The Best iPhone Apps of 2008 Award Winners


2008 was a great year for the iPhone. Apple launched the iPhone 3G, sold millions more than it thought it would, positioned itself strongly in the mobile phone and smart phone market and opened the flood gate of the AppStore to Developers and consumers.

With over 10,000 Apps available via the AppStore and counting how are we supposed to make sense of all of them and keep track of updates, ratings and new releases? And out of those 10,000+ Apps, who’s go the best one? What App is the best for wasteing time, whats tbe best social App, what is the best app to WOW your friends or a first date?

Well 148Apps.com set out to answer all those questions. 148Apps.com reviews and features New and Updated Apps and keeps a very thorough database of Apps that they have reviewd. They also set out to figure out what were the BEST Apps of 2008 with a website called, what else, bestappever.com

Here are some of the Winners of Best App Ever 2008 that caught my eye. Thanks to bestappever.com and 148Apps.com for such a complete and well put together list. For a complete list of the 2008 Winners by Category, please check out complete the list below.


2008 Best App Ever, 2008 Most Innovative App, 2008 Best iPhone WOW App

Shazam
Developer: Shazam Entertainment Ltd.
Original Release Date: 2008-07-07
Category: Music

Shazam is one of those apps that people just don’t believe is real when you first show it to them. I mean, I’ve seen it work it dozens of times and I’m not even sure I believe it. Press a button and let Shazam listen to a song playing on the radio, in a store, on TV, wherever, and it will tell you what the song is? Amazing! Having a massive library of titles it recognizes, Shazam can recognize just about any song that you feed it. It quickly and accurately returns you the name and title of the artist just about everytime.

2008 Most Useful App

Air Sharing
Developer: Avatron Software, Inc.
Original Release Date: 2008-09-08
Category: Productivity

Air Sharing by Avatron is an amazingly useful app. It allows you extra functionality in your iPhone by making it a networked storage device and a multi-format file reader. It includes the ability to have multiple shared folders and password protect each one or leave it open. The built in file viewer is one of the best available for doing everything from ebook reading, viewing very large images, to following along with a presentation

2008 Best Productivity Enhancer

Things
Developer: Cultured Code
Original Release Date: 2008-08-19
Category: Productivity

Second to making phone calls, organization is what I most use my iPhone for. This perfectly designed app can give you everything you need to be organized. Based on the Getting Things Done or GTD method of organization, this app syncs to it’s OSX desktop counterpart to keep you up to date at all times.

2008 Best Social Networking App

Facebook
Developer: Facebook
Original Release Date: 2008-07-18
Category: Social Networking

Facebook has taken the largest social network in the world and shrunken it into an extremely addictive, well designed, and wonderful app. This app packs the most important parts of the social network into a small package. Facebook was suggested as a nominee for Most Original User Interface for it’s shake to update UI. If you are a member of Facebook, this app is a must for keeping track of your friends while on the go.

2008 Most Creative Use of iPhone Hardware

Ocarina
Developer: Smule
Original Release Date: 2008-11-01
Category: Music

Ocarina greatly extends the iPhone platform by doing some things that no one had ever dreamed of. It turns your iPhone into a very accurate, yet simple wind instrument. But it is also rapidly becoming a community. Ocarina the application networks you with millions of other users of this app allowing you to share your music with them and hear theirs.

2008 Best Game Graphics

Rolando
Developer: ngmoco, Inc.
Original Release Date: 2008-12-08
Category: Games :: Adventure

Rolando from ngmoco was the most hotly anticipated iPhone game. A game with so much hype behind it that everyone knew we were bound to be let down it was finally released. Then something interesting happened, on 12/18/2008 — Rolando was released. Once we got out hands on it we realized — it lives up to the hype and maybe even goes beyond it. Rolando is a great game. Innovative, well designed, gorgeous varied gameplay. Expensive by current standards in the App Store, but you still get great value for your money.

2008 Winners by Category

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Four Core iPhone on Apple’s Horizon


There is allot of buzz going around at CES 2009 about Imagination Technologies announcement of a new PowerVR SGX543 chip that is the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU. This new GPU, in theory, can scale to an unlimited number of cores and offer support for GPGPU acceleration. This is all especially interesting since Apple could have access to the PowerVR SGX543 and may be planning a powerful graphics engine with GPGPU acceleration for one of the next iPhones. Last year Apple licensed Imagination’s GPU technology blueprints and even invested in the company.

Here is a littler more about the new PowerVR SGX543 from TG Daily:

“Imagination did not reveal many details about its new design, the PowerVR SGX543 (5 for series, 4 for performance and 3 to indicate that it is part of the Power VR Extended product line), in terms of numbers since clock speed, resulting performance or power consumption largely depend on the specs a hardware designer chooses. But we were told that the shader performance has been increased by about 40% and that the GPU delivers about 2.5x the image processing performance of an ARM Cortex-8 CPU and outperforms the a 600 MHz ARM chip in some traditional CPU benchmarks with a 100 MHz design. Power consumption is also down, but company representatives indicated that “a huge leap has not been made.

The new 543 isn’t about power consumption; it is about performance and features. It is multi-core capable - 543 chips can run in parallel - with power consumption and space constraints being the main limitations for the number of cores - and can translate into very capable hardware for devices such as netbooks, MIDs, set top boxes and mobile phones. According to Imagination, one core delivers a performance of 35 million polygons per second and a fill rate of 1 Gigapixel per second at 200 MHz.”

All this new processing power means that Apple’s next gen iPhone’s, iPod Touch and maybe even some sort of Netbook/Touch Tablet could see and iPhone OS more similar to what you would find on your Mac. GPGPU acceleration will allow these portable devices to print, scan, fax, video, video chat, multi tasking (apps running in the background) and will also allow developers to create new Business and Social Apps that utilize the increased capabilites/processing power of the device. Sometime in the not so distant future, the next iPhone could become a much more capable business device, supporting features normally only capable on a computer or notebook.

This will also make the iPhone (and the iPod Touch or any future Touch Tablet/Netbook) a much more powerful gaming platform than the current offerings from Nintendo and Sony. The current iPhone and it’s slightly faster brethren the iPod Touch, are both already on par with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, with the substantial increase horsepower to a four core GPU with GPGPU acceleration, the iPhone will certianly blow past its competition.

Rumors are that the new Four Core iPhone will require a completely updated iPhone OS version 3.0. When Apple introduced the iPhone 3G, they released iPhone OS version 2.0 to support the new GPS chip and 3G capabilities. It would be only logical that a new firmware would be released to support any new hardware and improved operating system. But is 3.0 too soon for such a leap in hardware?

The time it usually takes these chips to make it into consumable devices is usually over a year so it is more than likely that the new iPhone Four Core will be released with iPhone OS 4.0. Apple may choose to instead use one of the current offereings from the PowerVR SGX line of GPU’s from Imagination Technologies.

No matter what, the Apple iPhone as a Phone and a Personal/Business/Social/Media/Gaming device has a great future ahead. As hardware performance increases and power consumption comes down and these processors, GPU’s, memory and other components get smaller, we will only see better and better iPhone’s.


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iPhone Dev Team Post Update to iPhone 3G Unlock Status - No Longer Beta


The following was taken from the iPhone Dev Team Blog where they have posted a summary of how they feel about the iPhone 3G Unlock and their plans for Yellowsn0w and a permanent iPhone 3G Unlock similar to the iPhone unlock.




“What a week it’s been for the 3G unlock!  Here’s where we’re at:

Past

  • As predicted in our beta release post, expanding yellowsn0w from dev team testing to worldwide usage revealed some unexpected situations.
  • Thanks to specific feedback from you on our reporting page, we’ve been able to tweak the method by which yellowsn0w injects the unlocking payload.  We believe we’re converging on a method that works
    for most cases.

Present

  • The current beta version of yellowsn0w is 0.9.6, available via Cydia.  Please refer to our beta release post for more technical info about how to install and use it.
  • Although ultimately the payload is the same as in the very first beta, we’ve changed the way that it’s injected into the baseband.
  • Although some of you have invested time and energy in coming up with a very specific flow that works for you, the best way to first try 0.9.6 is as-provided, straight out of the box with no special usage
    around it.
  • Please continue to provide feedback on our reporting page so that we can iron out wrinkles.

Future

  • One major feature we have left to provide support for is PIN locking.  We have dabbled in this a bit and think we have a solution, but want to make that a separate effort from making yellowsn0w work
    with as many SIMs as possible.
  • At that point, we can probably declare yellowsn0w out of “beta” status.
  • The “permanent” unlock is still the ultimate goal for some of us.  We’d like to break the chain of trust a bit earlier in the boot process (if only for the fun in trying).“
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How to unlock your iPhone 3G with Yellowsn0w


Hi there everyone and Happy New Year. 2009 started off great for all us iPhone 3G owners with the iPhone Dev Team releasing Yellowsn0w for the iPhone 3G. Yellowsn0w is a simple app that you install from Cydia or Installer that runs a LaunchDaemon on your iPhone at startup that unlocks your iPhone 3G baseband to work on any carrier worldwide.

The first release waws 0.9 and has eventually been updated to 0.9.5 0.9.6 in an effort to fix problems some users (especially T-Mobile USA users) not being able to make outgoing calls. Based on the comments and feedback on the iPhone Dev Team Blog and other forums, it seems like the latest version 0.9.5 0.9.6 is working the best. I unlocked my iPhone 3G last the other night using 0.9.4, but I am positive the steps are the same and maybe easier as some report that the final step of removing and reinserting the sim is no longer needed.

Before you do any of this please remember that this is a Beta unlock, you do this at your own risk. Also do not try this if you are going to call me to fix it for you if it doesn’t work :P

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Macworld 2009 Keynote Stream and Summary


2009 Macworld Keynote by Phil Schiller (QuickTime Stream) Keynote Summary It’s Your iLife On Jan. 3, I posted a list of six things Apple must do at Macworld. The company fulfilled the first, coming clean about Steve’s health, yesterday. Phil fulfilled the third thing today, by introducing iLife ‘09. Apple really needed to update the software, which is one of the major applications for which people choose Macs

Phil’s early presentation showed how Apple effectively out-markets Microsoft. One major new iPhoto ‘09 feature, “Faces,” uses facial recognition search to make organizing images easier. I’m sure many bloggers and journalists will write about Apple’s amazing new innovation. Microsoft added facial recognition search to the now defunct Digital Image Suite about five years ago. The feature worked really well, and Microsoft had scene recognition search, too. Damn slick. But for reasons I never understood, Microsoft didn’t promote what was a truly innovative feature.

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Macworld 2009 iPhone Rumors Roundup


Macworld 2009 which has started today will be the last time Apple will exhibit at the Macworld Expo. Though Apple has downplayed the event with that announcement it hasn’t stopped the rumors. We are rounding up the iPhone rumors that have been reported so far and what we think about them.

iPhone Nano Rumors:

iDealsChina was the first to publish information and rendering of the iPhone Nano case manufactured by a Chinese case manufacturer, XSKN claiming that the product will be announced at Macworld San Francisco 2009.

We then had the case manufacturer, XSKN add references to iPhone nano on its website and then followed up by publishing the entire series of iPhone Nano cases for sale suggesting that rumors of a smaller version of iPhone could be true.

We also had a well-known case designer Vaja who has just updated its web catalog revealing that they have plans to release protective case for the iPhone Nano in the near future.

Apple might introduce 32 GB iPhone:

MacBlogz had claimed that they have received an anonymous tip that Apple might introduce 32 GB iPhone at Macworld 2009.

Their tipster had claimed to work with a third party iPhone accessory supplier and has access to iPhone’s short-term roadmap.


AT&T to announce Tethering plans for the iPhone:

Tethering takes a wireless phone’s high speed data connection and allows it to connect with a non-mobile device like a desktop computer laptop.

There’s a chance that AT&T may provide its customers with an iPhone tethering plan. We have heard rumors that AT&T will be offering their official tethering option for the iPhone for an additional $30 per month with a 5GB data cap. So those of you who are thinking, “hey! I’m going to do away with my home DSL bill!”

It is being reported that AT&T might make that announcement this week at Macworld.

(via iPhoneHacks.com & G4TV’s TheFeed)



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