Essential iPhone apps (if you happen to be me)

Well I was sorely tempted by the Blackberry Storm, but Vodafone are making a fundamental error in their sales tactics: they let people play with the thing before they buy it. Usually that’d be a good thing, but I very quickly concluded that it’s a bloody awful device. (Stephen Fry was right, and I so wanted to like it too!)

So out went the Storm, and in came a shiny new iPhone.

But even the iPhone itself as its problems, and I was all ready to jailbreak the thing in order to get the functionality I wanted… but found it wasn’t necessary. So here’s some essential iPhone applications, if you just happen to be identical to me…

MMS

Apple need to be shot for releasing a phone without MMS… but along came MMS (Web link | App-store link). This app is compatible only with phones on O2-UK network, and works by connecting to the O2 MMS website. It can send MMS messages too, for a small fee.

If you read the reviews in the app store, people do love to bitch about paying to send MMS. But here’s the deal: the people who make the app are hosting an MMS gateway somewhere on the interwebs, so their iPhone app connects to that machine, which sends the MMS on the iPhone’s behalf. This costs money – get over it.

All in all, a great app.

SaiSuke

The Second Great Omission, which really bites my arse, is that applications cannot run in the background, unless they’re written by Apple themselves. That’d be fine if the supplied apps did everything we wanted, but sadly they don’t…

So if you want to use the built-in Calendar application to remind you about an appointment or task, well, um, you can’t :(

I was very pleased to hear about SaiSuke (Web link | App-store links for free version, paid version). SaiSuke is an excellent replacement calendaring application which synchronizes with Google Calendar. And Google Calendar will send SMS reminder messages to your iPhone, for free.

It’s a slightly clunky solution, but works well enough.

WunderRadio

WunderRadio (Web link | App-store link) connects to radio stations on the interwebs. Great if you happen to have “unlimited” internet with your phone contract. So I can once again listen to WATO every day…

Synthesis SyncML

Easy one to review: Synthesis SyncML (Web link | App-store link) synchronises contacts using SyncML, and works very well indeed with O2’s Bluebook service. Highly recommended, and currently free too!

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Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jan 26th, 2009

2 Responses to “Essential iPhone apps (if you happen to be me)”

  1. Tom Says:
    February 3rd, 2009 at 3:25 pm

    Great post – where do you find the settings to configure SyncML for Bluebook??

    Thanks!!

  2. Matthew Says:
    February 3rd, 2009 at 4:26 pm

    I probably just asked Teh Google.

    My settings are:
    URL: http://o2contacts.o2.co.uk/syncml
    SyncML Version: SyncML DS 1.2 / OMA DS 1.2
    Ignore SSL errors: off
    User/Password: {bluebook username/password}

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