Free Iphone Applications

Banner Free

Ever wanted to turn you iPhone or iPod Touch into an advertising board, whether just for fun, or to genuinely advertise something? Banner, and its companion software, Banner Free, want to help you do just that! Released by Akamatsu, this great free App is now ending up on many people’s iPhone and iPod Touch’s, so we thought it was high time we review it.

This App is very basic, but very trivial at the same time. The App functions by displaying whatever you want it to say in LCD-like lights. The free version of the App is basically nothing more than that, and that’s where we find it’s shortfalls are. While the App performs the pretty cool feature of displaying your text in virtual lights, we feel like it could have been much better if all the features of the paid version was migrated into it, and the paid version discontinued all together. We understand that an App Developer has to put food on the table somehow, but we can hardly believe that the creator of this App makes a lot of money off this App anyways. Some examples of the features we would like to see on this App include the addition of multi-coloured lights and backgrounds, the addition of different fonts, control over speed of the scrolling text, vertical scrolling alongside horizontal scrolling, and the ability to add different styles of scrolling (backwards, back-and-forth,etc.).

So while App has a pretty neat idea, and is fun App to keep on your iPhone or iPod Touch even after you’re done using it, we believe that the developer did a very poor job with the release and features in this App. Even though Apps are getting smaller and more useless by the day, we don’t think that’s a valid reason to make no-feature apps. That said, we award this App an unflattering 1 out of 5 stars.