Filed under: Wireless, Odds and ends, Internet, iPhone, iPod touch

TUAW reader Troy sent an email the other day stating that he'd found one of our posts from last August to be very helpful. In Using your iPhone on a cruise ship we talked about Cellular At Sea and getting your iPhone to send and receive pricey calls from many cruise ships. How expensive are they? Last year, they were running about US$0.79 per minute. This year, they cost about the same.

Troy's email got me thinking about how to make cheaper phone calls on cruises, since I'll be on two cruise ships next year. Since last August, we've seen Skype for iPhone / iPod touch [App Store] appear, and for US$2.95 a month you can make unlimited calls to the USA and Canada over a Wi-Fi connection. That's great, but you're going to need to pay anywhere from $0.30 to $0.75 per minute for that Wi-Fi! And another big dead fly is floating in that soup -- the bandwidth on cruise ships is so incredibly low that your calls may not even go through using Skype or another VoIP app.

Unfortunately, things haven't improved much in this realm since last year. My recommendation? Buy the biggest onboard Wi-Fi account you can afford (more minutes = cheaper per minute) and use it with your iPhone or iPod touch for emails, Tweeting your friends, using IM, and checking TUAW. If you want to send voice messages to your pals, record them in the new iPhone OS 3.0 voice memos app or (if you have a 3GS) with video, and then email the messages over Wi-Fi. Your friends can respond the same way.

If you absolutely must have a two-way conversation, your cheapest alternative is going to be to wait until you're in a port, then use one of AT&T's international calling plans (or another carrier's plan if you're not in the US) or see if you can use Skype at a portside bar with free Wi-Fi. You probably don't want to use the ship's on-board satellite phone service at the US$6.99 to US$10.99 per minute rate!

Do you have any other hints for cheap communications afloat, other than sending postcards from ports? Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Troy for reminding us about cruise ships and iPhones

TUAWiPhones ahoy! Making calls on cruise ships, updated originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CNNMoney.com News, Stocks, and Video [free - iTunes link] for iPhone (and iPod touch) is the latest big name entrant into the App Store financial news and media space. Leveraging their brand and resources, it looks like CNN.com’s mobile site while working like an iPhone app. iPhone-likeness aficionados may take a few blinking moments to adjust, but it’s a deliberate design decision that will no doubt appeal to the massive user-base of CNN.com’s existing web services.

TiPb had a chance to test drive CNNMoney, and from a pure content standpoint it’s impressive. When you first launch, you’re greeted with the News dashboard. At the very top is a rotating stock-ticker, then a sampling of latest news, stocks, videos, etc. Users can easily check or uncheck specific content options, and drag them around to re-sequence them in whatever order they prefer. (I immediately put technology news at the top).

The content itself isn’t merely a feed. In an effort to give mobile users the best experience possible, both statistical measures like popularity and hand-picked curation on the part of CNN Money’s editors determine which stories and in what order they’re made available to the iPhone app. Also, stories loaded into the app are cached locally in case you need to go offline (i.e. on an airplane).

The free app is supported by advertising, but when there is no appropriate or available ad, rather than filler or “house ads”, CNN Money cuts users a much-appreciated break and removes the ad space completely.

My Stocks is pre-populated with a few high profile favorites but can be easily customized. Tapping a stock brings up a details and graph view. As is typical with online stock reporting, quotes are delayed roughly 15 min. Once you’ve viewed a stock quote, a new section pops up on your dashboard News tab called Last 3 Quotes, and as the title indicates, it keeps track of your most recently views stocks.

Videos shows thumbnails and a brief description of the story. CNN Money typically produces over a dozen unique video segments a day, and they load quickly and look good on the iPhone.

The Add/Remove tab lets you do the content re-arrangement mentioned previously.

It should be noted that while CNN Money is compatible with iPhone 3.0, and the system-wide Copy functionality works fine, it doesn’t yet support push notification alerts, or automatic HTTP video stream optimization. Hopefully we’ll see these in an update. Along with a good James Earl Jones rendition of “This is CNN”.

Screenshots after the break…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Quick App: CNNMoney.com News, Stocks, and Video for iPhone

OH (original hacker, yo!) George Hotz has posted the RC2 version of his iPhone 3GS jailbreak tool, purplera1n. Along with other improvements, the new version supports Vista, Windows 7, and supports 64-bit.

If any of the above interests you, and you’re a responsible adult who understands the risks involved, hit the link below and check it out. Jarrrr!

[On the iPhone]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3GS Jailbreak purplera1n Updated to Support Vista, Windows 7, 64-bit

newVideoPlayer("/july4th_part4_giz.flv", 475, 376,""); Here’s another clip from the Consumer Product Safety Commission that proves, once and for all, that it is not okay to point fireworks at family members. Happy July 4th everybody! [CPSC] (more…)

Filed under: Gaming, Odds and ends, Freeware, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Normally we'd just send out a tweet about this (that's usually what we do with free app deals, so if you're not one of the almost 40,000 people following us yet, you definitely should be), but this is a good one, and it's a holiday, so we wanted to make sure you knew. Sega is feeling particularly generous this weekend, so they're giving away free copies of their Columns Deluxe, a port of the old Genesis game, for the iPhone. The game is a pretty straightforward port -- it doesn't have any extras, and the accelerometer controls are a little tacked on from what we hear, but if you like the puzzler gameplay of Columns, and you should, it's a fun one to pull up for a few minutes at a time.

Plus, it's free -- from July 3rd to Monday, July 6th, Sega says it'll be on sale for the low price of nothing at all. Sounds good to us -- sit back, put a few brats and burgers on the grill, grab a Corona (and lime, of course), and enjoy some old-school dropping block gameplay for no money at all.

TUAWSega giving away Columns on iPhone for free all this weekend originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Pentagon’s wacky sci-fi department DARPA has been working on robotic hummingbird-based drones to serve as miniature spies. They’re not nearly as agile or adorable as real hummingbirds, but DARPA is well on their way to achieving that dream. (more…)

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Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store, Road Tested

Like my colleague Mel Martin, I've had a serious GPS jones for quite a while. When I was in much better shape, I rode the local trails on a mountain bike with a Garmin eTrex Summit. It didn't have any maps, nor did I really need any for what I was doing. My next GPS receiver was a Garmin GPSmap 60cs that I used for geocaching. It had a nice color screen and some limited maps, but really didn't do a very good job of helping me find my way around town.

The third GPS unit was another Garmin, and in this case it was my first real "navigator." I still have it; it's the Garmin nüvi 660, which is an awesome little unit that can help you find your way around the US or Europe (depending on the model you purchase), act as an MP3 player, or even work as a fairly serviceable hands-free unit for Bluetooth phones. I've used mine with my iPhones since way back in 2007, and have enjoyed hearing the amplified voices of callers blasting out of the nüvi.

It's best capability, of course, is as a navigator. In this post, I'm going to compare the AT&T Navigator app [App Store] and service with the nüvi, and give you my take on how this free app works. Mel already filled you in on some of the details in his earlier post; we agreed that I'd give you the road test perspective.

Continue reading Road Tested: AT&T Navigator for iPhone

TUAWRoad Tested: AT&T Navigator for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We already knew pretty much everything about the Archos9 tablet netbook running Windows 7, but with nobody sure what kind of touchscreen the thing uses, we’re left to wonder if we’d want anything to do with a resistive-touchscreen tablet. (more…)

Netbooks are netbooks. Usually based on Intel’s Atom chipset, and generally not that fast. What you gonna do? Well, I upgraded the SSD in my Hackintosh. Not just to bump the drive from 32 to 128GB, but for SPEED. (more…)