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Ok. My new year gift to myself. A brand new infectious art for my iPhone. Aahh…it’s a stunner of a design art.

You should go out and check some cool art for your iPhone, laptops, cars or maybe even your office / home walls. And if you need a neat 10% off your purchase, then use the coupon code “chipmunk” (good through 6/1/09 only).

Just a few screenshots - the before and after story :P

My iphone before

After pimpin' my iphone with infectious art

The iphone app store (for India) has some really pretty awesome apps, both for fun and work. Some of the apps that I’m literally addicted to on my iphone is “YouNote”, “Parking Lot”, “Air Sharing” and “Fring” (more on the best apps available on the Indian app store, coming in a different post).

But there is just one little app, that I find missing on the app store. Maybe it won’t be use to a lot of people, but it is certainly useful to me.

The idea is simple. The app lets me set my to-do things, and then just reminds me on time. Nothing great. Except that it should be distance-based, and not time or date based. Or if possible, on the basis of time left to reach my destination. A simple example : I live in Bangalore these days, and visit delhi once in about 4-6 months, but I never know exactly when, and most of the ticket-booking is all done at the last moment. So, effectively, I don’t really have much time to check up on things before leaving. So, when I reach delhi, and am about say 5 kms from my home, this app should remind me of things I need to do; i.e, clean up my messages, remove the indecent stuff :P , etc. Yes, and obviously, this could be better, if this app could determine my instantaneous speed (based on some past data and some heuristics) and tell me that i’ll probably reach home in 10 minutes, so this cleanup is a real priority now :D

If given a chance, I would probably be using this app almost everyday. Telling me to wake up 5 minutes before I reach the office in the mornings, or home in the evenings. I could watch even more movies late nights, having the luxury to catch up on my sleep in the mornings and evenings :)

Anyways, this might not be a great app, but it sure is definitely better than a lot of crap and useless ones on the app store these days. Is anyone listening ???

It’s been exactly a month today since I first got my 16GB iPhone (after waiting for a week to get my preferred color - white), and I thought to do a small review on that.

First up, iPhone is NOT entirely meant for mobile addicts. Instead, as apple’s main business strategy, the focus always has remained on a particular segment of users who are tech-savvy, web-people just in love with this beauty. So, please no hard feelings if I contradict some of the popular notions about iPhone doing the rounds in the Indian blogosphere since it’s launch in August (or rather since it’s price launch).

• The iPhone is Sturdy - Believe it or not, the gadget only looks fragile and weak, but in reality it is pretty robust, and as in my case, it easily stands out falling on a very hard surface. I just happened to drop it on the floor, and literally stopped breathing for the time since it slipped out of my hand till I picked it up and noticed that it didn’t even have a scratch (forget the point of breaking the delicate beauty). I can say the same for any Nokia phone, but when it comes to Sony Ericsson, I am not too sure. I have had a similar experience with a Sony phone that I held previously, and boy-oh-boy it was a nightmare after that.
• No Bluetooth ?? - Not exactly. The iPhone supports bluetooth, but it does not support communicating with other similar devices apart from bluetooth headset, and maybe some other apple product. It is a definite problem, but in any case I have never used bluetooth too much for sharing and transferring data with my friends previously also. So, it really doesn’t make any difference to me, but it might (will) make a difference to a lot of people. Though the good news is that the bluetooth sharing can be easily achieved using software updates. So watch out for all the firmware updates from apple; we might soon have bluetooth in iphone, as like other phones.
• No custom ringtones too?? - Not exactly again. I have the starting guitar seconds of the song “pichle saat dino mein” as my ringtone. Although, it is a little tricky to set your custom ringtone. Either you have to buy a song from the apple store and then convert it into a ringtone (which will effectively cost you $1.98 for that!!) or you can have a software like “iPhoneRingtoneMaker” to do all the dirty little stuff for stuff while you sit back and just select your favorite song. But again, iPhoneRingtoneMaker will set you back by $8 one time. One can get the pirated software from anywhere on the internet for free. I actually did the same :)
• Battery Life is superb - Yes indeed. One full recharge will probably last for a maximum of day and a half if you are using the iPod a lot (as I do), playing games, browsing etc. Using it only as a phone, the battery lasts for an average 2 days.
• App Store ?? - A lot of apps. A lot of good apps (the point of my next article). And a lot of good apps for free
• iPod - Too good. The earphones just blast off with quality sound. All the music management is done by iTunes and synced to the iphone. A new update to iTunes is addition of a feature called “GENIUS”, which is basically a smart music suggestion system. You choose a song, and it helps build a list of similar songs that you may find interesting to listen to at that moment.
• Camera - The camera in the iPhone is just a mere 2mp camera, but effectively, the camera is equivalent to any 3.2mp camera in terms of picture quality. The iphone also lacks video capture, which is one of the biggest negatives for people who use the camera a lot to shoot videos (I do :) )
• The touch screen - It’s big ! It’s clear ! And it just moves on your fingers ! :) . In terms of the user interface and the design, nobody can actually beat apple right now (not even google with the G-Phone). The interface is just too intuitive to not to love it :)

Although the list is exhaustive, I just chose to write a few points that I felt were more important than a lot of others. So far, my experience with the iphone has been excellent (although if you plan to buy the iphone, then buy an LCD cover immediately, or the scratch marks will ruin the fun), and as a friend of mine asked me - “Do you recommend buying the iPhone ??” - my answer would be “Yes, if you are a connoisseur of beauty and design, or else just wait for six months and buy the phone for 25k”.

But really, whatever be the case, I do not expect the iPhone to be available for 16k. Those of you, who expect this, and are writing all s**t since it’s actual price was revealed, my only suggestion would be - do not try to judge beauty when you don’t know how to value it.

This has to be one of the better iPhone apps - the wordpress app for iPhone. Nice nice :)

This definitely is one of the top 10 iPhone apps….easy to use, hassle-free and just enough for the main purpose of blogging - reading and writing :)

Just wish they add image support too soon, or maybe I am unaware of it right now.

Whatever happens, it is a great little app.

So, it’s been like ages since my last useless post, on even worthless topics. Umm (just trying to be a little modest there)

So, I just chalked out certain areas that I have been dying to write about in the last few months, and hopefully, I’ll be able to blog on certain of these topics in this week.

And yeah, I did change my blogging engine to Wordpress from Typo (no offense to Typo or anyone, but Typo just doesn’t seem to work on MT), and talking about MT - I switched over from ASO to MT hosting (more on that in the next few posts). And yeah, I also booked a 16GB Apple Iphone (white) amidst all the hoopla and controversies surrounding the price of this supaaa kewwll gadget (again. more on that later)