Mike Flacy

I picked up my 3G iPhone last Friday.  The consumer madness was in full swing at the AT&T store.  They had 40 iPhones in stock and about 60 people in line.  I snagged the 8 gig model and spent the rest of the day checking out the applications on iPhone.  Here are some of my favorites:

Shazam: This music app is great for people who are clueless to the names of songs and artists.  It can listen to any song playing on the radio or over a loudspeaker and identify it through the iPhone’s microphone.  You can mark the song for download on iTunes, watch any Youtube related video about it or send a link of the song to your friends.

Box Office: This simple app takes your GPS location and finds all the movies / theaters in the area.  It offers the Rotten Tomato rating for every movie and can be organized by rating or title.  Most importantly, it offers fast access to the showtimes in all the nearby theaters.

NetNewsWire: This is the fastest way to read RSS feeds on the iPhone.  I can rummage through posts on 15 sites when I wake up in about 10 minutes.   Just be careful to keep up with the feeds otherwise there will be a huge number posted on the icon all day.

AOL Radio: Turns the iPhone into a radio with 200 stations of music.  You can bookmark stations and mark songs for download on iTunes later.  The sound quality is extremely good for a web based radio.  Pandora is also pretty good for specific artist preferences.

Tap Tap Revenge: It’s Guitar Hero for the iPhone.  It’s only 3 buttons and four songs, but there are four levels of difficulty and the possibility of downloadable songs in the future.  You can also shake the iPhone to hit the right beats instead of tapping the screen.  Lots of fun and it’s free!

Graffitio: This app uses the GPS to figure out where you are and looks for nearby restaurants, bars, stores, parks, events, etc.  The apps creates persistent online graffiti walls for you to write notes about the business.  You can also read notes from people who have been there before.

I was chatting with a friend about the upcoming 3G iPhone and we got stuck on the topic of GPS for a while. Obviously GPS isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with their in-car GPS systems or even the current capabilities of their GPS enabled phones. There’s no real added value for current GPS owners to switch over to the iPhone specifically based on the hardware.

Apple’s strategic advantage will be in the applications that are created with live tracking GPS in mind. Apple already demoed Loopt.com; an app that tells you your friend’s exact location, recent pictures, little messages and alerts you when they are nearby.

The possibilities are so ridiculously intriguing. For instance, imagine twittering, blogging, or updating your Facebook / Myspace status with not only a message, but also your current location automatically.

Locating nearby restaurants is nothing new for GPS, but imagine a one click Yelp.com application that automatically recommends the top 3 nearby Italian restaurants based on user reviews and according to your GPS location.

Imagine a music application that offers a list of upcoming, nearby concerts based on the type of music you keep on your iPhone (or your Pandora.com likes / dislikes) and your current GPS location.

Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and desperately needing to find a public restroom. One button click on the iPhone, your GPS location could be sent to Mizpee.com and a list of the closest toilets (along with reviews if you are a clean freak) would pop up along with directions to each.

Imagine not only all of your pictures being geo-tagged with locations due to GPS, but also tossed into a map-like trip diary documenting vacations as you travel or even the mundane details of your life; all via a one click social networking app on the iPhone.

Imagine sitting at work and hitting a one click Craigslist search that allows you to find nearby apartments (obviously to save on $4 a gallon gas) based on your current GPS location.

The point I’m trying to make is that the iPhone is going to make this type of techy GPS stuff incredibly easy to do. Blackberry already has plenty of GPS apps, but they aren’t for the casual phone user; they are mostly for the tech-heads. Ideally, iPhone users will just load up the App store with one click, download & install a GPS application within a few seconds and away they go. The streamlined process will ultimately increase the number of users and bring these sort of live tracking applications into the mainstream very quickly.