There are more and more turn-by-turn navigation apps coming out for the iPhone 3GS; iGo My Way app for the iPhone 3G/3GS is one of them and costs $79.99. iGo can be found in other stand alone car gps units that you can buy from electronic stores, the interface is similar to the stand alone units. But does this iPhone app stand up to the stand alone units?
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Navigon is back in the North American market with their Navigon MobileNavigator for iPhone / iPhone 3GS running OS 3.0 or higher. We are quite excited to review it, the app seems to be very similar to their in car devices with a clean interface and good feature set.

One big difference with other iPhone apps is that the 1.2 gigs of maps are downloaded into your iPhone, so you do not have to pay any data charges or monthly fees to use this app or worry about cellular signal dead zones.

The North American app costs a $99 from the Apple Itunes app store and is presently on sale till August 31st 2009 for a rock bottom price of $69. There are also versions for many other countries as well, including a version for all of Europe. Continue Reading »

QR Codes are a fantastic idea. Mostly. And yes, I’m talking about a technology that has been around for quite some time and it really didn’t take off outside of Japan, but go with me on this.

I know that you lot would have seen them before and dismissed them as futuristic ideas that will never work on TV shows alongside beliefs that we will have flying cars and robot housemaids, but strangely, two-dimensional barcodes that can be read by modern mobile handsets and actually have uses.

The main use is, as everyone probably already knows about, for mobile websites. Cans of Pepsi here in the UK have these codes plastered onto the side, allowing you to waste lots of your phone contract’s data allowance seeing effectively an advert for a soft drink.
Some generator sites will even allow you to use QR Codes to show a plain-text message, for example “Put that phone away and get back to work”.
The Pet Shop Boys have even decked out a music video with tons of QR Codes. Odd, but that’s what we expect.

But my current favourite use for QR Codes has to be the supplemental content for adult magazines, as seen in Japan. The great Danny Choo has, whilst going for a medical check-up, taken some photos of this phenomenon which charges the user a high rate for each photo they see. Of course the photo consists of an altered form of the magazine, usually where the subject wears less clothing, and this does seem to be quite a good monetizing effort. It also means that the magazine itself, despite being adult in nature, has the most mundane photos inside, rendering it relatively safe to look at in public. Although weird…

As many of you that read one of the other blogs will know, I have owned my 3 Skypephone for a good few months now. I loved the idea of being able to use Skype on a mobile phone without resorting to some cobbled together solution involving extra equipment nor a computer. I blathered about it being a smart and useable handset that turned out to be suprisingly cheap over at Blatantly Random, but now that I have lived with it for a few months, the honeymoon period is over.

In a nutshell, it’s a normal candybar mobile phone. It’s cheap, it’s functional for calls, texts and mms, and it has hefty Skype integration, allowing you to call people from your phonebook on either their mobile, housephone or their Skype client if it’s accepting calls. The important part is that 3 UK offer this Skype functionality for no extra charge, so long as you are either on a contract or on a prepay solution. It does the jobs as described, but it does have it’s faults….

The most obvious problem is cosmetic. Rubbery latex covers most of the handset which, despite being a bit odd in terms of coating, is lovely to touch. Sadly, the coating for the removable back cover has mostly peeled off. Weirdly it is just this back cover that has the problem, since the rest of the phone seems to look ok.

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