What? Read on that tiny thing?

It’s still new to me so I still enjoy reading on my iPhone. It will probably get old and start to bug me, but it’s not as bad as I expected. (Kind of like writing blog entries isn’t nearly as bad as expected.) I have been tempted by Amazon’s Kindle. Obviously the technology is far superior to a backlit screen. However, aside from economic concerns, I just don’t read enough to justify it. Having just made a rather questionable economic decision in my new phone, I have decided to exploit it as much as possible.

Stanza is a neat little app that I have been using to read free public domain books. Still with Kindle drool regularly, when I got word this morning of the Kindle for iPhone app, I rushed right out to download. I set it up tonight.

Overall right now, I think Stanza is better, at least for what I am looking for. There are so many classics I haven’t read. The catalogs are huge. Having direct access within the app is a big plus here. For the Kindle app you have to go to Amazon’s site in a separate browser to purchase. The syncing process is automatic and I can see the benefit if you also have a Kindle.

I “purchased” three books from Amazon so I could compare. One was Pride and Prejudice for direct comparison to Stanza. I do think I like the text layout a bit more in the Kindle app. There is some white space around the text which is nice. The entire book is scannable on the screen via scrollbar. That’s actually a little cumbersome when there are over 4000 pages. Stanza is scannable within the current chapter only.

Strangely the navigation on the Stanza app is more like Kindle navigation than the Kindle app. For either you can swipe like other iPhone apps, but Stanza allows tapping the left or right edge of the screen to navigate between pages.

Other features the Kindle app doesn’t have are ability to change the background and viewing in landscape mode. Both of these could easily be added in a later version. The lack of background change is a definite negative for me, so I hope they change that.

What the Kindle app does have going for it is an enormous library for purchase. Since I’m mostly in it for the free stuff so far (read: bad customer) this is less important for me.

I’ll spend some more time with both and cross my fingers that the Kindle app has some updates to make up for my concerns.

Kelly + iPhone = love

It makes sense that my first blog post since getting the iPhone is being written on it. The wordpress app is my latest download of many. It’s interesting learning to trust the smart keyboard. Not bad actually. I thought I’d give a quick list and perhaps mini-review of the apps I have downloaded so far.

Facebook: I’d say this is a “duh” app to download. My biggest gripe so far is that I don’t have the live feed view I’m addicted to on the real thing. I did my first mobile upload today. All seemed to go well.

Twitterfon: There are lots of twitter apps out there. This seemed the best fit from the reviews of the free apps out there. Tweetie seems the best for pay apps, but I’m not going there, at least not yet. I might check out twitterific soon as well.

Google: Favorite part is the speech recognition. It makes it far less painstaking to search. I’ve only had one miserable failure on that when I said a long string and it decided I had said “India”. Um… Overall it’s great.

Flashlight: Mostly it just made me laugh.

Stanza: This is an eReader which has direct access to several online catalogs including Project Gutenberg. I’ve dowloaded a number of classics already and am on chapter four of Pride and Prejudice. I’ve used the settings to turn the background grey which helps a bit with eye strain. I love this, especially that it’s free with such a large free library.

Google Earth: Kind of a duh for me as well. I love maps and love having the world satellite view at my fingertips.

Shazam: This identified recorded music it hears. It’s a fun little app.

Urban Spoon: Mostly it’s just fun to shake and watch it act like a slot machine for dining choices.

ShoZu: I’m trying to figure out a good app to transfer photos to flickr. I don’t know if this is it, but my test run seemed to do the trick. I’ll probably try out some others before settling in on one.

IcanHasCheezburger: Duh. It has the whole Cheezburger network for my perusing pleasure.

Geocaching: Probably the most expensive app I’ll buy. It was $9.99 and is only one of two I’ve paid any money for. I quite like the real time instant access to nearby caches though. I haven’t gone hunting with it yet, but I can’t wait.

iLCARS: Yes, this silly app is the other one I spent money on. It basically looks like a Star Trek TNG panel, makes appropriate noises and sounds, and pretends to scan people and the environment. I love it except for all the annoying spelling errors and typos. The huge geek in me had no problem with the $0.99 price tag.

WordPress: Seems good. This has taken awhile though.

I’ll perhaps review the games later. I have seven right now. We’ll see where I’m at when I get around to it.

ETA: Bolding to app names, done from computer.