My favorite thing about living in a city: not having to have a car. My least favorite thing about living in a city: not having a ride home and struggling to get a cab.
The free iPhone app Taxi Magic was made for me — and anyone else who ever needs to use taxis. The radical “magic” booking is one-click taxi ordering and is supported in 25 major cities. For cities that aren’t on the list, Taxi Magic can still hook you up with the numbers.
Even if you don’t take cabs a lot, at some point you may be traveling and need transportation, and guess who’s gonna be your best friend when you’re shivering on a lonely street corner, miles from your hotel?
Smule, the company behind innovative applications like the Sonic Lighter and Ocarina, is easily one of my favorite developers on the App Store. The company has developed a suite of advanced technologies revolving around audio information, which allows it to share music on a global scale and (in the case of an app launching today) to use audio to relay information between two nearby cell phones.
Today Nico Becherer, the developer behind the hit application Face Melter, has released the first third party application to use Smule’s core technology. The application, called Electric Smoke, allows users to play with a virtual cigarette. It may not sound particularly exciting, but the technology behind it is impressive – if you’ve got another iPhone handy with Sonic Lighter installed, you can use it to light your virtual cigarette.
Using Smule’s ‘Sonic Modem’ technology, the two phones actually relay information using sound (they literally beep at each other), which means the apps will work even if there isn’t an internet connection available. Smule has lent its IP networking technology to Electric Smoke free of charge in return for promoting its Smule Sonic Lighter app.
While the technology behind it is very cool, the application itself isn’t particularly fun. After launching Electric Smoke, you’re presented with a very nicely rendered unlit cigarette.
Once you’ve got your cigarette ablaze, you can inhale and blow on the iPhone’s microphone as you watch virtual smoke fill the screen (you can manipulate the smoke by running your fingers across it). The game keeps track of how long it takes for you to burn through each cigarette, making for a mildly amusing game that will leave you both lightheaded and winded.
Because Electric Smoke is at least jokingly meant as a substitute for smoking actual cigarettes, the app offers a long listing of random trivia detailing how much money you’re saving and the time you’ve added to your lifespan (other notable factoids include how much you’ve helped the ozone layer). It also offers a smoking-related statistic every time you launch the app, likely as a way to show that it isn’t meant to promote smoking – it’s meant to raise awareness (or help you quit).
It came as no surprise that the iPhone 3G takes the top spot as your favorite cell phone of 2008 (with 51 percent of the vote!), given that it was also your favorite new Apple product this year as well. And let’s be honest — it’s a known fact that I am a iPhone fan, so I’d have to agree with you that the iPhone 3G is the clear favorite in 2008.
You can’t really go wrong with the iPhone’s speedy 3G connectivity, and endless amounts of Apps that help make your life easier, more fun, and get you to where you need to go faster. I know that if I didn’t have my iPhone, it would be like missing a limb, and then where would we be?!
Today in shady Chinese electronics manufacturer news, we’ve got a whopping three iPhonies vying for your (counterfeit?) dollars. iFone, which isn’t another of my clever puns but is actually a very brazenly-named company, announced the iFone 3G and the two-for-one ripoff iFone X1. Meizu, who wins the dubious title of the classiest in the bunch, has finally made its M8 official on its website.
The iFone X1 looks like a Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, but with a touchscreen and without a QWERTY keyboard. The interface, however, is still an iClone, which doesn’t even make sense. The least these guys could aim for is consistency, you know? Short video of the interface below.
