iPhone Accessories version 2

It is Good Friday! And what a Good Friday it is indeed here at Accessories for iPhone!  We have been lagging a bit with our blog updates since we had been preparing to launch our latest, and greatest revision 2.0 of AccessoriesforiPhone.com

Now that the site is live, and we have passed April Fool’s Day, you can be rest assured that this is no joke, and that the site launch is very real.  Please let us know what you think about the navigation the colors, the features, and what new products you want to see of course!  Also, we are cooking up some new products in our labs that will be heading into our website very soon.

Thanks!  Team AccessoriesforiPhone.com

Face Fighter iPhone App

Hello and welcome to another post at Accessories for iPhone.

This past weekend, we had the pleasure of becoming introduced to a new app, or rather a new iPhone game that we had not played, or heard of before.  It is called Face Fighter, and you can now download it from the App Store.  Additionally, it allows multiplayer capability via bluetooth.  You may think this is just another silly iPhone fighting game, and the answer is yes, and no.  No because it is so much more than that.

Face Fighter allows you to upload your own image to be used as your fighter.  But, it also allows you to upload a photo to be used for your “foe” in the game.  This can become increasingly fun as you are now pounding the face of your friend, loved one, brother, sister, etc, you get the picture.  And no, we are not advocate for violence, we are against it, but this is certainly fun in a humorous way.  When you connect to a friend via bluetooth to their iPhone, the fun becomes even better.  You each can see each other’s faces on the iPhone screens.  The punches, head butting, kicking, and with special moves hammering (with a hammer), you will be both laughing at the beating each of you will receive.  See video on how to play:

The gameplay itself if relatively simple, and very easy to pick up on.  It has five virtual buttons.  Block, punch, heavy punch, kick, and in the middle you have special move.  The special move button though needs to be filled up before you can activate it.  This is when you can have a wrench, or hammer to dish out some serious beating to your foe.

Our office had great fun with this iPhone app, and we are sure we are going to continue playing it more as we all have it on our iPhones now.

Until next time.

Accessories for iPhone

Siri iPhone App, Personal Assistant

Hello and welcome to yet another post on Accessories for iPhone.

Today we are going to do another review of an app which is fairly new, and one which we took great advantage of before Valentines Day weekend.  The app in question is called Siri, a personal assistant for the iPhone as they like to call it.

When we first read about Siri briefly from other forums, we thought it would be fairly similar to the Google App.  While being similar in that it has voice recognition, it goes one step beyond the Google App.  The voice recognition aspect of the app also happens to be the same one that is used in Dragon Dictation.

With Siri, when you first start it up, you are asked to fill in some information, such as your name, email, and phone number.  If you do not know why they are asking, you may forgo wanting to fill it out.  However, the reason behind asking you to fill it out is quite good, and really what makes Siri such a great application for the iPhone.

To give you a real world example of how Siri works, and how we used it ourselves, we would like you to imagine Valentines is coming up (which it already did), and you need to make a reservation to a restaurant.  You open up the Siri app, state the name of the restaurant and location (San Diego for us), and it will do a search for you.  Once it has found restaurant X, you state, “Reservation for two on Sunday February 14, at 6:00pm”.  Since you had previously entered your info before, you have no need to call the restaurant to give name, phone, or email.  They will be notified, and within moments, you will be notified via Siri (and email) of your confirmation.  However, this does not work for all the restaurants, and when it does not, it does suggest to you, “would you like to call said place?”.  You can check out their video below this text:

In addition to this great scenario we just explained, it also does show Yelp reviews of what other people have thought of the business you are interested in visiting.  All in all, we were very pleased with the App, and highly recommend it to anyone.

Until next time.

Accessories for iPhone

Knocking iPhone App review

Welcome to another day at Accessories for iPhone.

Thanks for tuning in again.  Today we wanted to review an amazing app that has been around since late 2009.  It is called Knocking.  It basically allows for Mobile to Mobile Live Sharing.  What this means is that for example if you are witness to an amazing event, or interesting event, and you want to share it with your friend(s), and/or family, you may do so live by simply “knocking” them and allow them to see Live what your iPhone’s camera is seeing.

We have tested this application both internally, and outside the office, and it has worked really well.  Sometimes there may be a slight lag, but that is usually fixed once flow has begun.  We had in fact one of our friends “knock” one of our iPhone while in Mexico.  We were able to see the sun, the sand, the pool, and the beautiful people bathing in the sun, while most of the country was freezing cold (yes even San Diego was cold at the time).

Knocking may also function as a video to iPhone conversation (one way though for now).  Basically, let’s say you are on the phone with Jim, and while on the phone you see something quite spectacular, and want to share that, without hanging up.  Well being on AT&T, and using iPhone’s Knocking App, you can do just that.  Simply press the Home button on your iPhone (after you put call on speaker mode), open up the Knocking App.  Knock your friend (all while talking on the phone), and voila!  You know have a phone call, while sharing video simultaneously.  You can even turn the video to show your face while talking!  Granted it is one way right now, but with time we believe there will be two way video sharing.  You may how it works in the official video from the Knocking Team below this text:

We would love to hear your stories.  Have you used Knocking?  How have you used it? Any cool and fun stories to share?  We would love to hear from you as always.

Cheers!

Accessories for iPhone

Google vs Bing, who will win the iPhone search?

Welcome to another post at Accessories for iPhone

If you have been following the news from the likes of Macrumors, you will have seen that there has been quite a discussion, or rather speculation on who Apple will choose to have as their default search engine.  Will it continue to be Google as the default Search Engine on all iPhones?  Or are these rumors holding some truth in speculating that Apple is indeed going to be working with Microsoft (again).

Fanboys of Apple will probably say that this should never happen, and if it does happen they will do a manual switch to Google.

Let us think about this a bit though.  Is Bing as awful as we all remember Live or MSN Search once was?  Polls and customer surveys suggest otherwise.  Bing may very well be as good, if not better than Google, and with people on their iPhone beginning to use it more extensively, perhaps Microsoft will become even better.  They certainly are showing some innovative signs with their WinMo 7 OS, which is becoming to be quite a contender on a speculative side.  We shall see.  As always, please send us your comments and opinions.

iPhone case

So.

It has been a while since we wrote our last entry here at Accessories for iPhone. We apologize for the delay .  This time our post will be about one of the product lines we carry.  Specifically it is about the Candy Series.  One of our staff members actually loves the color green, and naturally she chose to get and use the Sourpatch Case.  We were actually thrilled to see how her iPhone would fare with it, considering she is an extreme biker, a dual athlon athlete, and a girly girl who tosses her iPhone into her purse (bowling bag)!

It has been three months since she began using this case, and that iPhone with the case has been through some serious rides!  It has fallen out of her hand when biking, when running, fallen upon tiled flooring (our office), become air borne to crash into a wall – all without scratching the iPhone one bit!  The case though has surprisingly also fared very well.  Except the last crash occurred on cement, and it created a small fracture.

We know this is an unorthodox review of a case, but we thought that if the iPhone case could sustain such abuse from the likes of her, then it can surely protect your iPhone even better.  Unless you are in the Winter Olympics and doing some freestyle skiing!

As we always do here, we like to comment, write, and speculate on all things iPhone, from its OS, to devices or accessories connected to it, to the competition of the iPhone.  Hence, this piece today is about the answer of Google to the iPhone, and why we firmly believe that while Android is an amazing piece of open source OS, it cannot replicate the ecosystem of Apple’s iPhone; not while it is open source and modified by so many handset manufacturers.

At Accessories for iPhone, we firmly believe that one of the many reasons for the runaway success for the iPhone is not just because it is a “sexy” looking smartphone as many critics will have you think, but because of the amazing ecosystem that Apple has created around the iPhone from device, to OS, to Apps.  PC World recently wrote a piece called Six Reasons to Not Like Like Google’s Nexus One.  We especially have to agree with point Six (which many criticize Apple for), and that is the controlled ecosystem that Apple has created around the iPhone with the App store, one form factor (manufactures handset), and the ease of publishing your Apps to fit one form.  Fitting one form, this is a huge one we believe because unlike Android App developers, iPhone developers really need to only adhere to one screen size, one resolution, and only recently can make certain apps run faster/better in the 3GS models.  When you take a look at the Android Market, the developers there are forced to choose: Will they make apps for the Droid by Moto, Droid Eris by HTC, G2, MyPhone, HTC Hero, or the new Nexus One with the SnapDragon CPU by Qualcomm?  If you have been following Android news, you will see that HTC is coming with a multitude of Android handsets, as is Acer, Motorola, SonyEricsson, and much more.  You would think Android is set to take over the world, and that is indeed what some Android fans believe.  We are not denying that it is indeed a possibility that Android OS may very well become the de facto OS for smartphones.  But, and this is a huge but, will Android be able to deliver the same integrated ease of use, amazing user experience across the board not only for customers purchasing Android handsets, but also giving Android developers an even bigger reason to develop more Apps for Android?   We firmly believe that as it is right now, the answer is no.  Here is a list of why we believe it will not stack up against Apple’s iPhone:

1. 1. Different screen sizes (because different manufacturers trying to outdo the others)
2. 2. Different hardware inside each phone (difficult for App developers to choose from/less success)
3. 3. Confusing Android Market because not all Apps work for all Android handsets
4. 4. Not all Android handsets will run same OS version (Droid 2.01, Droid Eris 1.5, Nexus One 2.1)
5. 5. Restrictions set by Wireless carrier (Verizon forces Bing)
6. 6. Most important of all – Features that need to be enabled makes it a lose for customers!

Point six is actually one that David Pogue wrote about in his NY Times column and got tons of unjust and ridiculous criticism for from rabid Android fans.  If you want a more in-depth analysis and reason for why Android falls short next to the iPhone and its OS, please read Charlie Wolf’s report.

Until next time, thanks for reading, and please send in your comments, rants, or praises.

So, to start off the new year we would like to talk about what other blogs have predicted for the coming year.  Does the new iPhone still hold the buzz it always has had? Or has it been surpassed by Android?  The answer we believe is yes and no.  iPhone still hold the buzz, but a little less so perhaps, but it certainly has not been passed by Android (at least not yet).  True the Droid has made some waves across the smartphone industry, but they are being plagued by something we have always thought would be their achilles heel.  Namely when there are too many manufacturers competing with the same OS platform (Android), the consumer ends up losing because not all Android users have the same OS, nor will they be able to when the telecoms and handset manufacturers control the entire sphere of pushing out new updates.  What has gained immense buzz though is another (rumored) forthcoming Apple product – the MacTablet, or iSlate or whatever name they will end up giving it.  You may ask yourself why we are commenting on a device that is not an iPhone.  The answer is simple.  It may use the iPhone OS, or a variant of it, and thus we are interested in knowing how they will utilize it.

According to MacRumors, there are some claiming that it will have two different casings.  If that is true, will the Mac Tablet/iSlate come in a white casing like the current MacBook?  Will that mean that the other casing will be in aluminum a la MacBook Pro series?  Only time will tell.  But the most interesting tidbits we have heard so far is that the OS will be able to download from the App Store, and thus some developers have been asked to optimize their graphics and looks of their apps.  It will be interesting to see what happens.  Especially if launching with connection to the App Store, that would give the new users of the coming Apple product immediate access to 100K+ applications.

What are your thoughts? Send your comments in, and as always thanks for reading.

AccessoriesforiPhone Team

iPhone 4G concept for summer 2010

Hello, and welcome back from a long Thanksgiving weekend, or as we like to call it – Turkey bingeing holiday!  We at Accessories for iPhone are recovering from it, hence the late post.  But, fear not, for we have kept tabs on all the latest news about everything iPhone related, and as tradition has held since the first press release of the first generation iPhone, new rumors in the blogosphere and news outlets have begun their annual “new iPhone” spotted in the wild again.  This time around, MacRumors broke the story on a new iPhone spotted in the wild.  It is the first time that it has been spotted in the wild for field testing under the name iPhone 3,1.  These news also reached Mashable, Digg, and many more.  So…are we going to continue the report they have been so diligent in reporting?  The answer is no.  Instead, we will list what we would like to see in the new iPhone hardware wise, and in the new iPhone OS.  The new OS will probably also work for iPhone 3G [S] but not so sure about previous generations.

Here is the hardware we wish to see in new iPhone for Summer 2010:

• Faster dual processors (dual 1Ghz?)
• Better camera – beat the Motorola Droid by leaps! Perhaps 8MP?
• Built in LED flash for the camera
• Real Zoom (3x?)
• Front facing camera to catch up to Europe and Japan for video calls
• 512 MB RAM instead of current 256
• Built in NVidia gfx card
• 10 Hour battery life for 3G Talk

What we want to see in OS 4.0:

• Background Apps running simultaneously
• Google Voice available in App store
• Ability to change default background of iPhone OS
• Ability to Categorize Apps into “Stacks”

We are sure there are many more features people would like to see.  What we have written is but a small sample of what we could think of.  As always, we at Accessories for iPhone are always looking for new cool news about everything iPhone.  Tomorrow, we will post a review one of our iPhone cases.

We will let these two videos do the talking:

We here at Accessories for iPhone find these videos brilliant in their ability to point out something so simple, yet so important with the iPhone, and as the ads ask, can your Network do that!?