iPhone Mania
iPhone 3G
Ok so the iPhone 3G has been out for a week now. My impressions are Wow. My hands got on a 3G iPhone at my local ATT store here in Sandusky Ohio. I currently have the first generation and have no plans to upgrade any time soon. Now from my experiences I can fairly say that this is the greatest phone that I have ever had. Every where that I go I am sharing my own uses of the phone with others. As far as uses in education I have many. I have used my iPhone to show others movies that my class has made, pictures of things that I need to remember, and even to share music with my class and football Players. I love it and the uses have only gotten larger with the opening of the App Store.
In case you have been out for the last 6 months, the iPhone has oppened its OS up to 3rd party developers to write native applications. So far I have downloaded 18 different apps that I have been using. 16 of them were totally free applications. The two that I have paid for are a voice memo application and a game called Enigmo which is a great problem solving game. Rather than review all of my applications, I will review only a couple and when I see fit I will try a couple more.
Shazam: Shazam is a song recognition program that I see as the most refined and wonderful pice of software that I have used probably my whole life. This program is a song recognition software that can figure out what song is playing, the artist, and the album with only a 10 second recording of the music. I have tried this at home, in the car, and even at a shopping mall. It has worked each and every time. If you hear a song you want more information about all you have to do is complete a 10 second recording and it somehow communicates to its own servers and a very short time later (about 5 seconds usually) it will provide you with the song name, artist, and album. It will also provide you with a link to download the song in some cases if it is available. Love the app. Not sure how to use it in my classroom yet but I am sure I will find a way.
Remote: Ok now this little software company called Apple Inc. even got into the mix and wrote their own app for the phone. This app takes control of your iTunes Library on your computer and allows you to play through your MAC or apple TV whatever you would like to. It is much nicer than using the apple remote itself to remotely control your music library. You get to see the music artwork and browse wherever you would like when you use this app. The only thing that is not supported by this is cover flow which is more of an aesthetic thing anyways.
Well those are two must have programs that I have been messing with this week. I hope if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch that you enjoy the software that has been released and please provide be with any apps that seem to help you out.
