pic2shop, which scans product barcodes and quickly pulls up prices from thousands of online stores. The latest version offers vastly improved scanning, yet it's still a free app.
Point Inside I've been shopping at the same mall (Twelve Oaks in Novi, MI) since I was a kid, and I still get lost in the place. Where has Point Inside been all my life? This ingenious app provides maps for hundreds of U.S. malls and shopping centers. It can find the malls nearest you, list current mall events and promotions, and even remember where you parked. It's a little buggy, and missing a few major malls in my area, but definitely a great start and a must-have app for mallrats.
OK, shoppers: Those are my picks; now let's hear yours. Hit the comments and tell me about the apps that make your shopping life easier, cheaper, or just a little more fun.
(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)
Ever wondered what some of the graphical differences are in games that make use of the newer hardware in the latest versions of Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch? So were we. That's why we put together a screenshot comparison gallery of 13 games, all of which are either packing extra OpenGL ES 2.0 goodies, or that more complicated graphics modes that run a whole lot better on the beefier hardware spec.
As for our testing, we ran each title on an iPhone 3G and a third-generation iPod Touch, the latter of which packs the faster innards required for some of the advanced OpenGL effects.
To our surprise, there were very few apps on the App Store that made use the new graphical spec, and even fewer that required a standalone version of that application to do so. However, many of the developers we talked with said that they were cooking up new titles that would be pushing these new devices a little further than what they had already created. That's good news for those with a newer iPhone or iPod Touch, but a definite thorn in the side of those who might not be able to play some of near-future App Store releases on their original iPhone or iPhone 3G.
Click on our slideshow link below to get started. We've also included links to each version of each app (in case there are variations), all of which open up in iTunes. Also, in case we missed any, feel free to leave them in the comments and we'll try to add them later.
Update: We've added bonus screenshots of Ravensword, the upcoming 3D RPG, as well as top-down pinball game Wild West Pinball.
See also:
The future of iPhone games
For games, no big rush to speedy iPhone 3GS
iPhone developer: 3G S graphics will be sooo much better than PSP's
The PS3 Slim is 33 percent smaller and 36 percent lighter than the "old" PS3.
(Credit: Sony)
Say you're shopping for laptops online and you're trying to figure out how big one is just by its product photo and measurements. It's not easy is it?
If you can't make it to a retailer to get your grubby mitts on it, there's a new solution called Pective. Like Sizeasy, which I checked out last year, the site is set up to help consumers find out the general size of something based on its measurements. In Pective's case, the tool goes one step further by using product photos and scaling them to match the size screen you're using.
The site is chock full of cell phones, which you can get a good feel for--especially when it comes to holding your old phone side by side. In the photo below I've matched it up with T-Mobile's G1, which may look a little bigger than it should, but keep in mind that it's sticking out about an inch off the screen. If you find something that's noticeably off you can vote to have it enlarged or reduced, which instantly changes it by one size measurement.
Pective does a pretty good job matching up T-Mobile's G1 with the on-screen version. It actually looks closer than this, but it's hard to tell since it's sticking an inch off the computer's screen.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)To add your own photo you simply direct the service toward a hosted photo, then crop it down with a built-in editor and plug in its width and height. The entire process only took me about a minute, although I had to track down a properly large, high-resolution shot (which was hosted elsewhere) and the proper measurements. In the future it would be nice to have a search tool that tracks these down for you and lets you upload high-resolution shots from your hard drive.
For the time being you're only able to browse through the directory 12 shots at a time. On the horizon is a search tool (powered by Yahoo BOSS) and product categories that will let users browse through items by type.
Pective was made by Pratham Kumar, whose other projects include Firefox extension No-NSFW (coverage) and the now defunct 2View.
Related: All the glory of the universe, in a single Flash app and XKCD: Height
Man, it sure would be nice if we could do this comparison here at CNET.
Mitsubishi's LaserVue TV (not actual size).
(Credit: Mitsubishi)The first third-party side-by-side comparison we've seen between Mitsubishi's LaserVue rear-projection TV and Pioneer's Elite Kuro plasma appeared at TheTechlounge Friday, and according to its authors, the LaserVue more than held its own against what's widely regarded as the best TV on the market.
Author Cameron Baker and editor Kurtis Kronk sat down before a 60-inch Kuro and a 65-inch LaserVue at a San Antonio, Texas, HDTV retailer and watched a pair of Blu-ray movies: Ice Age: The Meltdown and Iron Man, along with Pioneer's Kuro test disc. They were unable to get their hands on a distribution amplifier for true side-by-side comparisons, apparently, so they based their observations on watching "the scenes back-to-back on each display a few times, juggling HDMI connections," and on still photos.
... Read more
(Credit:
Crave UK)
Remember back in the day when we went nuts and compared a Samsung Q1 Ultra to an Apple Newton? We've been eating the crazy pills again. Today, we woke up and decided we'd do another mental comparison--the MSI Wind versus the similarly gusty MacBook Air.
Despite the price disparity, they're both laptops, they're both ultraportable, they both have keyboards and screens, and they're both so gorgeous they cause random strangers to accost you in the street, demanding to know where you got them from. So which is best? The great silver hope from Apple, or the dirt-cheap Eee knockoff? Click here to see what we found.
(Source: Crave UK)
It's a debate that spawned well before the next-generation of gaming even began. Fast-forward to present day, and you'll find that jury still seems to be out on which console provides the better graphical experience.
While console fanboys would have you believing otherwise, the truth is that there really is no dramatic difference in the majority of multiplatform games on either the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3.
That said, CNET sister site Gamespot has re-examined the controversy in their third look at comparing the graphics on both consoles. Quite possibly the most in-depth comparison to date, Gamespot used games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, The Orange Box, and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 in their testing.
Now that you have all the evidence laid out neatly in front of you, what do you think?
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