Utilities

PART II CONTINUED FROM HERE


4.

The iPhone is an ideal platform for listening to online radio stations. In this article, I explain everything you’ll ever need to know about all this. You’ll learn how radio stations can be listened to on even non-jailbroken iPhones, without any hacks to play stations in the background; I also present a very thorough comparison of currently available third-party radio software.

First and foremost, let’s take a closer look at the built-in, out-of-the-box radio support.

1. Built-in capabilities: QuickTime

All versions of the iPhone (and, of course, the iPod Touch – from now on, I refer to all these as “iPhone”), under OS3, already have support for playing back some (not all!) possible radio stream types.

 “July 13, 2009 - SBSH announced an exciting update for its SafeWallet for iPhone to version 1.1! Introducing new PC Companion, iPhone 3.0 support, custom templates creation and editing and much more!”

With the Push support in the iPhone OS 3, the iPhone has become an excellent platform for instant messaging.

Before the Push support, you could only keep them listening using hacks like Backgrounder on jailbroken devices or using clients that forced the entire phone remain “alive”. Neither is an optimal solution. Now, the Push support provides the platform with something that, in some respects, is even better than the current instant messaging support on competing smartphone operating systems (at least Symbian S60, Blackberry and Windows Mobile).

I’ve just added a new section to my iPhone Web browser roundup, elaborating on the latest changes and news. I also present three new Web browsers coming with Internet radio stream players.

Speaking of Internet radio apps, I’m working on a brand new review of them – along with a full roundup of iPhone messenger applications, paying special attention to their new, Push functionality.

 

I’ve long been complaining about the lack of any “find in page” functionality in most mobile Web browsers.

When I’m using my PC at work, I’m able to quickly open Outlook and call up an e-mail group, for instance to send out a tech-support bulletin to our field sites, or maybe report a bug to our development team. At home, I use mostly Gmail, and also have a few helpful contact groups configured (like for our bloggers), but I have yet to find a way to sync the grouping to my iPod touch.

How many times have you wanted to send someone contact information from your iPhone or iPod Touch, but you couldn’t do it? Instead, you had to manually type the information into an Email to send it or tell them the information over the phone. Big time waster!