Archive for June 26th, 2009

BlackBerry Palringo App

Name: BlackBerry Palringo App

Summary: If you love or incline to instant messaging, you will definitely love the Palringo application. Palringo is a mobile instant messaging application in BlackBerry smart phones that supports Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, and countless others. It is an all-in-one software for your mobile. This application also allows you to chat with other Palringo users via either chat, text, pictures, or voice. The voice capability of this application is almost great because of its PTT or Push-To-Talk software. The wide compatibility of this software allows you to talk to your friends or family online or through their mobile phones.

User Interaction: The Palringo application uses a proprietary protocol that permits communication between other users of the application. The same protocol allows communication between the Palringo client and the IM servers since Palringo clients do not directly communicate to any of the IM protocols. Newer versions of the application’s protocol permit you to change your online statuses as well as status messages. From the various IM or messaging services as well as social networking services supported by the Palringo application, you can easily exchange or share chat, photo, and voice messages with your contacts. Palringo application has a technology that allows you to set and view the location of your peers via estimation over the existing Internet network, triangulation, GPS, and manual setting. This technology uses Google Maps API to highlight the location of your peers. It also offers a nearby section by group and a friend list that shows the nearby users.

User Interface: Palringo application has a very easy to use interface. It has a Groups Gallery icon that contains a directory that you can browse for other Palringo users. The gallery also contains groups of people you would like to participate or join in that share similar or the same interest as you do. It is a virtual place for Palringo users. The combination of the brilliant colored screen, soft keyboard, and 3G technology in Palringo application were too good to ignore. Its decent interface truly attracts BlackBerry users. Before using this application, you must register an account with the proprietary instant messaging service of Palringo. Once you have the account, you can simply connect to different instant messaging services supported by Palringo. However, in disconnecting from the IM service, you must delete the protocol or quit the entire application. Your contacts in Palringo application are consolidated in a single list. From this list, you can either add or delete contacts. The multiple message windows are being supported by the application in a unique style. Instead of tabs, the application treats single conversations as separate windows. These windows can be accessed by pushing the home button of the application located on the bottom left hand corner.

Utility and Productivity: You can always be the administrator of your BlackBerry smart phone. With Palringo application installed in your phone, you can easily create and moderate your groups. The transfer and delivery of instant messages on Palringo is incredibly fast over a WiFi or broadband connection on a desktop computer. This also applies with the photo and voice chat messages. The speed of transfer and delivery of the voice messages are excellently clear, which indicates that the developers of the application have made a good choice of codec. The bandwidth of voice messages in Palringo application is encoded at around 7 kbps while the text messages only use a negligible amount of bandwidth. For photos, the bandwidth weighs about 20 kbps each.

Rating: (9.0 out of 10) The Palringo application combines the services of the ability to share presence, location and pictures, real time instant messaging via text or chat, and vocal instant messaging. It enables group and one on one discussions as well as real time dialogues for Palringo users across the globe whether on a connected PC or any mobile network.

Distance Meter Pro iPhone App

Summary Distance Meter Pro

Distance Meter Pro is definitely the best iPhone app for the hardcore hiker that wants to get the most out of their hikes. People can take a stopwatch, a calculator, a pencil, a map and a notepad along with them on their next hike, or they can take Distance Meter Pro and their iPhone in order to get the exact same end result.

User Interaction
User interaction with Distance Meter Pro is actually quite difficult by iPhone standards, although this has more to do with the overall raw power of the interface than it does with the actual difficulty of using the program. Distance Meter Pro allows the user to bring up different maps of terrain and topography while at the same time tracking their position along the trail they are currently following. Apple iPhone users can bring up statistics such as their speed and the number of calories burned as well, before importing the entire set of information to another location. If you are really interested in just what you get out of your hikes physically, Distance Meter Pro will give you the maximum amount of power to calculate it.

User Interface

The interface on iPhone Apps Distance Meter Pro operates like most GPS applications, although it is a little more sophisticated. You can fit the map, the trail, your pathway along the map and all of the real time information like trip duration, distance traveled and instantaneous speed onto the same iPhone screen with an interface that is intuitive. Unfortunately, the size of the screen combined with the number of features displayed does mean that the screen can seem somewhat cluttered with information, but it is about as good as it can get on a screen as small as the one on the Apple iPhone.

Utility and Productivity
Distance Meter Pro iPhone application is one of the slower ones to start up because of the sheer amount of information that needs to be accessed. On the other hand, this iPhone app will allow you to set up a tracking session quite quickly to the point where you can be off in just a few minutes. Compare that to the 25-30 minutes it would take with the equipment mentioned in the summary and you can see just how much more productive this app will make you. Furthermore, there are at least five different calculations going on in real time simultaneously on this application. That is extraordinarily productive.

Rating
In the end, the best thing to do about the Distance Meter Pro was to give it a score of 8.5 out of 10. As far as usefulness is concerned, this is easily one of the best iPhone applications around. That having been said however, some considerations do need to be made.

The most important of these is that a large part of the iPhone using population is not interested in fitness apps and even fewer people are interested in hiking-specific apps. That makes this not a widely used app and really much more of a niche product and that is reflected in the score given above: