ziphi.com – apps reviews

Posts tagged as: Android Market back to homepage

Google Play Takes Over the Android Market(6)

You may have noticed in the last few days that when looking for an app on the Android Market, you are directed to a site called Google Play. Google Play was launched on March 6 and combines the Android Market and Google’s other entertainment services.

The Market No More

So what does this new venture mean for Google? Well, the most obvious outcome is that the brand that they worked so hard to promote, Android Market, is no more. Companies do not take rebranding lightly. It usually means a massive tectonic shift in the company’s foundations. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But one has to tread cautiously. Remember New Coke?

Okay, that may not be a fair comparison, especially because the choice to rebrand to Google Play makes sense for many reasons. For one, the Google name carries a lot more weight than Android does. If you did an informal survey on the street, most people could probably not even tell you that Android is a Google invention. However, scarcely an individual would not know what Google is. The choice, therefore, is an obvious one.

Pinball Arcade App Wants to Tilt Your World(0)

FarSight Studios wants you to get in touch with your pinball wizard with its Pinball Arcade app. As of late, most of our reviews have dealt with serious issues like mobile security and fraud, so we thought it was time to lighten things up again.

A Little Pinball History

Pinball dates back several centuries to the pre-modern games of bocce, croquet, and billiards. In late 1700s Western Europe, the billard Japonais was invented—and from this ornate and elaborate “Sin King” creation came our modern pinball machine.

The first coin-operated machines appeared in the 1930s, when David Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball became an instant sensation. Incidentally, Gottlieb is one of the “greatest pinball tables” included in the Pinball Arcade app.

Snap Tax Your Tax Return from Your Smartphone(0)

The Snap Tax app from Turbo Tax and Intuit makes filing your taxes this year as easy as pointing your camera and snapping a picture. There are two versions of the app available, one for use in the United States and one for filers in Canada.

Just snap a photo of your W2 (in the U.S.) or your T4 (in Canada), and your information is automatically imported to the right place in the application. Follow the steps and answer a few simple questions to easily calculate your refund. You can check a preview of your return before filing, and you can also set up direct deposit and e-file directly from your phone. Although the app is free, there is the standard fee for filing online ($19.99 in the U.S. and $9.99 in Canada via NETFILE).

Snap Tax has already been downloaded more than a half million times in the U.S., and the reviews all appear to be positive. There are few restrictions, however, in both the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., you cannot be a homeowner or have kids. You can only use a W2 and have interest or unemployment income to report. In Canada, you can use Snap Tax if you only have T4 slips, don’t have children or dependents, are under the age of 65, and live in select provinces.

Voxer Turns Your Phone into a Walkie-Talkie(0)

Voxeris a free app that can turn your iPhone or smartphone into a walkie-talkie. It’s not the first push-to-talk app on the market—but it is doing things just a little bit different.

Voxer — The App & The Company

The app itself is straightforward and easy to use. It has both audio and texting features, and like most apps these days, Voxer works side-by-side with Facebook, telling you which Facebook friends are using Voxer and giving you the ability to communicate with them via the app.

The great thing about Voxer is that it doesn’t interrupt you like a normal walkie-talkie does. Messages are stored in the cloud, so you can listen to a live stream or listen and respond to the message later. It essentially works much like text-based messaging, but now you can add a voice to it—yours.

Voxer was developed by Tom Katis, an American Special Forces communications specialist and Green Beret. The idea came to him on the battlefield where circumstances necessitated multi-channel communication. Unfortunately, communication could only be with one group, one individual, one channel at a time.

Mobile Security — The Next Technological Frontier(3)

Mobile Security Tips to Follow

This will be the first in a series of articles about mobile phone security. This first article deals with Internet security in general, and the follow-up articles will be on specific security apps for Andorid and iOS devices. Even if you follow just a few of these tips, you will go a long way in safeguarding your information, both personal and financial.

1. Don’t Lose Your Phone

Or, if you do, make sure that your phone is password protected. And just to be clear, a password like 1234 or 0000 is not really a password. This is basically a default code, so try to be a little more creative when choosing a code.

If you go into your General settings on your iPhone, for instance, under Passcode Lock, you can also select to have all data wiped from your phone if after 10 tries the right password is not entered. Of course, this means that a code should not be so difficult that even you have a hard time remembering it.

Clik: The New App that Wants to Control Your Screen(0)

Clik wants to control your screens. This new app by Clik Interactive is impressive—even for the technologically jaded. In practical terms, the concept is pretty simple, and the idea, nothing new. We have these smartphones that are no longer just phones. They are virtual multiplexes. The movie references is on purpose, but it also speaks to the combing of signals, as the term is used in engineering.

Clik: Reinventing the Remote

Those of you old enough to remember the first remote controllers can chuckle at the memory of those two-button boxes that controlled the volume and channel knobs on your old TV set. As a child, it was mesmerizing to see the little channel knob on the big Telefunken set turn magically as you hit the button on the remote.

Well, the makers of Clik are bringing back some of that magic to your smartphones. The Clik app can be downloaded for free both at the App Store and Android Market. Once you have downloaded the app, simply click it and follow the steps.

Hipster and Path Offer a Heartfelt Apology to iPhone Users(2)

Hipster and Path have apologized after it was reported that they had ‘inadvertently’ uploaded users’ address-book information without consent.

Although Hipster and Path sounds like a Sly Stallone and Kurt Russell film from the 80s, they are in fact social networking and media app developers. Addressing the issue in a blog post for TechCrunch, Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow stated, “needless to say we’re pretty embarrassed by the situation. Embarrassed not because we had malicious goals in mind (we don’t store the contact data we pull – we just match it to existing users), but embarrassed by the fact that we pushed a feature that doesn’t meet our standards for the protection of our user’s data.”

That is all fine and good, and his call on other developers to have a ‘summit’ on application privacy is not a bad idea, but maybe there needs to be a little more verification on the part of developers and the hosts of those apps, like the App Store and Android Market, before these apps get pushed onto consumers. Yes, there is a time element involved in getting an app on the market, but surely there has to be some accountability.