There are other features, but hurry if you want to try them. There are only about 150k trials left out of the million trial challenge. Simply tap on the “Try Now FREE” on the opening popup, it will convert your basic Snapture into the full Premium Snapture for the rest of the session.

More info here:

www.snapturelabs.com

Once installed, go to the Library and install the first 4 free lessons and the demo dictionary. The demo contains all the characters in the 4 free lessons, and it allows you to try the handwriting recognition.

Since my Chinese is very poor, sometimes I need to know what a certain character mean, but unless I have it in my computer (where I can look it up digitally), I would have to look it up in a Chinese-English print dictionary. Even then, sometimes it’s hard for me to know which radical to look for, and in the end I just can’t find it or give up.

With this app I can simply copy the character and write it with my finger on my iPhone. Using a finger is not as easy as using a stylus, but I never had any problem with it. It might not look pretty, but it is recognized.

Once the character is found and selected in the bottom bar, a list of results is shown, divided by the number of characters. Chinese words are often a combination of 2+ characters, so these combinations are included in the results.

Finally, you can get the traditional and simplified version of the characters, as well as the various meanings and their pinyin. Pretty much everything you would need to know.

It is also possible to enter the pinyin to get the corresponding characters, or even enter English words. This last option isn’t a true English-Chinese dictionary, but it’s useful most of the time.

The more complex the character is, the more time it will take to find it. I found that at most you’ll wait 5-10 seconds. For simpler characters the results are instantaneous.

I have the full dictionary (20,000+ characters), but there were a few instances in which it couldn’t recognize the character I entered. It could be the stroke order was wrong, or it might be a bug. In one instance I did find the character with pinyin, so it is in the dictionary, but it just couldn’t recognize the handwriting.

The lessons are less useful to me, since I am not a novice user. But from the little I tried, the main focus is the stroke order and position, as well as memorizing the characters. You’ll have to write those characters over and over, in order to commit them to memory, which I think will be useful to many learners. You can also customize lesson settings to better suit your level.

Here are some improvements I’d like to see in the future:

- Improve character recognition speed
- Allow bottom search bar in dictionary to be scrollable, to look for similar characters.
- Improve recognition (some characters are not recognized).
- Remember past searches. Sometimes it’s useful to remember the last few searches.

Overall this is well worth the 4.99 Euro I paid for the full Chinese-English dictionary. I think the interface is very well done, sometimes I just enter characters for fun, which might help with my Chinese. If you’re interested in Chinese, give this a try and let me know what you think.

There are many ways to do that, here are the ones I tried:

- The easiest way is to send the image as an attachment through email. Every Flickr account has a private email for this purpose. I’ve tried this in the past, but it was not very efficient. Sometimes the email just never arrives, sometimes it takes a long time, which defeats the purpose of upload on the spot.

- There are a few apps that do this: Pushr just uploads all the pics in your camera roll (I couldn’t find a way to choose which photo to upload). uPoze uploads every photo in your camera roll, including new ones you take (this is only useful if you want to automatically upload all photos). iFlickr allows you to choose an image from your camera roll, or to take a new one and upload it. It also allows to enter title, description, tags, permissions. This is the app I’ve been using until recently. But then I found a newer and better app.

- MobileFlickr (Source http://xk72.com/iphone/repos/ ): this is the most comprehensive Flickr app so far. Not only it allows to easily upload photos like iFlickr (including upload status bar/size uploaded), but it also has a nice interface to your Flickr account. You can choose to browse your stream, sets, favorites, groups, tags, and everything for your contacts or anyone else. It can cash thumbnails locally (so you can browse offline), and it allows to browse photos with a coverflow-like interface. I haven’t found any problem with this app, I only wish it allowed to modify my own photos (delete, change title etc..). I think anyone with an iPhone should have this app. Even if you don’t have a Flickr account, get one for free and start photoblogging!!

Flickr also has a mobile version of their site (http://m.flickr.com), and it works ok on the iPhone. It’s not formatted for the iPhone specifically, it looks more like a general WAP site. It also doesn’t allow to edit your photos, for that you’ll have to switch to the normal site. A better site for viewing Flickr photos is iPhlickr (www.chandlerkent.com/iphlickr) which formats the photos very nicely. However MobileFlickr is still a better alternative.

But now there’s a new app called Snapture, which is similar to CameraPro but it’s totally free. Here are some of the features:

- Black & White photos
- Timer
- Fast burst taking 3 photos in a row.
- Different sizes (though it can’t take bigger pictures than the default camera app)
- Digital zoom
- Level Aid
- Auto Rotation turned off

I recently upgraded the app, but I cannot save the settings anymore. Probably a permission issue. But not a big problem. I highly recommend this app, it has replaced the default camera app for me.

In theory there isn’t a time limit, as long as you iPhone has enough battery and disk space. In practice this app crashes often, so I wouldn’t want to record anything too long and risk losing it at the end.

Unfortunately it is not possible to record phone conversations at the moment, hopefully the developer will find a way to do that in the future. For the moment it’s just a fun app to have to easily record voices. I use it often to record my son learning to talk, he also loves to hear himself back.

- Amazon/Kindle/ebook reader: right now there is the Books app, but it only supports txt and html files. What if Amazon’s new ebook service would integrate with the iPhone? We could buy/download and read ebooks directly from the iPhone!

- Blogging Client: currently I have installed the Wordpress WPhone plugin on my blogs, which allows me to manage my blog from the iPhone, including writing new posts. However a native blogging client would allow me to write a post offline any time, and then post it to my blog once I am near a wifi. Template posts would also be useful.

- Video Player: the video player on the iPhone only supports Quicktime movies, so I have to convert all my video files to that format, which is time-consuming and sometimes frustrating (sometimes the aspect ratio is just wrong). What about a video player that supports divx/xvid files? That way I wouldn’t have to convert them, I’d just copy them over.

- RSS reader: there are already a couple of RSS readers, but my problem is that they don’t sync with an online reader which is necessary since I read my feeds on many different computers.

- VOIP: since Jobs said that they won’t interfere on VOIP usage through wifi, I am sure we will see a VOIP client pretty soon. That’d be amazing for voice calls.

- Record phone conversations: there is now an app that makes voice recordings (VoiceNote), however it cannot record phone conversations. I would find this very useful.

- PlecoDict for iPhone: this is an amazing program for Palm and Windows Mobile. It’s a handwriting recognition software for Chinese characters. If they can port it to the iPhone touch screen I would definitely buy this. I wouldn’t have to wonder “what is that character?”. I think this would improve my poor poor chinese very quickly.

That’s what iComic does. Install it here. Since the author is Japanese, the menus are all in Japanese, however you can find an English translation here.

Now that you have iComic installed, copy your digital comics in zip format into this folder: /var/mobile/Media/Comic. You can also create subfolders to separate different series.

This app works very well. You can read comics horizontally, so that the page width is the screen width, and you just scroll down to read the whole page. It’s also possible to zoom in, and when you turn page the zoom will be kept.

There are three ways to turn the page: gravity, (invisible) bottons in the corners, or swipe. I use the corner buttons, since scrolling and swipe are very similar.

The app will also remember the last page read, not only in general, but also for each file. You can also see a list of each page inside the zip file.

One big problem I found is that some files load very very slow, 30-60 seconds to load the next page. I am not sure why this is, but I found a way around it. I extract the image file from the zip archive, open them in Irfanview and save them with the same dimensions and file names, but Irfanview automatically reduces the file size of each file. That’s enough to make these files work.

Most digital comics files are in the cbr format, which is the rar archive. This will not work with iComic, but I can easily convert them to zip using IZarcXXXX. Hopefully in the future iComic will support the rar format as well.

Another missing feature would be to know which page I am reading. Often I need to know how far along I am in the comic.

iComic works really well with manga. I have absolutely no problem reading manga. For American comics, it’s a little bit more difficult. I often have to zoom in and scroll around the page. But it still works for me.

As I said, I really like this app, I hope the author will be able to keep developing this app and improve it.

- FiveDice: if you’ve ever played Yatzee, this is the game app for you. Don’t know how much fun it is to play by yourself, but it’s well done.

- Labyrinth: this shows perfectly the potential of the accelerometor. I think this is one of my favorite games. Unfortunately the free version comes only with a few levels.

- Mines/iSolitaire: all very typical Windows games, but all working well.

- Pool: it’s actually boring to play a whole game, but if you like pool this is fun.

- Towers of Hanoi: love this game, and it’s very easy to play: just tap the origin and destination towers to move a piece. It allows you to concentrate on the game itself instead of the logistics.

- Garf: I remember this board game from my childhood, I actually never played it but I used to see the commecials on TV. I really like this.

- Superpong: the touch screen should be a good way to play this, but I just can’t seem to master it. It’s better than the iPod clickwheel, but not as good as the mouse for me. Weird.

- Gemlogic: another simple but fun game, works great with the touch screen.

- NES: it’s also possible to install Nintendo ported games, though that requires you to find NES rom files somewhere on the web and install them on your iPhone. I’ve tried a few of them, however the virtual keypad really doesn’t work well. For a while it was fun to have Dong King Kong on my iPhone, but I never really played it.

- Yeti3D/iPac3D: these two games are more a demo for 3D graphics on the iPhone. They’re basically a Doom-like environment, with accelerometor-based navigation. The navigation and graphics are cool, but it’s not easy to play.

- Signal is a way for you to control your iTunes from the iPhone. You install a small program on your PC, then in your iPhone you surf to your PC’s IP address and you will see an interface for your iTunes. You can play/stop tracks, but you can also browse all your playlists as well as artists and albums.

- Touchpad Pro is a native app that allows to connect to a computer with VNC. First you need to install a VNC server on your PC, TightVNC is a very good way to do this. Then install Touchpad Pro on your iPhone and connect to your PC. You can control your mouse with the touch pad, and also type words with the iPhone keyboard. Unfortunately you cannot see the PC desktop on your iPhone screen.

- Which is why my favorite service is PC2Me.net. With this server you can actually see your PC desktop and perform any mouse/keyboard operation. Again you have to install a small application on your PC, then you use Safari to connect to your PC. Very cool!!

- Sketches: you can draw with your finger, even choosing a photo as background. My kid loves to play with this.

- Pianist/PocketGuitar/Drummer: these are apps that simulate these instruments, and they sound very good. For Pianist it is even possible to record your performance and play it back. Drummer has many different type of electronic keyboards, depending on your favorite genre (rock, jazz, electro etc…).

- DropCopy: you can easily transfer files through wifi between iPhones, or to/from a Mac. The transfer is not very fast, but it’s cool to be able to wirelessly send a song to someone else. I wish it had a Windows client though.

- MxTube: this app allows you to download youtube videos and play them back whenever you want. Unfortunately it often “times out” and doesn’t complete the download. You probably need a very good connection.

- TuneWiki: this is a community based lyrics app that not only displays the lyrics but also times each sentence to the song. It’s a bit like a karaoke or a subtitle feature for songs. You can also submit lyrics and timing to the service, in case it’s missing. Unfortunately you need to be online in order to use it. I wish it were possible to download the lyrics once and be able to use it offline.