iPhone4idiots

High Noon, Exoweb Ltd. Free, is the best iPhone game I’ve found in awhile. It’s real-time one on one cowboy dueling at its best. You even holster your iPhone before the fight begins! The game is simple to where you can jump right in and fight other players. It takes multiple shots to win and usually reloading is required. This involves a simple tilt of your iPhone to open the chamber and then tapping for each bullet you want to put in the gun. Be quick as your opponent might be shooting at you the entire time. After each win you earn gold from which you can buy tons of fun stuff. Better guns, hairstyles, clothes, hats, expressions and more. There are specialty items for the fights like sacks of flour to blind your opposition, dynamite to throw or lasso’s to briefly tie them up while you take your shots. Continue Reading…

Bullfighting Hero, Magic Cube $0.99, is a unique iPhone game where you play the matador. There are two types of gameplay, survival and campaign. In campaign after each victory earn money to buy better weapons and skills. This is what I usually play, but survival mode is a blast as well. There you fight multiple bulls at the same time and see how long you can last. One trick there is to try and have the bulls run into each other before they attempt to hit you. It’s fast paced for sure. In either game you control your matador with either tilt or D-pad (I prefer tilt). There are 20 different bull body types with 10 different horns. Some bulls are bigger, some are faster. The skills you upgrade include health, attack speed, damage caused, move speed and decrease duration when down. That last one is a big one. When the bull knocks you down they can charge again before you have time to get up and move and gore you again. This becomes a real problem with multiple bulls or when you are pinned in a corner. Now the graphics in this game are just OK. They certainly could be better or at least zoom in and show the bull getting hit at the end. What makes this game fun is the speed of play and sounds. The background music is perfect and its great to hear “ole” when you make the bull miss or the “crunch” when you get horned. On May 16, Magic Cube introduced a free version of this game which I highly recommend you check out.

Last week Apple announced there are now over 500,000 apps in the Apple App Store. While that’s great there is such a variety there is surely an app for almost anything you might want or need it does create one problem. How the heck do you find what you are looking for? Well quixey.com is a search engine made specifically for apps. Type “6 year old sight words” and you get a list. You can filter by iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android or Windows phone. It’s still in a beta phase as the results are too many. A search for “doppler radar” brings up over 100 results. However, the first three listed seem spot on and include my personal favorite Weather Bug. I figure the results will get better and better the more people that use this search engine. It monitors blogs and app review sites to base results not just on app title or developer description, but on what people are saying about the app. Give it a try. I think you might like it.

ZombieSmash, gamedoctors UG $0.99, is an addictive game where you kill tons of zombies in a variety of ways. To begin you use your fingers to flick them up in the air and smash them on the ground. As you advance through the levels you unlock 30 upgrades to assist in killing the zombies in unique and entertaining ways. Some of these include dropping giant rocks to smash them, attaching rockets to shoot them in air and then explode or kicking them with a giant swinging boot. There are three modes of play involving over 60 boards. There are fast zombies, zombies that can’t be flipped up in the air and thus must be killed with weapons and other zombies wear helmets requiring multiple attacks to destroy. The goal of the game is to protect your house. Zombies come from both sides of the screen and try and force their way in. If they gain access you lose. With the 60 boards you can play this game for hours and hours. However, it holds your interest (or at least mine) as you want to unlock another way to destroy the zombies. My six year old started playing yesterday and likes it as well. The gore and spurting blood are his favorites. The game goes into slow mo and replays the last zombie you take out on each level. This enables you to focus on the limbs being smashed or ripped off and blood flying around. Given all this I’m sure this game isn’t for everyone. For me this helps pass the time until The Walking Dead returns.

Do you check the weather on your iPhone daily? At least once per day I do. When I have to tell the kids what clothes to pick out for the next day (pants or shorts etc.) I pull out my iPhone. Why slide to unlock and then tap the weather icon when you can set this information in your Lock Screen like displayed here. There are lots of great jailbreak apps that do this and more, but I thought I’d show some love to the non-jailbreakers out there with Weather Lock Screen Free, Huang AnZhang. The app is simple to setup – takes about three minutes. There are five tabs at the bottom of the app to setup your Lock Screen. On one you select the city you want displayed. Next choose a background from images the app has or your own camera roll. Then there is text you can choose to add in black or white. I just put iPhone4idiots in white on the Lock Screen pictured here. You could put, “If found please return to . . . ” or something funny or inspirational. Lastly choose a theme to display across the top. I just went for black. Once it looks how you want you tap save and then you have one final step to activate your Weather Lock Screen. Just goto Settings/Wallpaper/Camera Roll and select your saved wallpaper and a pop up will ask if you want Lock Screen or Home Screen. The app even gives you a pop-up with these instructions after you save your Lock Screen. Tap Lock Screen and you’ll likely never tap the weather icon on your Home Screen again. Now if you are a Doppler Radar freak I suggest you try Weather Bug.
Update 5/20/2011 App has one MAJOR flaw. The weather forecast on the Lock Screen doesn’t update automatically. The developer says this is due to Apple Restrictions, but having to manually update each day defeats the purpose. Just another reason why you should jailbreak. To see what your Lock Screen could and should look like check out my review of Cydia app Lock Info.

Two rumors have been hot around iPhone and iPad blogs the past week regarding the iPad 2 jailbreak. They are you will have to pay for the iPad 2 jailbreak and that it is a couple of weeks from release. First, the idea that you’ll have to pay for the iPad 2 jailbreak is extremely unlikely. Almost the entire jailbreak community has stated numerous times that jailbreaks should be free. The rumor is based off this tweet from i0n1c, “After a few years of bug killing everyone will realize that it is nonsense to give out bugs for free.” He later tweeted that there would likely be a free version of any future jailbreak. On top of that it’s likely GeoHot might release the iPad 2 jailbreak. Thus, I said its extremely unlikely you’ll have to pay for an iPad 2 jailbreak and by that I meant less than one percent. The other rumor is that iPad 2 jailbreak is a couple of weeks from release. Sadly the tweet displayed here this morning form MuscleNerd throws a lot of cold water on that one. Continue Reading…

When it comes to downloading music or movies BitTorrent sites have been the most popular way to get content for years. All you needed was some free download software like BitTorrent or UTorrent and then websites like The Pirage Bay, Torrent Funk, VCDQ, btjunkie or dozens of similar sites made searching for and downloading movies simple. However, things have changed over the past few years and IMO they shouldn’t be used. Storage sites like MegaUpload and FileServe are just as easy to use and and you don’t have to have the download software to boot. They now have just as big a selection with new movies being posted just as quickly as torrent websites. About the only drawback I can think of is if your interent connection gets stopped during the download you have to start over. With torrent software it just picks back up at the point the connection was lost. Thus, if you were 95% through a download you don’t have to start over. This can be a big deal if you are downloading HD movies or full seasons of some TV shows that go over 10GB. More importantly, at least for the time being, storage sites are much safter to use as only bittorrent site users are getting sued! Continue Reading…

Google announced today that YouTube will start offering movie rentals. They are starting with 3000 movies that you can see here. While this idea seems logical enough I feel they are much better served trying to make their own movies. Why be the middleman when you can cut them out of the loop. The thing that makes YouTube great are its stars like Ray William Johnson, Nigahiga and many more. This why YouTube gets 2 billion views everyday (well that and cat videos). The problem is the average person spends just 15 minutes per day on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong. I love YouTube. It’s great for skits under 10 minutes and people doing things you won’t see or can’t do on television. That’s where they should remain focused and are doing a great job in training and paying their biggest stars to produce more and higher quality content. Continue Reading…

With HBO Go, HBO subscriber’s can stream their entire library of content to their iPhone or iPad. This includes HBO original programming, movies and comedy. You can stream any episode of any HBO show to your iPad or iPhone. I’m on Comcast and signing up took about two minutes. Just enter your email and password. Browsing the huge database of content is a little difficult. It’s much better to filter by category or just search by name. Categories include movies, series, comedy, sports documentaries and late night. If you have little ones you are going to want to go into the settings to prevent them from viewing the late night material. The comedy section was great. I didn’t even know Bill Hicks did an HBO One Night Stand special. I’ve only watched on my iPad or iPhone and I’ve read that it doesn’t work trying to attach to your TV or through Airplay. Disappointing as the app has a much larger selection of shows than you’ll find on your cable or satellite box. Continue Reading…

China is the biggest market in the world and Apple is just getting started there. There are only four Apple stores in China today, but another 21 are planned to open over the next year. iPhone sales in Greater China were up 250% in the first quarter of 2011. Expect this trend to continue. The Chinese love to jailbreak! A report from mobile research firm Umeng picked up by TheNextWeb is shown here. It states that 34.6% of current Chinese iOS devices have been jailbroken. I’ve always seen percentages of jailbroken devices as just under 10%. This makes me think those estimates have been too low. Look at the graphic, 3 out of every 4 iPhone 3G’s in China is jailbroken. Wow. I would assume the big reason is for unlocking purposes, but even the iPod Touch 4 is showing almost 40% as being jailbroken. Now this doesn’t really mean anything I just find it interesting. You could argue that jailbreaking helps Apple as it adds features customers want and thus leads to more sales. You really can’t dispute that fact. Without jailbreaking I’m sure that at least a small percentage of people would buy Android instead. Possibly a not so small percentage.