In this post, I thought I’d just talk about some of the iPhone apps I currently have on my iPhone, and why you should use them too.

The most-used app I have is probably TVGuide. This is a great little app. I can’t quite remember if it’s free or not (It’s been a long time since I first put it onto my iPhone). As the name of it says, it basically gives you the latest TV guide for many different channels – You can even select the channels that you want to see a TV guide for. When you start the app, you have to wait for the data to be downloaded to the iPhone (Which basically depends on if you’re using WiFi or 3G, normally doesn’t take long). If you watch TV often, then this could be a great application for you, which is well-worth using.

Another great app to use is Palringo. This is an iPhone instant messenger client – Which supports many different services, including MSN and Yahoo Messenger. It’s completely free and works perfectly. You stay logged in when you close the application too (You sign out once you use the sign out feature in the app) which enables your contacts to message you even when you aren’t using the app. This is a great way to contact people on the move, for free. It would be great if they added the feature to change your display picture though, which is probably the only downside of this.

The third app to use is Sky News. If you’re interested in staying up to date with the news, this is a great and quick way to find out what’s happening. The application runs quick and is very simple to use – Simply select the headline that interests you and immediately the full story is displayed. Unlike quite a lot of apps, it runs very quick even when you’re using 3G networking, which means that you’ll be able to check the news anywhere with great speed. I use this often.

The final application to use is Twitterific. Although I don’t use Twitter that much, I still have this app and use it when I want to check Twitter. It’s quick and is full of great features, allowing to browse your friends’ tweets as well as make your own tweets directly from your iPhone. It’s also very easy to check your direct messages. There are many different Twitter clients for the iPhone but, in my opinion, Twitterific is probably the best one to use.

In conclusion, these are the four main iPhone applications that I use. I do have other apps on my iPhone, so I might make another post about applications sometime in the future.

Recently, Internet giants Google have announced two new services – Google Buzz and Google Broadband. Let’s look at both of them.

Google Buzz
This new idea is Google’s solution to social sharing – Built into Google Mail. You may think that this is quite similiar to Google’s other product, Google Wave. In fact, you’d be right. Buzz, however, aims to enable users to share photos, videos, links and status updates with other people, quite like Twitter does.

Google Buzz is actually live right now so if you log into Google Mail, you should see a new link in the sidebar called Buzz. Once clicked, you’ll notice a Twitter-like layout. It actually works in the same sort of way – You enter a short message into the box and it submits it to all of your friends. You can see all of your friends’ messages below it.

Some people would see it as a half-way point between normal e-mail and Google Wave. It’s a different way of communicating online in a unique way, which links e-mail, Twitter and Wave all together into one nice package. Although I personally won’t use this new feature, it’s great that Google are continuing to expand on their free services offered to users on the internet.

Google Broadband
Just to note to start with, Google Broadband is not the official name of this project, I believe. Google have announced that they will be providing internet broadband to over 500,000 communities in the United States. This won’t just be any normal broadband – It’s ultra-quick. The speed claimed by Google is to be 1gbps, which is a huge improvement in speed. For example in the United Kingdom, the highest speed available at the moment is 50mbps, which means Google’s broadband would be 20x quicker!

The main reason Google has given for this new idea is to get more people using the internet. In turn, this would also increase Google’s profits because they would get more users purchasing advertising from their Search Network. Of course, this is one service that Google cannot provide completely free, so they have said that they will provide very competitive prices on their broadband. They have also said that they will have open access on their network, so that users will have a choice of different service providers.

This new service is to be tested in the United States near the end of the year. Later on in the year, Google will decide the chosen sites which will be allowed to test the new service and then hopefully they’ll release it officially next year, maybe even reaching to different countries. There has been no official word on their public release date and reaching internationally, though.

Most users were expecting Apple to call their new tablet PC the iTablet. They chose not to, and now the British company X2 Computing has decided to pick up on that and make a rival product – The iTablet.

In terms of specifications, the iTablet does seem more powerful than Apple’s iPad. Due for an April release, the iTablet is going to run on Windows 7 and even has a 1.3 megapixel camera built in to enable video chatting. Another advantage over the iPad.

One of the biggest problems with the iPad is the lack of Adobe Flash support, which can be difficult if you’re trying to view websites with flash content on. Luckily, X2 Computing have managed to bring flash support into their iTablet, which is a great feature to have. Just think, you could be travelling and playing on online games websites at the same time!

The screen size of the iTablet ranges between 10.2 inches and 12.1 inches, bigger than the iPad, and claims to have multitouch, Wi-Fi, bluetooth as well as optional 3G networking. You even get a huge hard drive too – Ranging up to 250GB of space, compared to the much-smaller 64GB offered by Apple’s iPad.

Another interesting feature is that you can run programs simultaneously. With the iPad, you can only run one task at a time because of the operating system used (Which is also on the iPhone). This can make it quite difficult if you want to, for example, read your e-mails and browse the internet.

In conclusion, X2 Computing have certainly done a great deal of work to rival Apple. They’ve managed to fix every weakness that was identified with the iPad and made it much better. Everything about the specifications are much better and quicker, and running on a decent operating system like Windows 7 too, what could go wrong?

The Google Nexus One is one of Google’s latest products. Most of us already know that Google created the Android OS for mobile phones, but the Nexus One is the first phone that Google are creating with it’s own hardware instead of just supplying the operating system. Let’s take a look at some of the hardware aspects of this phone.

The Nexus One has a 800×480 display on a 3.7 inch screen, which is a pretty decent size for a phone. It also has a 1GHz processor (Which is more powerful than processors in other key phones, such as the iPhone) and 512MB RAM, which is fairly average for one of today’s smartphones.

Google’s new phone also has a very good quality camera – With 5 megapixels. This is similar to another of today’s most popular phones, the Nokia N97 which also has a 5 megapixel camera. In terms of actual quality, the camera does seem to be of a great quality. If having a good-quality camera on your mobile phone is important to you, then the Google Nexus One would be a great idea for you to purchase.

The phone obviously uses Google’s own platform, Google Android. This has support for a lot of important features – Such as e-mail support, Facebook, voice commands and generally a nice-looking system. After testing, it does work pretty quickly most of the time, but in some occasions it can be a little slow. In most cases, this won’t have a huge effect on the operations of your phone and you may not even be able to realise it if you aren’t completing complex tasks.

One potential problem with the Google Nexus One, however, is that it may not be very effective when used in direct sunlight. For example, if you’re at the beach, it may be quite difficult to view the screen. You may not run into issues if you aren’t using the phone in direct sunlight, because apart from that, the screen is a great feature of it. It has a great touchscreen which is very responsive and works exactly as you want it.

In conclusion, the Google Nexus One phone is probably the best Android phone on the market at the moment. If you’re looking for a high-quality phone which will complete all of your day-to-day tasks such as checking e-mails, browsing the internet and obviously making phone calls, then the Nexus One would be a great purchase. If you’re in need of more information on this phone, I recommend visiting Nexus One Review.

Options for Residential Phone services – What to choose?

To talk in terms of residential communication needs, there are versatile options for home service available today, making it difficult to choose from. The best part is that now you don’t have to be restricted to using the traditional services only. If you ask me the only words to utter from my mouth would be, “Phew! Thank heavens for that.”

With more options available, one can easily choose from the wide list of choices they can decide to use for themselves, based on their needs and affordability.

Traditional Phone Service – the regular phone

Traditional phone services or POTS, has ruled the world of telecommunications for decades. It is the long-established phone system, which in fact is still preferred as the first choice by a majority of people for residential purposes. It consists of a landline service with a dial tone ported within your home premises. You can conveniently avail calling services such as long-distance phone calls, international phone calls, voicemail, call waiting and caller ID but for every service you are charged distinctly. So, collectively, it’s the phone line rent, taxes, services charges, and extra charges add up to make a huge sum of money to be paid in form of your monthly bill, which is sure to make you scream in surprise.

Owing to its rather expensive service, people have begun to shift to using other less expensive alternatives, which include internet phone services. The best part is that with voip phone you can keep the existing number but simply switch services.

Other Alternatives–Voip phone

Gradually, we see more and more consumers welcoming voip phone services in their homes and offices. The best reason to support this idea of switching is perhaps due to the cost effectiveness and affordability. Making calls using a voip phone is way cheaper than using the regular phone for that reason.

Today, we have Cable providers offering well turned-out “triple play” services, which deliver cable television, home phone service, and support a fast speed Internet all in one. If you are guessing the cost would be rocketing sky high for this all-in-one service, then you are wrong because there is a considerable cost advantage it offers over otherwise purchasing each service individually.

Nevertheless, this being digital age, there is nothing as better as using an internet phone service. If you have a high speed Internet connection that gives an excellent service quality, then you can easily get yourself a voip phone and begin making economical voice and video calls right away. Whether you use it with a computer or simply get a handset, the cost to acquiring and using the service both are by far less than other services charge.

Voip phone services offer an excellent call quality, similar to that of a traditional phone service but costs you much less, inclusive of all service charges. This is why internet phone is much performing much more better in the market than critics had anticipated. Stats say that internet phone will replace most of the traditional communication means until 2019.

Anyways, choose what you think is best for you, in terms of service quality, cost, and convenience.

Today, Apple announced the Apple iPad. This is their version of a tablet PC. It’s meant to be small, portable and be a mixture of an iPhone and a Mac. Some of the features announced make it seem like it. Let’s take a look.

Steve Jobs described in great detail about the Apple iPad’s media functionalities. First of all, iTunes is built into it. This allows you to listen to music and watch videos, just like on an iPhone. It may not be the best purchase if you’re JUST interested into listening to music, because obviously the iPad is much larger than the iPhone. However, the iPad’s huge touch screen makes it much better for watching videos on. Also, one of Apple’s aims is to make people purchase digital books. They have deals set up with most major book publishers to try and get users to purchase books from them and then read it on the iPad. This is the same with newspapers. They want users to read it digitally – Which is a great idea.

Like with the iPhone, the iPad also has YouTube built in, as well as Maps. Both of these look much better on the iPad – You can now even watch YouTube in HD! One of the downsides is that the internet browser STILL doesn’t have flash installed. For a “portable computer”, flash definitely should be included.

Now let’s look at some of the hardware aspects of the iPad. It’s very thin – 0.5 inches in thickness. It weighs 5 pounds and has a large 9.7 inch display. Amazingly, Apple has made their own processor chip just for this iPad – And it runs at 1GHz. Again, considering the iPhone has a 667MHz processor, this should have been much better in order to provide a quick user experience. The disk space options on offer vary from 16GB to 64GB, depending on how many files you’ll need to be storing.

The iPad also has WiFi built in. This is something you would expect – But what most users want is 3G networking, which allows you to browse the web wherever you are. They do offer this, but you have to purchase a separate model for this – Which costs more! This feature should be provided in all models for free.

What some news channels have been reporting is that this iPad may be competitive in the gaming market. Portable games consoles such as the DSi and the PSP may be good consoles, but the iPad has the advantage of having a much larger screen, better touch screen capabilites and a huge user base which can produce games for much lower prices. If the iPad is capable of handling higher-quality games, then this certainly could be a key player to watch out for.

One of the final things we’ll look at with the Apple iPad is the battery life. The average battery life is 10 hours whilst the battery life on standby mode is approximately a month. I believe that they’ve cut some important features out to save battery life – For example, lack of flash support as well as only being able to run one application at a time. You cannot open, eg, mail and the internet browser up at once.

And now it comes down to the price. If you don’t want 3G networking, then the price of the Apple iPad is $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB. If you want 3G networking, it costs $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. The pricing is quite reasonable considering most tech websites were claiming it would be priced at $999.

In conclusion, the Apple iPad is very, very similar to an iPhone. However, it’s obviously much bigger and can be used to provide much better experiences with watching videos and reading books – As well as playing games. If these are the tasks you’ll be wanting to do, then this may be a good purchase for you.

iPhones are great devices. However, one main flaw is definitely the battery life. If you use it a lot, then you’ll know that the battery doesn’t last long at all. Here are some tips which should help to make your battery last longer.

First of all, this tip will save you a LOT of battery life. Lower the brightness settings in the iPhone and set Auto-Brightness to on. I find that the iPhone is at a suitable brightness at just less than half, or even a quarter. Having it on full brightness will eat up your battery very, very quickly. Let’s be honest though, nobody needs it as bright as it is on full. To change the brightness, go into Settings –> Brightness.

The next option to change is the 3G networking (If you’re on an iPhone 3G or 3GS). When Apple announced these products, they claimed 10 hours of battery life on WiFi and 5 hours of battery life while connected to 3G. That just shows you the difference. If you’re in an area with WiFi, try to connect to the WiFi Network if possible. Even better though, if you don’t need the internet at all, disable 3G and WiFi. To do this, go into Settings –> Wi-Fi –> Wi-Fi = Off. To disable 3G, go into Settings –> General –> Network –> Enable 3G = Off.

Thirdly, you should disable bluetooth on the phone if you don’t need it. This also uses your battery life which you really don’t need if you aren’t using it. Only enable bluetooth if you’re about to use it. Then when you’ve finished, disable it again. This is just one of the many ways of making your iPhone battery last longer.

If you have music on often but aren’t listening to it, you can easily turn the music off. Music does use more processing power so you shouldn’t keep it on when you don’t need to. Listening to music often is fine, just don’t keep it on when you aren’t listening to it.

What some people have found also is that your phone doesn’t last long when you’ve just purchased it. The more you use it and charge it, the longer the battery lasts. If you have only just purchased your iPhone within several days, then just keep using it normally and see how it is in around a week. It could make a lot of difference.

These are just some of the ways you can make your battery last longer. They are simple tweaks which won’t restrict your access to the iPhone, you can still continue using your iPhone in the same way.

Back in the glory days of the internet – around 1996, to be exact – Real Player was actually quite an accomplished piece of software. The VLC of its day, it could play a variety of formats reasonably well, and was great for streaming web content way before anyone had heard of YouTube. Then RealMedia decided to add some annoying nag screens. Then a music ripping program. Then a burning program. Then internet channels and radio…. It all got a bit messy.

The state of RealPlayer today is that it’s well known as being the flagship of bloatware – an application that tries to do much and ends up doing everything half as well as standalone application, so it was hard to get excited when RealPlayer announced yet another update to the product line. Still, we checked it out hoping that RealMedia had finally learned its lesson and began to emulate its much more streamlined, faster and nicer looking peers.

Rather than taking away though, RealPlayer have simply added again – this time a method for downloading video from sites like YouTube. To be fair, it does this very well and you can very quickly throw a video from YouTube onto your iPod or 360 for example. It’s encoding is quick and its options are plenty. However, while it does nothing wrong it doesn’t offer anything different to the variety of programs that have been able to do this for years.

If you’ve never converted web video before but have always wanted to, SP might be worth a try. However, if you know your way around video encoding or don’t feel a media player needs that particular feature, there’s little to offer you. One day RealPlayer might start sorting out its huge list of mediocre features to come up with a killer application, but SP is not that program.

I thought I’d make a personal post for a change.

So far in 2010 I have 3 concerts planned:

22nd March – Delain – I absolutely love Delain’s music! They’re probably my second favourite band (After Nightwish, obviously) and I’m really looking forward to seeing them.

1st May – Kiss – My dad wanted to see Kiss so I thought I’d go with him. They aren’t my favourite band but oh well, they’re still good.

10th May – Kiss – Yep it’s Kiss again. I hope they’re good the first time or this one could be quite boring!

Unfortunately I have to wait until 2011 for Nightwish to tour again, I don’t think I can wait any longer. I’ve seen them once so far in London on the 11th March, I had to travel for around 8 hours in total for that show and it was definitely worth it.

On another note, I really, really hope Nightwish release The Heart Asks Pleasure First soon. I think it would be a good idea to release it in 2010 to give Nightwish fans something to “put them on” until the next album in 2011. I absolutely love that song and all I have is pretty bad versions of it.

Welcome to the release of my JR Memberlist WordPress Plugin.

Description
This plugin allows you to display a list of users on your blog, using a simple shortcode.

It’s very simple to use. Simply enable the plugin and then enter [jrmemberlist] in any post or page you make on your blog. The memberlist will automatically replace it!

That’s all you need to do.

Installation
1. Upload `jr-memberlist.php` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Use the shortcode [jrmemberlist] to show the memberlist.

FAQ
=Does this work?=
Yes.

Changelog
= 1.0.0 =
* Initial Release

Download
New Link: JR Memberlist

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via the contact form on this website, or by leaving a comment on this post.