iPhone Guru

You want the iPhone 3GS but you don’t want to pay the $399 or $499 price because you just bought an iPhone 3G. You want to only pay $199 for the 16 GB but you *really* want the juicy 32 GB for $299. If you could fill up all 32 gigs of space with video (you can’t, because of the actual capacity conversion and room for the operating system) you would be able to record over 21 hours of video! You need this phone! So how do you attain eligibility pricing if you are with AT&T locked into a current 2 year contract with iPhone 3G? Easy. The trick is to know someone with an active AT&T account with an original first generation iPhone who is not interested in upgrading to iPhone 3GS. With their permission you can fool the system at the Apple Online Store into thinking you want to upgrade an existing plan with a new iPhone 3GS! Remember, you must obtain permission first! Click the buy now button and choose the option where you want to activate an iPhone on your existing plan. Click to continue and enter the original first generation iPhone mobile number and the requested information and click continue and then you can choose the option to pay now and have iPhone 3GS delivered by Apple to your doorstep on the June 17th 2009 launch date or pick it up at an Apple Retail Store you saved a bundle of your hard earned cash to boot! Don’t forget that the original iPhone owner won’t be eligible to upgrade pricing for 2 years if you pull this off, so choose wisely.

Looking for a fun way to spice up those iPhone photos? Check out Photo FX from the professional photographic supply legend Tiffen. Photo FX adds 26 individually modifiable filters to photos you’ve already taken and you can also add filters on the fly. Be sure you don’t push the home button while editing a photo you’ve taken in Photo FX without saving it first or you will lose the photo, a feature I hope Tiffen can improve soon with an update. Tiffen Photo FX is available now from the App Store at an introductory price of $2.99. I’d say the price is totally worth it if you’re a mobile shutterbug snap snap snapping pictures away. This app is like a mini-Photoshop or mini-Aperture on your iPhone.

If you use the Safari browser search bar on your iPhone a history of your searches is compiled over time. These searches are offered via autocomplete on any future subsequent search queries. You can clear your iPhone search history by tapping Settings then Safari. Clear history, cookies and cache. Then choose Yahoo as your preferred search engine and clear history and cookies and cache again. Choose Google as your preferred search engine again and your history of past searches will no longer appear in iPhone Safari browser.

Speedtest from xtremelabs.com is a great native app for iPhone which tests and measures your network bandwidth by benchmarking your upload and download connection speeds. There is a nifty history feature so you can compare different locations on the fly. If you travel often you can use Speedtest to compare Wi-Fi, 3G or Edge data network speeds in different cities. Speedtest is available now for free from the App Store.

Now it is possible to use your iPhone to search Google just by speaking your search query. Google Mobile app for iPhone added voice to search functionality with the latest version of the application that was just released on the App Store. Surfing the web by speaking is easy, simply launch Google Mobile and bring the iPhone to your ear and when you hear the loud beep just say what you are looking for. Google Mobile automatically detects your location so you won’t need to append your city or general location to the search query. With the Google Mobile app on your iPhone you will not have to type what you are searching for anymore. Give your fingers a break, let your voice do the searching! Google Mobile app is available now from the App Store.

Cats and captions, ah the fun never ends! Introducing the I Can Has Cheezburger app for iPhone. This app brings the content of any of the sites in the Cheezburger network to your pocket. Laugh at user-submitted captioned celebrity photos with RoflRazzi or visit the land of magical land of fail at Failblog. Witness comical mispelled product packaging with Engrish Funny or have some laughs with celebrity look-a-likes at Totally Looks Like. The laughs never stop with the I Can Has Cheezburger app for iPhone and it’s now available for free in the App Store.

Is the portrait style keyboard giving you a hard time when composing or replying to email? Introducing EasyWriter for iPhone, an app that finally gives you access to the widescreen landscape style keyboard when writing email. EasyWriter works great as a word-processing application because it saves your work as you type in the event of power loss or if the app crashes. The accelerometer driven interface provides both portrait and landscape keyboard modes. Replying to mail requires that you open your message you wish to reply to in mail on your iPhone and initiate a reply message then push the home button and go back to the main screen then launch EasyWriter and write your message then tap Send to Mail and your message is ready to send. EasyWriter is free for a limited time and is available now from the App Store.

Looking to record voice notes or memos with your iPhone but want the recordings to be made in high quality and easily understood when playing them back? iTalk recorder by Griffin Technologies for iPhone has superior recording quality than any other recording app that I have tested. The sound quality at the medium quality setting had great clarity. For professionals seeking a serious minded recording solution for iPhone then iTrip Recorder is for you. iTrip does let you sync your recordings back to your Mac or PC but that process necissitates that you install another third-party app called iTalkSync onto your computer. ITalk Recorder for iPhone is free for a limited time and is available now from the App Store.

One of the coolest ways to make music is with Cosmovox for the iPhone. Cosmovox actually turns the movement of your iPhone into electronic music. It is a very good example of another theramin emulator for the iPhone as this time around the tones are created by the movement of the entire device. You can choose from many different frequencies and my favorite thus far is Mystic. You simply can’t ever go wrong with music apps, they hit the spot every time. All that I ask as your trusty iPhone Guru is that you be careful swinging your iPhone around being a 21st century Mozart! Your cat will flip out and scratch you if you take this app too far so keep it mellow, eh! Cosmovox is available now from the App Store for only $1.99.

Panolab is a great free application that gives your iPhone the ability to take super wide angle panoramic photos. The iPhone camera captures images at 2 megapixels with a prime lens. Panolab uses a simple yet intuitive user interface to stitch your photos together and the results make for interesting images. If you want a super master shot of your surroundings Panolab can help. The hardest part about stitching your photos together is the touch interface. During testing as I lifted my finger off the screen after lining two images up the gesture of my hand would blur the image out of alignment. A pixel by pixel nudge feature would be beneficial to Panolab but it is still a useful tool for on-the-go experimental photography with your iPhone.