Kindling the iPhone

For those of you who think that headline means I finally tossed Gigi-the-iPhone on the fire: Nope.

Actually, Gigi and I have gotten along pretty well in the last six weeks. She’s finally resigned herself to living with a peasant, and I’ve learned that she can be a pretty good phone…as long as I don’t try to use her 3G network. The only time she drops calls now is when I turn the daggone 3G back on. (If there’s a more perfect example than AT&T of why you shouldn’t sell a technology before you get it right, I don’t know what it would be.)

In fact, Gigi and I have been visiting that irresistible money magnet, the iPhone apps store, and trying things out. And I’ve discovered a natural rating system of sorts for the apps I try: Gigi presents apps in groups of 16 per page, and you can move app icons to any page you like. I’ve got five pages of the little buggers, pretty much arranged from most-used to least. Anything that makes Gigi’s first page is pretty darn indispensible. Anything on page five is about to be blitzed off the phone.

Amazon’s Kindle app (Amazon.com, free) has made it to page two.

Now, I’ve just not seen the sense in buying a Kindle. I mean, even a first-class gadget freak has to draw the line SOMEwhere. In Gigi, I’ve consolidated phone, pager, email, browser and all kinds of other gadgets I used to carry and my purse is about four pounds lighter. Why the heck would I want to add stuff back?

Besides, Gigi offers apps like Stanza, which lets you read just about any book or magazine in the public domain. It’s not great–no real illustrations, the interface is a tad clumsy–but it works.

But when Kindle came out for iPhone this week, I just had to try it. And I gotta admit, I kinda like it. It’s not–repeat NOT–the same as reading a book,. But if the book’s good enough, I could be reading it on a roll of toilet paper and I’d still love it.

You download the app, register with your Amazon.com username and password, and you’re automatically connected to your Amazon.com account. Buy a Kindle book, and it automagically shows up as an available download on your iPhone the next time you open the app.

(And, btw, here’s a fairly significant difference between the app and the Kindle: I’m told you can acquire books directly on the Kindle. The iPhone app only supports reading them; you still must buy them using a regular computer.)

I downloaded Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book ($9.99–the paper version is a couple bucks more) and gave it a shot. Text was easy to read, the illustrations were there, and the interface was very iPhone: A fingerswish moves you from page to page, you can easily select different text sizes and the “book” always opens to your last-read page. If you move about, you can resynch to the furthest page read. (BTW, TGB just won a Newberry Award, well-deserved. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.)

So…tell me again why I should buy a Kindle?

Loopt (free). Loopt has barely made it to page five and I probably won’t keep it. The Loopt app uses GPS and text messaging to do a geosynched kind of Twitter. Anyone connected with you can see where you are and, to some extent, what you’re doing. They can share geotagged photos, give you directions to places they’d like you to try, etc.

I’m all for presence detection, i.e., using applications such as instant messaging to learn when a person is (or isn’t) available to take a phone call, email, etc. But Loopt is kinda scary. The default privacy level on this app is essentially zero, and figuring out how to restrict others’ access can be challenging.

To use Loopt you must enter a bit more personal information into the app than I’m comfortable with. Besides, it works from your address book to match up with other potential Loopt members (and also to invite them to join–gee, isn’t that what malware does?).

Anybody with a significant online life (say, someone who, er, blogs a lot and has accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and heaven knows where else) knows that privacy is an illusion and has made some measure of peace with that. That doesn’t mean, though, that I want folk checking to see if I’m out of the bathroom yet.

I suppose that kicks me up a notch on the fuddy-duddy scale, but too bad.

Facebook (free). I’ve also installed the iPhone version of Facebook which has, to my surprise, made it to page one. It’s a useful little precis of what’s going on with your Facebook friends and, aside from the iPhone’s lousy keyboard, is pretty easy to use.

(BTW, if you’re on Facebook, come find me; I’m gathering a nice network of glassists and techists and they’re fun)

BBC World News (free) kicked the New York Times newsreader out of its page one spot last week, mostly due to its broader news focus and slightly faster performance. It’s a quick, fast update that also gives you access to “World, Have Your Say,” which has to be one of the most fascinating radio programs on air.

MagicPad ($3.99), one of the the first rich text editors for the iPhone, also moved to page one. It lets you cut and paste text from one application to another, something that’s been sadly lacking in the iPhone, and also allows you some rudimentary formatting such as changing fonts and text color. Using it can be an exercise in frustration until you understand how the gestures work with the editor, but once you get the hang of it, it’s quite useful.

Been playing around with more apps, including FacePhone ($2.99), which matches up your address book and your FaceBook friends, iStethoscope (free), a heart monitor and sound amplifier for iPhone that so far hasn’t so much as found my pulse, and Pinger, which lets you send text messages for free and integrates your social and instant messaging accounts into a single place.

So far, only Pinger looks like it’ll make it off page five, but I’ll keep you posted…

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