The Best and Worst of CES for iPhone Lovers

This last week, Chris, Tony and I made the trip to CES to take a look at some of the best new gadgets and accessories for the iPhone. After walking 743.9 miles, shaking 16,984 hands, and trading business cards with 3.5 gajillion people, here’s are some of the highlights of what we saw.

FloTV Mophie Battery Case – Mophie announced an interesting new version of their great juice pack. This new version will include a FloTV receiver allowing you to watch broadcast TV right on your iPhone. They include the FloTV receiver yet the unit is only 2mm thicker than the usual Juice Pack. So far the only downside we’ve heard is the price of the FloTV service which is expected to be about the same as it is for other devices. Full details are still short, but we’ll let you know more as soon as we find it out.

Tunebug – Tunebug is a tiny little interesting speaker for your iPhone. Not much larger than a couple matchbooks stacked on top of each other, this isn’t a normal speaker. Tunebug uses a patented technology called SurfaceSound that turns anything you set it on into a speaker. The coolest implementation is a Tunebug that straps to you bike helmet and connects to your iPhone using Bluetooth allowing you to listen to music while riding your bike without plugging up your ears and tuning out all of the sounds around you. Obviously a huge breakthrough for biker safety. The other implementation connects to your iPhone (or any device) with a normal speaker wire and sets on your desk, turning your desk into the speaker. The Tunebug will be available soon at $119 for the Bluetooth version, $69 for the wired version.

Zoll PocketCPR – As amazing as the iDevices are, they really don’t do much in the ways of saving lives. Sure, there are some apps that are probably helpful in the medical community, but life saving isn’t quite the iDevice’s forte. The Zoll PocketCPR changes this with an app that shows how to perform CPR with accuracy by using the accelerometer to judge compression depth. At the booth, we heard a story or a doctor who used the app and was complimented by a nurse who hadn’t seen proper CPR done by a doctor in a long time. The app hasn’t been officially approved by the FDA yet, but Zoll expects the approval to come shortly. [More Info]

Blio Reader – we got a chance to get a demo of the iPhone version of the much talked about Blio Reader. A multi-platform ebook reader announced at CES. Blio does a few things that other ebook readers don’t do. For one, there’s text to speech technology. Also included are some pretty good options for different ways to read text on the device including both as printed and text versions. Obviously this will be a much more interesting app if the rumored tablet/slate is released. Blio is still a few weeks off, but it looks to be a great platform. We’ll bring you more as soon as we can.

L5 Universal Remote – The L5 Universal Remote, while not quite as universal as the Logitech Harmony due to its lack of bluetooth connectivity (PS3), but is quite an amazing remote replacement unit. With the included IR attachment, the L5 Universal Remote instantly learns your remotes features without needing to plug in those pesky product codes. To me, there’s really nothing that excites me quite as much as the prospect of controlling my entire house with my iDevice. The L5 will be available soon.

Continue reading The Best and Worst of CES for iPhone Lovers »

Four Of The Best Photo Editing Apps For Your iPhone!

When taking photos on the move, sometimes it pays to have photo editing apps. After all, you’re not going to tweet that picture without a bit of increased contrast, or brightness – right? It’s a well-known fact nowadays that the majority of photos we see on the web have being edited in some way in a graphics package such as Adobe Photoshop. But what if you can’t get to your computer and need reliable and feature filled editing applications on the move?

Being a keen photographer and designer, I thought it’d be fun to give you my low-down on the photo editing apps I personally think you should have on your phone. I’ll explain why I think you should have them, and what features and benefits I like most about each application. Here we go!

PhotoForge

Definitely one of the more fully-featured photo editing App Store offerings, PhotoForge (in my opinion) should have you pretty much covered for your mobile editing needs. Just like all the editors I’m about to feature, the app will allow you to open, edit and save a photo to your iPhone’s camera roll. What makes PhotoForge a great pick for this over it’s competition is it’s feature set. As well as allowing you to rotate and crop your photo, the app also offers a wide range of both adjustment and visual effects which are comparable to Adobe Photoshop on a mobile level.
Continue reading Four Of The Best Photo Editing Apps For Your iPhone! »

148Apps Named to PC Magazine’s Top 100 Web Sites of 2009!

All of us here on team 148Apps were very honored to find out last week that we were named to PC Magazine’s Top 100 Web Sites of 2009. It’s an amazingly huge honor and a great validation of what we’ve been trying to do here at 148Apps. You’ll find us on the list under Undiscovered Tech sites.

We’re proud to be the only iPhone dedicated site on the list. We won’t let it go to our heads though. We are going to do our best to continue to lead with a goal of being on the list again next year. Just hopefully we’ll be in the discovered section by then.

Thanks to all of our fantastic writers and our passionate readers. We couldn’t have done it without each of you.

This is probably a good time to ask — what do you want to see added / changed / removed from 148Apps. Let us know in the comments, or send me an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Cheers,
Jeff

A Few of My Favorite Macworld Things

Had a great time at Macworld this year. Got to put a lot of names with faces – it was great meeting you all. And saw some really cool things.

Read on for some of my favorites from the Expo like Slingbox Player, Griffin Air Curve, BeeJive 2.0, TubeToGo, TileStack, and more.

Continue reading A Few of My Favorite Macworld Things »

Announcing the 2008 Best App Ever Awards

148apps.com is proud to announce the launch of the 2008 Best App Ever Awards. A new site to allow you to nominate the apps and games you best love for over 30 awards including the title Best App Ever. We want to honor the best in iPhone apps and games, not just the best selling.

The awards are now open to receive nominations for apps and games. Nominations end on December 30th.

Once all nominations are totaled, verified, and calculated, we’ll take the top 5 nominated from the site and combine those with 5 nominations from the list of bloggers, developers, and industry people we have been contacting about these awards. That will give us 10 nominations for each category. In addition, the 10 apps that get the most votes across all categories will compete for the title of Best App Ever.

On December 31st we’ll post the nominees for all categories and voting will start. Winners will be announced on January 7th, 2009 at the MacWorld Expo.

Head on over to http://bestappever.com to nominate your favorite apps.