Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.

I’m not a tech or media critic, though I work for a newspaper (and yes, full disclosure, that paper does seem to have a working relationship with the iPad developers, but I had no role in that or the news coverage of the tablet).

I’m approaching this as a gadget lover and a reader. And to this consumer, the iPad vs. Kindle question is the most important one. To my surprise, I find myself leaning toward the cheapest, $499 iPad without 3G or a lot of storage.

Back in August, my Amazon Kindle’s e-ink display melted down. A tragedy.

I had some frustrations with the Kindle. The hardware of the first model in particular always felt a little cheap and poorly designed. I was constantly turning pages by mistake.

While e-ink did seem to reduce eyestrain, I went through a series of booklights that didn’t quite fit the device and had to be positioned just-so to avoid creating glare on the screen.

I actually found the backlit Kindle app on the iPhone to be easier for reading in bed and on planes.

The Kindle did a poor job rendering newspapers and magazines. The user interface was awkward, requiring you to page through endless menus. The device didn’t have enough storage. And the crippled experimental browser was so bad that some users are apparently willing to pay Amazon for blog posts. And I actually paid Amazon for the privilege to email PDFs to myself.

But I forgave all that. I loved my Kindle. Its always-on, free Internet connection made downloading free first chapters and shopping for books anywhere a dream. The eBook prices (and first chapter previews) were easy on my wallet. The selection was Amazonian. I no longer had to lug around so many heavy books on vacation trips. So I really missed it when it died. And I lusted for the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX. The Nook and Sony Reader didn’t measure up. But I held off, because everyone suspected the Apple tablet was coming soon.

Now that I’ve seen the iPad, I think it’s my Kindle replacement. I’ll have to hold one and read on it to be sure.

Do I need another way to watch movies and video? Not really, but it’s cool the iPad does that. Do I need another way to get my email or surf the Web? Not really, but any device that can’t do those things easily loses points. Do I need another way to write or do other computer work on the run? Not necessarily, but it’s great that the iPad has some solutions for that. Do I need another music player? Not one this big. Do I need another mobile GPS device? Again, not one this big. Do I need another way to display digital photos? (Well, actually, that is kind of cool).

But as a book reader, it seems like a winner. This may not be the greatest news for Apple’s bottom line or its dreams of a media revolution.

Consider the iPad’s reading features: The ability to turn pages via touchscreen. Books with color charts and photography. Books with video embedded. Everything in Amazon’s proprietary format via the Kindle app. Everything else that comes in the (relatively open) ePub format, including many Google Books and everything else available on the Stanza reader. (The Kindle limits you to the Amazon library.)

With customized apps, the iPad will render magazines, newspapers and other print items far better than anything out there, including standard Web browsers on computers.

And yes, that will allow some content providers to charge for the enhanced reading experience. That won’t “save” journalism or book publishing. Journalism doesn’t really need saving, but devices like this will be another force working to transform how it is distributed and financially supported. That will be good news for bloggers and small news shops looking for income, not just the big corporate media.

Sure, the Kindle hardware and software will catch up — but it’s still wedded to the proprietary Amazon format. Sure, there will other devices, running Google Chrome or Android, netbook-type devices from the Windows world, and proprietary gadgets from some content providers (which will probably fail). All that competition will be good for consumers and content providers everywhere.

But one other thing tips the balance toward the iPad for me that might not apply to everyone: I am among the minority that live in a Mac world, and there’s a justifiable expectation that the iPad will work seamlessly within that world, from iPhone apps to the iTunes store. I’m not an unreasoning fanboy. If the iPad turns out to be as buggy as my Apple TV, or too locked down (what, no Flash?), I’ll be annoyed.

Much of the commentary has focused on whether the iPad will replace the laptop or even the desktop computer. It might, for people who don’t really need computers for their jobs, who are more consumers of content than creators. It might appeal to casual touch-gamers, but not hard-core PC gamers.

I don’t think an iPad would completely replace my MacBook Air (which I got after flirting with a cheaper, smaller Acer Windows netbook; too awkward to use routinely, and I remembered why I hated Windows).

For work, I need to use Microsoft Word, and I need to run the newsroom’s publishing software, which is a bit of a system hog. I want to be able to run the Firefox browser, with some special plugins for work, and I bet the iPad will be a Safari world. I rely heavily on Bento 3, and the iPhone version of that program is pretty much useful only as a read-only app for me. I need to be able to view my paper’s video players and other Flash content, which the iPad doesn’t do (although it appears that the customized Times app for the iPad does play video, based on the keynote demo). And with a keyboard stand, the iPad looks a bit awkward for day to day office or home use on a lap. I don’t enjoy writing anything longer than a Tweet with a touchscreen keyboard. And the iPad’s maximum 64 gigabytes of storage is not enough.

This would be a third device after the laptop and the iPhone, and I probably wouldn’t carry it every day. I imagine it would mostly be for home use, or trips. It’s for pleasure, a toy, not a necessity.

So that leaves the cost question. The gadget freak in me lusts for the high-end $829 iPad with 64 gigabytes and 3G connectivity. That’s an awful lot for an e-book reader, and might not pass the spouse’s-raised-eyebrow test. At that price, I might not feel comfortable flashing it around on the New York subway, either.

But do I really need 3G and an always-on connection? Looking back on my Kindle usage, I mainly downloaded things at home or the airport, both places where WiFi is not a problem. More and more free WiFi hot spots are popping up, and more friends have wireless in their apartments. It’s becoming customary to give your WiFi password (if you lock it down) to friends and other guests. No device can give me Internet in most of the subway. And with AT&T’s network still overloaded in Manhattan, browsing the Internet via 3G is not all that fun, though it’s great to have a 3G phone in an emergency.

Those factors make the non-3G $499 to $699 models more attractive than the tech pundits realize, as I posted to Twitter earlier this week. Many hard-core geeks can’t imagine not having maximum connectivity everywhere, whereas I can’t imagine paying another $30 to AT&T for yet more slow Internet. I’d rather spend the money on books and other content. So the main trade-off when it comes to cost will be the gigs of storage versus price. I already spend a lot of time managing audio and video files on my maxed-out 32G iPhone. When I travel, I keep extra content on an old 60G video iPod. Books don’t take up much space, but a few movies and TV series will fill this up quickly.

There’s another factor, too — the life of the device. Early adopters might be salivating to have the first generation, but we know that the next one in a year or two will probably be better. It might have a camera, more storage, software improvements, subsidized deals with content providers, and so on. An early adopter with a smaller budget is probably better off with the cheapest model this time around.

That’s where I’m heading. What am I missing?

(One more thing: If this device melts down, Pee Wee Herman points out it could have other uses. Also, it turns out the iPad is better than this primitive tool.)

March 2010 Update: Yes, I did order the non-3G iPad today, but I opted for the one with the biggest storage, 64G at $699. I figure I’ll load it up with media, so I wanted the extra capacity, but I still don’t see a need for 3G. I’ve never needed it for my laptop.

April 2010 Update: I wrote about my experience with the Apple iPad here.)

Afterward, tourists were standing around snapping pictures of each other in front of the wreck. City Room has more details. So does the local CBS site.

My wife was walking by when the taxi was still ablaze and alerted me, but I missed the flames. (We live nearby.) The rest of my pictures are over at Posterous.

I was impressed with the ease and speed of PicPosterous. It uploaded the pictures quickly and automatically from my iPhone 3GS, creating the blog post and slide show. The name of the gallery in the application becomes the headline of the post. You can also set it up to autopost to Twitter, Facebook, and many other services.

Next, I’ll have to figure out the best way to upload video from the iPhone. This is pretty cool:

Recently, I noticed a sort of smudge developing in the upper left corner of the screen, even when the machine was turned off. There were also slight streaks of white lines going vertically down the screen, with a washed-out appearance at the top. I could still read books, but it was sort of annoying. I decided to see if Amazon tech support could offer any advice.

I wasn’t looking for a replacement, although I wouldn’t have minded a sort of cash-for-clunkers trade-in discount on a Kindle 2 or a DX. Mainly I was hoping this was an easy problem that they had learned how to fix. If they couldn’t, I would live with it.

So, first I sent Amazon Kindle support a note explaining the problem, and got this reply from Bobby Chowdary:

I truly understand your concern in this regard. Please check to make sure your battery is fully charged or that your Kindle is plugged in using the power adapter. If your Kindle’s low on power, the screen may not refresh properly.

You can also clear the screen by restarting your Kindle. Visit Kindle’s Settings screen by selecting that option from the Home screen menu. When you’re on the Settings screen, select Menu again. You’ll then see a “Restart” option you can select to reboot your Kindle.

If restarting Kindle doesn’t help, please give us a call so we can try some real-time troubleshooting.

As I had mentioned in my email, the Kindle’s memory was full, so I deleted a bunch of old NYT Kindle editions, some books I had read and private documents I no longer needed. Then I charged it overnight and used the reset option on the screen menu. The smudge was still there the next day.

This time I called Amazon, or, rather, put my cell number on the Kindle support site, causing them to call me back in a matter of minutes. The support person on the phone walked me through a reset procedure that involved putting a paperclip into a small hole in the back of the device.

When the device reset, it was as if the e-ink had exploded. “Amazon Kindle” was now visible behind the text, and dark and white streaks were much worse (see picture). The text was basically illegible.

The Amazon helper explained that my device was out of warranty (it had been covered until June) but that I had two options: I could buy a Kindle 2 at full price, $299, or they could ship me a discounted original Kindle for $180. I said I was a bit reluctant to shell out money for a device that might not last another two years, especially with so many other competing toys being rumored. And I certainly wasn’t going to pay $180 for a beta device that “had a lot of problems” that had been solved for the Kindle 2. We went around a bit, and I could hear her whispering to a supervisor.

When we ended the conversation, I told her I wanted to be marked down as dissatisfied.

I then posted what happened on Twitter, in between denial-of-service attacks from Russia. I also used my iPhone to post a picture on my Posterous page.

By going public, I am tying my hands, ethically. Even if Amazon changed its mind, I couldn’t accept a replacement unit or even a discount at this point, lest someone suggest I’m using my position as a journalist to get a better deal than anyone else. And that’s fine. I just want to warn others who might face the same problem.

Today, somebody named Irshad of Amazon wrote in response to my follow-up email:

I’m sorry for any trouble that has been caused with regards to the Kindle device. I have reviewed your order, as well as the notes regarding your phone call to our Customer Service department on August 08, 2009. I know this may be frustrating; however, please understand that the One-Year Limited Warranty for your Kindle expired in June of 2009. We can’t offer warranty support or repair services for this Kindle. However, as one of my colleagues mentioned, we can send you a refurbished kindle with charges. If you’re interested in receiving a refurbished Kindle, please write back to us and let us know.

No, thanks. Kindle 1 prices on eBay range from $100 to $227, so I could probably get a better deal if I wanted another one of these.

I wrote yet another message to Amazon urging them to add some notes to their tech support guide on this problem. Customers should be warned that resetting an original Kindle with these symptoms might end up turning it into a useless brick. The customer might want to choose discretion and see if the device can be nursed through a few more months. (I am not the only one who has encountered this problem.)

(The following day, I tried resetting the Kindle again, with no effect. The e-ink problems persist on the screen even after the thing is fully powered down. I am tempted to disconnect the hard-wired battery, just for curiosity’s sake.)

As tempting as the new Kindles (the 2 and the DX) look, the rumors of an Apple tablet-sized iPhone-type device have kept me from taking the plunge. A full-color computing device with an e-book reader and continuous Kindle-like wireless would be a category-killer. [Update: See this.]

For now, I’ll live with the Kindle iPhone app. This morning, I canceled my NYT Kindle subscription, since that doesn’t work on the iPhone. That and reading my wife’s manuscripts was the main use I had for the Amazon device, though I am in the middle of a few books.

Oh, well. No doubt I would have moved on to some new device in the next six to nine months.

The fatal plane-helicopter crash over the Hudson on the same day put it all in perspective, too — there are worse things than a broken e-book reader.

I thought the @replies from my followers on Twitter were interesting (a selection):

(Sept. 21 update: To my surprise, I find myself returning to print books, reading them faster and appreciating the superior interface. And several readers have recommended the observations on Kindles vs. books in this excellent New Yorker piece by Nicholson Baker.)

April 2010 Update: I bought an Applie iPad and wrote about my experience with it.)

I am surprised by how well this list of iPhone apps I actually use has held up over the past few months. Most of the apps I’ve added in recent months have been games, none of them particularly amazing, although my daughter swears by one, Jelly Car. I have to admit, it is fun.

The only significant new application I’ve added is the Amazon Kindle for iPhone. It has quickly become one of my favorites. I actually find reading on it preferable to the clunky Kindle 1 in some ways. (I read most of this book on the iPhone.)

The application is free, but of course you need to own an Amazon Kindle and download some books. Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions don’t work, nor can you read documents you have sent to yourself or ebooks from sources other than Amazon (the original Kindle allows this). Unfortunately, Amazon and publishers have recently raised the cost of new Kindle books. The page-turning is easier than the Kindle 1, and of course the phone has a backlight, while the Kindle uses e-ink that is supposedly easier on the eyes but requires outside light. The coolest feature is the Whisper Sync: You are taken to the most recent page you read, whether on the phone or the Kindle.

Since October I’ve been experimenting here with some personal blogging. Why, you might ask, when I already blog at my job? Isn’t that a busman’s holiday? Perhaps. But I had plunked down money for this domain, and I had some ideas and obsessions to explore that didn’t fit in with my work. And I also wanted to conduct a few experiments.

When a blog is housed within a major news site, the metrics get hard to sort out. With some great content and breaking news, and a huge built-in audience, it is a simple matter to draw millions of views. (Palafo.com has drawn under 5,000 views in its entire existence, with who knows how many hundreds of those clicks attributable to family and friends.)

Blogging alone is a lot tougher, as some smaller news outlets and out of work journalists may be discovering the hard way. You have to rely on tools found in the wild — basic search, trackbacks, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Digg, reminding friends at parties that you have a blog, etc.

As it turns out, the free host WordPress.com offers some pretty good measurement tools on the back end. They won’t let me use Google analytics — how irritating — but the stats they provide are interesting. (No measurement of time spent, unique users and repeat visitors, or other ways to judge engagement, alas,)

Take a look at the chart up top (click to enlarge it). It shows day to day traffic for the last few weeks. Basically, all you need to know is that the peaks are when I blogged. The valleys show up when I took a break. No content, no readers. Simple enough. Without posts, the traffic dives off a cliff. This is one reason big commercial sites (both mainstream and indie) often blog shotgun style, throwing as much content to the search engines and feed readers and social networks as they can, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Over time, you do get some repeat visitors, but the Web audience is pretty fickle. They come for the content, and they don’t care too much who you are.

The peaks and valleys are more obvious in this week to week chart (click to enlarge):

As you can probably guess from this chart, without looking around the blog, my posting dropped off in recent weeks, from about two or three times a week to once a week. Some work projects came to a head, and I found it more rewarding and easier to Twitter in 140 characters for a potentially large audience than research and write complicated posts requiring photos and so forth. So I never did the planned posts about the New York Comic Convention, the trip to the Spa Castle in Queens, and any number of food-oriented posts. (There’s something about blogs and food.)

It was particularly labor-intensive because I was mostly writing about podcasts, which required hours of listening to audio, music (ditto), blogging/social media/books (hours of reading and Web surfing) and single-source coffees that required comparison shopping around town.

Before that wore me down I did learn a few things about what drives traffic to a little blog like mine in a far corner of the Web. Let’s look at the all-time top posts (click to enlarge):

The all-time top post was my advice on a computer problem I encountered: how to get rid of annoying IM coho bots. More about that later.

The No. 2 spot is taken by a list post of my favorite blogs. Web readers love lists, and bloggers love to be put on lists. I had not quite realized the significance of automatic trackbacks, but a lot of blogs use them, so when you link to them, they link back to you. Bloggers themselves will pay you a visit to see what you are saying about them. It is still a thriving form of social media.

Then there was my bio. Not surprising. Just about everyone landing here probably looks at it once.

My list of iPhone apps, updated a few times, also proved surprisingly popular. I put it out at a time when people were having a lot of trouble figuring out which apps were worth using, and there were hundreds of new ones. Plenty of other bloggers had the same idea. It helps to be an early adopter. That list is probably getting a little stale now. I’ve lost interest in tracking down every single cool app, now that I’ve settled on the set I need.

The biggest overall topic is podcasting. There are many directories but few that approach the topic in a systematic fashion. My approach was entirely idiosyncratic, and I would have stopped if I hadn’t discovered a small but interested audience out there. Podcasters, even commercially successful ones, are rather unreliable about posting reliable show notes or blog posts about their content. And as much as I love the iTunes store, the podcasting area is a bit of a disorganized mess, perhaps because the content is mostly free. That leaves a search void.

My coffee blogging also proved “popular” in the aggregate, because it was aimed at obsessives who are served by a network of blogs and sites that have been going out of business in the economic downturn. While many coffee experts have tried to blog, their expertise tends to be in making great coffee, not writing or blogging. There’s definitely an opportunity out there for a good writer who loves coffee and knows more about it than I do.

Any blog post about Twitter is bound to be a hit, especially if you mention it on Twitter. I know, having clicked through to a bunch of them. (The Jan. 23 one about my rules for following on Twitter is the high starting peak in the chart at the top of this post.)

The only real surprises on this list were the N+1 post, about a slightly obscure literary magazine with Luddite pretensions, and the “thoughtprints” post, about a very obscure theater production. Neither had a particularly good Web presence, so these posts filled a void in search results, apparently.

On to the top referring sites. The results below (click to enlarge) taught me that I was better off depending on the curiosity of strangers than the kindness of my friends. The numbers don’t lie. Twitter, an open, public platform, wins hands-down, over Facebook, a mostly closed platform where only my friends see my stuff.

Now, something doesn’t quite add up here. These stats don’t match the larger views listed by the post. But that’s often the case with Web metrics. They are suspect.

During this period I had about the same number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends. I promoted links to my blog on both sites — probably a little more often on Facebook, thinking people who knew me would show more interest in my stuff. Facebook is a closed system, and only my friends can see my profile. Twitter is open and even shows up in search. But Twitter followers far outperformed Facebook friends on click-throughs. Perhaps they prefer to stay on Facebook, chat and look at each others’ pictures. Twitter users seem to be more actively seeking out content.

The biggest surprise may be that Mahalo referral, which keeps on giving. I posted an answer on Mahalo about how to get rid of the instant-message coho bots, with a link to my longer blog post about it. Not only did that answer drive a lot of traffic, but a link to my post has been posted on numerous other blogs. Happy to help.

The rest of the referrers are an assortment of individual WordPress tags, people clicking links in email, Google reader RSS shares, stumbleupon links, and so forth.

Now, what about search? It doesn’t seem to have driven a lot of traffic (click to enlarge):

Not surprisingly, many lazy people just type the name of the blog in the search panel rather than bookmarking the site. I do the same thing. The top searched term on Google has been “Yahoo” for many years. This is one reason I picked a short, unusual name for my blog that (I hope) is easy to remember. The other terms are assorted podcast, coffee and blog topics that I briefly mentioned, including the unusual phrase “janky vegetables” from the “Faire du Camping” episode of You Look Nice Today, which is not janky at all.

Most of the few incoming links were trackbacks from posts or blogs I mentioned, and stuff related to the instant-message coho problem.

Now, of course, it is a truism on the Internet that if you send people away with links, they will come back. Where did this blog send people?

Click to enlarge the chart. The greatest beneficiary here is my own Twitter profile, followed by my Facebook profile.

The other links are mostly blogs from my list, podcast sites from the reviews, and assorted links that have appeared in the feeds at the left of the blog. (WordPress makes it very easy to share links and feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Google Reader and so forth, without having to manually post anything here on the blog.)

The most interesting result had nothing to do with traffic here on the blog. I started posting a lot on Twitter in part to promote this blog, as well as share other links I found while looking for stuff to write about on the blog. Then people started following me there, I became part of a community, and I ended up with a bigger, more reliable audience there than here. Click on this Twittercounter chart, for the last three months:

That’s remarkable. I’ll be thinking about Twitter some more and eventually share thoughts here on the blog that require more than 140 characters. I could obviously use the traffic.

Update: After two blog posts, four hours and some promotion on Facebook and Twitter the chart was happily spiking again (at right). Most of the clicks came from Twitter, followed by Facebook, Google Reader and assorted tags here on WordPress blogs. Plus one click from Mahalo Answers to the IM coho post.

{Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.]

For 99 cents I downloaded Ocarina, an app from Smule that turns an iPhone into a version of that ancient flute-like instrument. You press glowing “finger holes” on the touchscreen and blow into the microphone to play [Video].

That’s fun, but Ocarina does more than that. The app also uses the location software and a Google-Earth style globe to let you rotate the earth and listen to others play on their phones around the world. As they play one by one, visual images of the notes stream upward, as you watch from space. Around the globe, patches of glowing white show what are apparently concentrations of signals, particularly on the coasts of the United States and in Europe. One soloist sent a lonely tune up from an island of Hawaii.

It seems the perfect instrument for the job. Halting, ghostly renditions of “Amazing Grace,” “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” “Happy Birthday,” and “Ode to Joy,” reach for the stars one by one. You can click a heart to show your appreciation for the particularly talented ones. It’s just cool. You feel connected with other musical beings on the planet. GPS broadcasting! Imagine what else could be broadcast through those mikes.

The Smule site advises, “For best results, blow softly, as if you’re blowing kisses.” It insists on calling the iPhone “your ocarina.”

My daughter and I each gave it a shot. Our efforts sounded more like free-form jazz. Somehow I missed this app when it first came out earlier this month, and my older-generation iPhone apparently required the 2.2 firmware update first. But it’s one of those apps that is sure to wow a friend, divert a fidgety kid or pass the time. I am sure some talented musicians will find ways to amaze us. I recently added it to my list of favorite third-party iPhone apps.

Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009. The old list is below.

Last updated April 11, 2009 I am surprised by how well this list held up. The updated NYTimes application is a great improvement over the first version, which I had stopped using, because it was slow and crashed so frequently. I have also added the Amazon Kindle for iPhone application. I still use these apps with some frequency: Google Mobile App, Twitterific, Facebook, Zenbe lists, Remote, Evernote, Amazon and Wikipanion. For restaurant, bar and services information, I still prefer the simpler IWant and Yelp to the flashy Urbanspoon roulette. The upcoming iPhone 3.0 software will eliminate my need for Writeroom, which allows e-mail messaging in landscape mode. As for games, my daughter swears by one new addition, JellyCar, and her favorites, Toybot and de Blob. My fascination with the time-wasting Bejeweled has ebbed, and nothing has really replaced it, unless you count Twitter.

The List Most of the third-party applications on my iPhone were free; none cost more than $9.99. I went a little crazy downloading apps when the store opened on iTunes. Some of them, like the Urbanspoon restaurant roulette app, proved more gimmicky than useful. And they started to drag down the performance. So I have been winnowing the list. Here are the third-party apps I actually open on a regular basis (some of them daily, all of them at least once every couple of weeks), roughly in the order they appear on the phone.

• Google Mobile App Search your phone, search the Web. This app moves to the top of the list with voice-activated search and other improvements. It not only searches the Web, but also your contacts and other data on your phone (the new iPhone operating system now does this as well). The word recognition is about 60 percent accurate, which can be frustrating, but I have hopes they’ll keep tweaking it, because, hey, it’s Google. That’s what Google does. I also have the mind-blowing toy Google Earth app. Updated 8/17/09.
• MightyDocs A simple concept: Free offline access to your text Google docs. I downloaded this app a while ago but have been using it a lot more, because people at the office have started sharing a lot live memos through Google. The latest version has basic spreadsheet support, which was missing in the original. And it’s still free.
• Twitterfon pro is my new choice for a Twitter client. The free version is fine, too. The interface is superior to the versions of Twitterific and Twinkle, which I had included in earlier versions of this list. Updated 8/17/09.
• Kindle for iPhone In many ways, the e-book reading experience is better than the actual Kindle. The application is free, but of course you need to own an Amazon Kindle and download some books. Kindle newspaper and magazine subscriptions don’t work, nor can you read documents you have sent to yourself or ebooks from other sources than Amazon. The page turning is easier than the Kindle 1, and of course the phone has a backlight. The coolest feature is the Whisper Sync: It takes you to the most recent page you read, whether on the phone or the Kindle.New.
• iWant For when you just want to quickly find a nearby restaurant, bar or gas station, without gee-whiz graphics to impress your friends.
• NYTimes The 2.0 version of this application is much improved. The articles download faster, you can bookmark them and share them via e-mail. In general, it seems a lot less buggy and no longer hangs or crashes. I love to open this app and download the day’s paper before heading into the subway. There is a menu that shows all the photos from the paper — click one to pick a story. It can store up to five days’ worth of news. And unlike the Amazon Kindle, which I also use to read the paper, it includes NYT blog posts. Updated review.
• Facebook Nicely put together, attractive, with intuitive navigation of the Facebook site. On a phone, in a line, it’s a way to catch up with people. One bonus: It still resembles the old Facebook interface, which is a relief compared to the updated and overloaded Facebook Web site.Updated review.
• Writeroom A document creator that can be used to easily write emails with the keyboard in a horizontal position, not something that mail currently allows. (It will have that feature when the iPhone 3.0 firmware is released later this year).Updated review.
• Amazon So you go into the bookstore and you see a book you want and you type the name into this app’s search box and probably find it cheaper, with free delivery if you have Amazon Prime. Maybe you just snap a picture for the “You asked us to remember” experimental function. Amazon will try to find a similar item in its store. It worked the first time for me with a fairly poor quality picture of an obscure book’s cover; no bar code required. Do you feel guilty? Do you hide what you are doing from Barnes & Noble employees? That’s your business. Great app. Just watch out for the one-click — the journey from looking something up to an immediate impulse buy is nearly frictionless. New.
• Airsharing Drag and drop Word, Excel, PDF and many other files via WiFi to the phone, where you can read them pretty well and transfer them to other computers. (Need to download software for the computer.) I don’t use it that much, but it is handy. MightyDocs has supplanted it; most of the documents I need I keep in Google Docs.Updated review.
• Zenbe Lists Of the hundreds of to-do lists, this one is pretty good. You don’t have to bother to sign up for Zenbe’s Web services and tools to use the free iPhone app.
• Last.fm, Pandora, AOL Radio In that order. All great versions music solutions using Internet radio. Customize music to your tastes. I have removed Simplify, an iTunes library syncing application, because I couldn’t get it to work reliably. Maybe I need a 3G phone. Updated review.
• Remote Turn the phone into a full-featured iTunes remote for your computer/stereo or Apple TV. Browse your media library in the palm of your hand. Still one of the greatest applications if you have an Apple TV.
• Ocarina Turn your iPhone into a musical instrument and connect with phone-musicians around the globe. A fun app to show friends, though the novelty wears off. Updated review.
• Yelp The user-rating restaurant/bar/etc site powers many other location-based restaurant apps, so you might as well use Yelp’s app, which works well and is attractive.
• AIM Why pay for SMS when you can send an instant message at no charge? Granted, texting is an Apple standard app, and thus better integrated than IM. You can’t use AIM with other apps running, so you have to disconnect this if you want to take a phone call, open up Safari or e-mail. But sometimes you need to locate an IM contact online and chat, and this app is handy for that. It may work better with the iPhone 3.0 firmware, which may allow apps to run in the background.Updated review.
• 1Password The day you lose your phone, you’ll be happy the person who found it doesn’t have access to all your sites, accounts and passwords. This secures and encrypts them, and it syncs with the passwords on your computer. (This app was free, but you do have to pay for 1Password software for your Mac itself).
• Evernote Save sites, Web clips and docs on the Web, look at them on your phone and computer; sync them. I may start using this more often, now that it has been integrated with Twitter. Updated.
• Wikipanion Look it up on Wikipedia with one touch. But please don’t cite it in your term papers if you are one of my wife’s students. I tried a few Wikipedia apps and settled on this one for its easy lookup functions.
• SayWho A simple voice dialer. Press the screen while saying the name of the person you want to call, and a list comes up in contacts. Works pretty well, even for a mumbler like me. Free. I seem to have stopped using it lately; I don’t make enough phone calls to make it worth my while.
• Bejeweled, Hero of Sparta, Toy Bot Diaries, de Blob, Stone, Scrabble, Metasquares, Enigmo, Tetris, Super Monkey Ball, DizzyBeeFree, BattleAtSea, Bubblewrap, Morocco, Cannon Game, FootballLite, The Stone of Destiny, Jelly Car, Labyrinth These are among the better iPhone games, all of them taking advantage of the touchscreen and/or accelerometer in clever ways. Good for distracting 8-year-olds and yourself on long car, train or plane rides.
• Shazam and Midomi Amuse your friends. Hold Shazam up to a playing music source, and it identifies the song. Midomi is similar, but you can also say lyrics or hum to get a list of possible song titles. The link shows a Shazam-Midomi face-off; Shazam won for reliability and usefulness. Both are free and worth having, although the novelty of these party tricks wears off eventually.
• doyoufeed.com A Web site, not a downloaded app. It will iPhonify any blog or site (or several feeds) and give you a tinyurl address for it. (Here is Palafo.) Then you can bookmark a Webclip on your iPhone iphone home screen. Maybe one day the owners will fix the spelling of “Thursday” in the timestamp code. New URL, fixed.

Note: I no longer have a jailbroken iPhone, which allows you to run software not available through iTunes. I do miss some of those pirate apps, but I just can’t be bothered with it anymore. I’d rather not risk downloading some wonky or malicious app that hasn’t been blessed by Apple.


Posted in iPhone Apps Tagged: AIM, Amazon, Apple, apps, Bejeweled, computers, Facebook, Google, iphone, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iTunes, macs, music, NYT, software, technology, Twinkle, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/10/14/iphone-apps-i-actually-use/feed/ 5 palafo img_00012