Free iPhone Applications

Urbanspoon

If you are going out for dinner, but you don’t know what to eat and what is around you, it’s sometimes difficult to decide. This app does solve this problem in a brilliant and funny way. Using the GPS in the iPhone locates random restaurant around you according to area, type of food and price in a slot machine style. Just shake (yes you read correctly… shake as a martini) your iphone and the slot machine will start spinning. After a quick spin you’ll get a random choice, if you like it you can look for more info (telephone, reviews, location ecc…) or if you want another pick, keep shaking. You can also lock any or all of the slot machine wheels. So if you know which cousine to eat and how much to spend you can lock those wheels and urbanspoon will pick a resaturant based on those choices. It works in North America and London.

IM+ All-in-one Mobile Messenger

I was waiting for an alternative to AIM chat tool for the iPhone in order to use also MSN Messenger and Yahoo! and it looks like I still have to wait. The app is very good and easy to use. Graphically is perfect and very intuitive. Just select the service you want to use, add your account details, set your chat status (online/offline) and you are ready to chat. The problem is that this app is very unstable at the moment. Every three messages sent, it would disconnect from the chat server and set you offline. So thumbs up for the app, but wait for an update because at the moment is almost worthless and annoying.

ReQall

ReQall is one of the first free applications I installed on my iPhone. It’s a really simple to-do list, but thinked differently.

First of all it doesn’t have a thousand parameters you need to set. You don’t really need to specify a date for your tasks and if you want to you just need to type it in the task and it will automatically recognize it. Your tasks are divided in notes, shopping list and to-dos, and you can see them by category or by date.

ReQall also gives you the possibility of sharing your tasks with other people, and this is great for shopping lists, to avoid to buy stuff twice…

Another great feature is the ability of record vocally your tasks and having them transcribed after few minutes on your list by the reQall team. This is simply priceless, especially considering that is a free appication. Of course everything is supported but a web version of the application and the integration with many tools you probably already use like iCal, Firefox, Outlook and many others.

This is for ma a 5 star applications, nearly perfect.

Twitterific

How could a Twitter addicted like me (@davidedicillo) not review Twitterific? So here we go!

This was the first Twitter iPhone application I downloaded but it didn’t really impress me, especially cause it was keep crashing, rebooting the all phone. So I switched to Twittelator for a while since a friend of mine convinced me to give it another shot. I have to say, after a couple of updates (of both the iPhone and the Twitterific) the application now is much more stable.

For sure the interface is one of the best one I’ve seen till now on the iPhone and it even drive me to abandone Twhirl for the desktop application of Twitterific. The ads aren’t too invasive so I don’t think I’ll buy the premium version anytime soon, unless they add something more than a light background option to choose from.

If you are a Twitter user like me Twitterific is the way to go.

Aurora Feint - The Beginning

Disable the iPhone backup

I know, this is not an application, but I really hate the auto-backup that starts every time I connect my iPhone to my computer. So what to do if you want to disable it?

Simple, if you are an Apple user quit iTunes and open Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type

defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

if you want to enable it again just type in the Terminal

defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

I told you it was simple

Page Once

Finally the first review, and I’m starting with what I think is a really useful free iPhone application: Page Once.

Till now the only bank that has a real iPhone application is Bank of America. If you don’t have an account with them and you want to check your bank account you need to use your bank website and navigate through your accounts with an interface that of course wasn’t made to be seen on a small screen. With Page Once now you can control all your bank accounts, as well as most of other type of accounts you have like mail, social networks, cable tv, electricity bills and much more.

Honestly I don’t think you really need Page Once for social networks and emails, considering all the applications around that do that in a much better way, but for other accounts like banks and bills is a killer application, for sure in my top 5.

Welcome to Free iPhone Applications

Finally I have the time to write the first post of this blog about, guess what, free iPhone applications.

I’ll try to try and review as many free applications as possible, pointing out pros and cons of each of them. Of course fell free to send me your reviews or if you actually build an application a link to it so I can try it.