iPhone 2.0 apps

I download the iphone2.0 update this week and have been trying out some free apps from the itunes appstore. here's the ones i've kept (so far):


Remote

Best of the ones I've downloaded. I can control my itunes library from anywhere in the house. now i just need to pick up an airport express to stream music to my stereo.

Shazam

You tell it to figure out what music is playing in the room, and it does. most of the time. it does remarkably well considering distance to source, the reverb in the room, etc. Doesn't do so well if someone nearby is talking, not surprisingly.


Google Mobile App

Searches your phone for string matches. nice, since apple still hasn't given me a way to search my contacts.

PhoneSaber

Minutes of fun. but it is pretty hilarious, even if it doesn't track movement terribly well. good for showing off.

Labyrinth LE

this was one of my favorite toys as a kid. got one for my nephew, he was profoundly uninterested. what's wrong with kids these days? anyway, this game is pretty fun, but the free version has only 10 mazes and it takes only a few minutes to go through them all. still, it too is good for showing off.

nice job on the ballistics, and the mechanism (tiling the iphone back and forth) is more intuitive than the actual game (two knobs).

WHERE

it's a googlemaps tie-in, but has shortcuts for gas stations (it missed some by my house), starbucks et. al. But the most compelling feature to me is the Buddy Beacon, which allows you to add friends and then tells you where they are. neat, huh? i thought it'd be great for finding friends in a crowd, or see where they are while you're waiting at a restaurant. Sadly, i tried it with Rick, and it put him in midtown, near 45th and 7th: he was in Brooklyn at the time. perhaps it does better with a proper GPS phone (which neither i nor Rick have).

Urbanspoon

You shake the phone and it finds a restaurant in your area. you can select the neighborhood, the type of cuisine, and the price (1-4 dollar signs). But -- it will find places MILES from the neighborhood you picked. and though it allows you to "lock down" the 3 parameters, it will find stuff that outside your parameters.

it does give you the address (and you can get to google maps from there) and you can read the reviews. but once you go to that webpage, it opens it in its own kind of browser, instead of taking you to safari. so you *don't* get the benefit of landscape mode, text resizing or that neat double-tap focus-in thing. overall, a bit disappointing.