Essential iPhone Apps for Students and Educators

MacWorld published the “Ten Essential Back to School iPhone Apps”. While they chose very good apps, they might have left out a few other interesting apps as well. A possible improvement on the “top X apps for students” post idea would be to have different school levels (Pre-school, Middle School, High School, Higher Ed., etc.)  AND different subjects in subcategories (General Apps, History, Math, Politics, Books, etc.) as well and list the apps that pertain to those categories only. This process would probably make it even more useful for students’ specific needs.

I still think that Education iPhone apps have to do a lot of catching-up to do in order to achieve the same level of excellence of other apps such as the games we now see on the iPhone.

However, there are some other good apps out there for Education such as the “100 Words Series” to help you sound smart in that test or paper. The iPhone seems to be a good platform for word lists and dictionaries, thesaurus-like lists, etc. (even Dictionary.com has their own apps).

For Educators, check out this list of “Top 50 Apps for Educators” from the Online Education Database.

Waze, the Driver-generated GPS – Crowdsourcing Navigation – Free GPS for the iPhone

Yeah, the concept of crowdsourcing has been everyone. The wisdom of the crowd is something that has been more in evidence lately and Web 2.0 technologies allow for people to get together and collaborate on products, websites, information gathering, etc.

Now it’s the navigation systems’ turn. With Waze, drivers submit new routes, traffic updates and more on ever-evolving maps.

And it’s free for the iPhone.

From their official website:

“What are waze drivers building?

Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road.
100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!”

iPhone Educational Apps

A while back I thought of creating a blog to review only educational apps for the iPhone.
Suddenly I noticed that not only did just a few developers try to create educational apps but also the quality of those that are there isn’t what you’d expect…

So, I’m still considering reviewing a few iPhone apps for learning, but if educational developers don’t learn to create good apps it will be a tough job…

The state of the so-called “Education” apps on the iPhone is hazy. So many applications for the iPhone utilize the revolutionary technologies available for that platform (such as the Shazam app that recognizes which music is playing at an environment and populates the app’s screen with metadata on that song, or the Aurora Feint series that utilizes the accelerometer to control the blocks on the screen), etc.

The educational apps are still on the “flash card” side of things… let’s see what INNOVATIVE ed apps will appear in the upcoming months, years, decades…

Apple and the iPhone – When the Customer doesn’t Matter…

“…because we’re too good for you…”

That is the vibe I get from Apple with this whole iPhone 3G shortage fiasco, or circus…

Everyone that reads my blog posts here knows that I have been quite disappointed with the customer care at Apple and their attitude towards the shortage and their customers. Well, today I got the “icing on the cake” on “great” policies from Apple.

I had “backordered”, that is, stupidly let AT&T charge my credit card for an iPhone that was going to be shipped to the store for me in 10-20 days — which was shipped in a week’s time (today). I got an email alert and went there to grab the iPhone, of course, not so excited to have it anymore. Not after waiting in line once at the Palo Alto store when I was in CA for an hour to find out “my corporate” discount wasn’t going to transfer, left the line and canceled the discount… got back in line the next day (it was too late that same day) and found out that my wife is the primary account holder and they couldn’t sell it to me even though I had proof of our relationship and her documents… mmm… leaving that alone (I already blogged about it)…

Back to the AT&T store: I got there, did everything and left with my iPhone. As soon as I called my wife (should have been me… seriously) I noticed there was a little “ringing” in the voice and all… I went back to the store: defective! So, I learned Apple doesn’t even ship enough iPhones to AT&T stores in case of a defective device like mine. Two options: get a refund and go back to the “backordering” process after re-chargin my credit card OR going to the Apple Store to replace the unit. I asked the AT&T guy to call Apple to find out if they had at least enough replacement units. THEY TOLD HIM THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SAY WHETHER THEY HAVE iPHONES OR NOT, if that is the case!!!! Now, what kind of stupid store can’t even say whether they have more units or not (once they find out a costumer has a defective unit)???? Apple is STUPID, “geniuses”!!! Seriously: they wanted me to drive to the store to then FIND OUT THE SAME WAY I WOULD OVER THE PHONE if they have or not iPhones to replace mine!!! What kind of crappy policy is that?! Costumers in the first place! Apple got it all “right”! If it wasn’t an excellent device (with it’s flaws and all), I wouldn’t have gotten back to the “backorder”… but it is a good phone… so… I hope other companies soon catch up on the technology quality Apple has (HP seems to be getting close for Windows-based machines), because in the costumer care side Apple is stupid…

Screen Capture – iPhone 2.0

Wondering how to get some screen shots of your iPhone’s applications to create tutorials or maybe just to show off on your blog? The iPhone 2.0 platform has a built-in screen capture functionality. Explained here by Gizmodo.

Enjoy!

Is it really all about the users?

I have been really disappointed with the whole sales process for the iPhone 3G. While Apple’s design and advance technologies are impressive, it is fairly disappointing that they still don’t understand it is about the costumer. We’re in the era of the prosumers, crowdsourcing. The whole iMonopoly or is a practice that (help me out here those who understand economy) might not work in the future. People want freedom, they are paying for a product, they want to use it the way they want to. Why impose a limit of 1 device per user at all costs? They had plenty of time to get the amount of iPhones out there in the market, but they prefer to control the market (even knowing that their costumers will pay for it anyway).

When you call AT&T stores, the automated message says you should “get iReady before going to the stores due to high demand”… well, maybe Apple and AT&T should have gotten their iAct together before starting sales, iTested the servers, and given better iCostumer treatment. Instead of trying to turn everyone into iSuckers by asking them wait for ours to them find out they don’t have enough devices or that they can’t iActivate the phone. And what a tasteless pun: “iReady”… ha    ha… 

Why not offer the same activation options as AT&T? My wife and I have a discount on our plan which can only be maintained if we buy the iPhone at the AT&T store. To get it activated at the Apple Store we’d have to deactivate the discount to then, call AT&T to reactivate the discount on our plan.

Anyways, Apple needs to stop having this attitude of iCanDoWhatever because they will still buy my products… it is all about the customers and I have encountered quite a few people that are upset with Apples policies and services lately… the whole MacBook Intel systems haven’t really been the “greatest” thin on Earth… anyway…

“i” am starting not to like Apple as much… already iHated iPhoto, for instance… now it’s worse…

iPhone 2.0 Applications

Has anyone been surprised by the new iPhone apps?

Some amazing ones…

Like Loopt.com that lets you know where your friends are on a Google map…

Others like Evernote.com that let you take photo notes, audio notes, etc (all sync’ed to your profile on their website)…

One of my favorites is the Shazam app which RECOGNIZES a song when you play it next to yourt phone and tells you the title, artist, album AND lets you buy right there… Amazing… So, when you are preparing some learnign material that you need THAT song that is playing on the radio but you don’t know its name: Shazam!

Cool apps… I even use the iPhone as a book light now

Hold Off on the iPhone 3G?

An article by Ben Patterson on Yahoo! Tech has case some buzz on the Web lately. It’s title: “5 Reasons to Hold Off on the iPhone 3G”.

While I agree with him on some points and disagree on others (I love freedom of speech), I feel like I need to respond to his article:

1. Shortages are unlikely

I agree on this one, if there reason you are camping outside an Apple store to get your new iPhone 3G, forget it. Unless you want to be known as “that guy” on the local news, there is no need to hurry…

2. Chaos on Day One

Totally agree that the new activation method (over the counter and not iTunes) might be a little bit of a stressful change, especially for the Apple stores, which are not used to processing phone contracts. Patterson is right: it might be a bit chaotic that first week.

3. 32GB iPhone 3G on the horizon

I disagree on this one. Why is a bigger storage number going to keep you from getting a gadget these days? They are always going up on storage, email, hard drives, video game consoles, SD cards, even the brain size… You are going to have to have an outdated gadget in a few months no matter what. Also, why do you need more than 8GB for a PHONE?

4. Best new iPhone features are coming to the original iPhone

Agree and disagree. While I don’t want to miss a call because I am looking at the GPS on my iPhone, I do think that the faster internet will be a big deal here. But the price in the long run is worse for this service package… IT might be good to keep the old iPhone for some reasons but bad for others…

5. The HTC Touch Diamond

I agree we shouldn’t get all excited about the iPhone being the ultimate phone and turn a blind eye to new technologies out there. But I do think that the iPhone, for many reasons and for different audiences might be the best one out there today…

The biggest reasons to hold off on the new iPhone to me really are:

1. the price of the new service package with the faster 3G connection

2. I forgot which one was number 2

Sell Your Old iPhone and Get Paid Enough to Buy the iPhone 2.0

As highlighted on TechCrunch and other technology blogs, some companies are buying or helping you sell your old iPhone. Not so surprisingly, you can almost make as much money as necessary to buy the new iPhone model coming out July 11. Why? Well, as TechCrunch explains in this post, the market for the old version of iPhone that is more compatible with service providers other than At&T will still crave for the old version of the iPhone which doesn’t offer the 3G connection (which is, by the way more expensive than Edge, the one you have right now).

So, get ready to sell the old one and upgrade to the new iPhone 3G without losing much money. An let’s explore this upgraded platform to create learning applications!

Flipswap

Venjuvo

Shoout’em – White Label Mobile Social Network

What can a service like Shout’em do for mobile learning? Mobile learning is a concept that has been getting stronger lately with the advent of improved functionalities in mobile operating systems such as Android and the increasing quality of mobile devices (phones, PDAs, iPhone).

As learning goes more mobile and just-in-time, demand will increase for services that offer more robust solutions for mobile operating systems, like the social networking capabilities Shout’em offers (the Ning.com for mobile platforms as they call themselves). This type of services will create even more collaborative learning experiences and facilitate reaching the learners where they are…