Our newest iBAM author Cheryl Colan has spent the day (and late night) evaluating some of the new iPhone 2.0 Apps and burned some more of the midnight oil writing up a review of 14 of them. This educational and informative article is a great way to get some inside info from a very educated author. If you are having some questions about the new iPhone or the update about to arrive, here’s some info to hopefully better help you make your decision a little easier. Thank you Cheryl for a great, great article!

(-Brent)

eBay Mobile

I genuinely like this application. You can search, bid, and keep track of your “My eBay” stuff: items you’re bidding on, selling or watching. As a seller, I can see how my auction is going, which is great. But I can’t check the feedback history of a bidder, or view an auction’s bidding history. I also can’t see or respond to questions about my open auctions from potential buyers, like I can in a web browser.

A big plus for both buyers and sellers is how eBay Mobile handles actual listings. First, you see the basics: time left, current bid, shipping and payment information, etc. Follow the link to the item description and you see the seller’s write-up. And the best part: if the seller includes hyperlinks to, say, a Flickr photoset or manufacturer web site, those links open within the eBay Mobile app itself rather than launching Safari. You can browse forward and back in the app, and there is always a quick link back to the item summary, and from there back to My eBay and Search functions.

Of course, it’s eBay, and they’ve geared their Mobile app more for buying than for selling. For example, when I am logged into eBay and viewing an item I’m selling, I still see “Place bid” and “Watch item” buttons. That’s pretty lame. As of this writing it’s got all 5-star reviews inside the Apple store (until I add my 2 cents), but I guess my expectations are a bit higher. I’d give it 4 stars if it were more aware of my seller role, and 5 if it actually let me create and edit listings.

Cost: Free | Rating: 3 Stars

Google Mobile App

I’m not as enthusiastic about Google Mobile App as other reviews I’ve read online. It’s super for searching, indeed, because its query completion and auto-generated shortcuts enable you to search with a lot less typing. But that’s it. Don’t bother with the huge “Explore more Google products” button. I saw that and thought, “Great!” until I clicked and realized that all those Google product icons just launch within Safari. You can bookmark them and get the same result. I’d been hoping they would launch in a more mobile device-friendly way. Clicking “Calendar” takes you to a Google search page where you can click a “Calendar” hyperlink. Uh, how about taking me directly to my calendar? Yeah, 2 stars, and one of those because the app is free.

Cost: Free | Rating: 2 Stars

iChing

Meditative and entertaining, but ultimately rather useless.

Cost: Free | Rating: 2 Stars

Jott for iPhone

Voice recording and transcription service from Jott.com. Being able to speak and have your words transcribed is fantastic. So are the list organization and “cross off” features. Out of four test recordings, two were quickly transcribed (quickly = in under half an hour), and one just never was. I eventually gave it up for lost and deleted it. It may be that you need to leave the application active until your recording is transcribed, I don’t know.

At this stage the app seems buggy. In addition to the never-transcribed recording, one recoding I made showed up on my list as two recordings. I played them both back and they were identical. I had to delete the second instance. The application also causes your iPhone to vibrate when your recording hits the ten second mark. Since I had my ringer set to vibrate, I thought I was receiving a call. There should be some warning/explanation to the user about this “feature.”

Also, one of the most useful things about Jott is the ability to call in and direct your audio note somewhere, like to your blog or to Twitter. Jott for iPhone does not seem to provide a means of doing the same, at least not one I could figure out. To me, the value of Jott is mainly in the area of transcription. I can get that done as easily via phone call, so I don’t see myself using this app often. It will probably be wirth more to folks who really love using Jott for to-do lists.

Cost: Free | Rating: 2 Stars

Light

All this application does is turn your screen white. It’s meant to be used like a flashlight; it just gives you a little light in the darkness. Earlier this summer, I was caught unprepared during a power outage. I had my iPhone in my pocket, and this app helped me change the batteries in my actual flashlight. You just never know when you’ll need a little illumination.

Cost: Free | Rating: 5 Stars

PayPal

Ho hum. With the PayPal app you can check your PayPal account balance and send money. You can’t view transaction history and details. The ability to zoom in using Safari negates the mobile device-sized interface advantage. Perhaps the next version will be more useful to users. I’m thinking this version is most useful to eBay.

Cost: Free | Rating: 1 Star

Remote

Remote is just excellent. It allows you to control the iTunes content of your computer or AppleTV from your iPhone (or iPod Touch). At first, I thought, “Who cares? I already have a remote.” But, I immediately realized, not one with a visually beautiful and intuitive touchscreen interface that I already understand. I love that I can turn on my music, switch playlists, or change the volume from the next room. It’s by no means necessary, but it’s ever so nice.

Cost: Free | Rating: 5 Stars

Starmap

Oh my. I utterly love the Starmap application. I love stargazing, and knowing what I’m seeing. I’ve got star charts for the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but they are peanuts to Starmap. One, they don’t fit in my pocket. Two, they’ve got to be swiveled around in multiple places to the correct time, and if you drop one, you’ve got to do it all over again in the dark. Three, they don’t illuminate, so you also have to carry a flashlight. I’ve also got a computer application that does what Starmap does, but again, it’s a bit difficult to fit my Windows XP tower (no Mac version!), monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power source in my pocket.

Starmap is many charts in one, since you can orient it to just about any location on the planet. And it comes with its own adjustable-brightness flashlight, a “Lamp” button, which you can set to illuminate in red to preserve your night vision. Its interface is drop dead easy to use and includes the ability to turn planets, deep field objects, and constellation outlines on and off. Touchscreen panning and zooming around the sky is a bit slow, but it’s easy and fast to switch cardinal directions. You can also search its catalogue to find objects of interest and figure out whether they’re visible and where to look for them in the night sky. I haven’t begun to list all the cool features of Starmap. It’s the only app I’ve paid for, and it’s well worth every penny.

Cost: $11.99 | Rating: 5 Stars

To Do

To Do is a very spare task list manager. You can add and delete tasks, set them as normal (dark grey) or high (red) priority, add notes to them and reorder your list. That’s it. When you mark a list item as complete, it turns light grey but stays put. The icon for the To Do app is a checkmark, so I thought it would provide a tick box to mark an item as complete. Instead, the procedure is much less intuitive: highlight the item, tap the priority level button labeled “123″ and then tap the “completed” button. When you don’t want to see it any more, press “Edit” and delete it the way we used to have to delete our email, one ponderous item at a time. To Do works but is no fun to use, getting the job done competently but without a sense of style. It feels like submitting TPS reports in triplicate. I’ll definitely keep looking for something better.

Cost: Free | Rating: 3 Stars

Twittelator

Twittelator allows you to pinpoint your location and upload a snapshot as you post to Twitter, so that your tweet contains a hyperlink to the photo and another to a Google map of your location. Which would be great, if you had any kind of control over where the URLs end up in your tweet. But you don’t. So it all feels very haphazard.

The application designers seem to think it was a great idea to include an “emergency” button so you can send out a picture and map to your friends, who will presumably come find and assist you. They hype this as a very important ability on their description page. OK. But if I’m lost with my iPhone on me, I can ring them or dial 911. Maybe this will turn out to be a lifesaver for iPod touch users.

The application works decently, but I don’t like not being able to control where links show up in my post. I do like being able to send my location, but it takes a really long time to load over Edge – longer than Maps takes to locate me. It needs a bit more work.

Cost: Free | Rating: 3 Stars

Twitterrific

Twitterrific is my favorite way to access Twitter on my desktop, so it’s no surprise I like it on the iPhone as well. I do wish it could mark tweets as read/unread, like the desktop app can.

Like Twittelator, Twitterrific allows you to upload and link to a photo while writing your tweet. Beware of the map locator though! Instead of posting your location in your tweet, it updates your Twitter profile with latitude and longitude coordinates. That might be useful if it included a hyperlink to show the location on a map, but as it’s unlinked, it’s essentially pointless and causes you to log into Twitter and repair the damage to your profile. It’s really in the wrong place – the feature is available when you are editing a tweet, not editing your profile, so the information should go into your tweet, not into your profile. A silly mistake in an otherwise super iPhone app.

Also, unless you pay for the premium version, you will see the occasioinal advertisement; I find them unobtrusive and occasionally useful.

Cost: Free | Rating: 4 Stars

Weight Tracker

Weight Tracker is a dead simple application that does exactly what the name implies: it tracks your weight over time. You enter your actual weight and goal weight. Then you enter intermediate weight weekly or daily ar at whatever interval you can cope with. Weight Tracker gives you an instant display of how many pounds you’ve lost and how far you have to go. Weight Tracker has the ability to sync with three different web sites, or save entries only to your iPhone (which is the way I’ll be using it). It isn’t exciting, but it gets the job done.

Cost: Free | Rating: 4 Stars

Whrrl

Whrrl is fun! It’s an iPhone application that’s fully integrated with the Whrrl.com web site. What you do on one appears pretty quickly on the other. Right after setting up an account, the Whrrl app located me and popped up all the restaurants and shops in my neighborhood, showing me factual information like address, phone number and business hours, as well as opinions such as ratings and reviews. I immediately reviewed six of my favorite places.

You can mark whether you’ve been to a place or want to visit it. You can rate places, write reviews, and even upload photos. And if you identify friends on the Whrrl social network, you can share places and events with them. I love this app. I love recommending the places that treat me well, and I also enjoy warning people away from terrible service or unclean kitchens.

The only thing wrong with Whrrl at the moment is that there aren’t enough reviews, so I’m using Yelp as a companion application until Whrrl has more action. I found Whrrl very easy and fun to use.

Cost: Free | Rating: 5 Stars

Yelp

I really like Yelp, which integrates with Yelp.com, a web site that allows users to review various shops and services. Like Whrrl, it makes use of your iPhone’s location to help you find nearby places and access ratings and reviews. Yelp seems to have a much larger user base than Whrrl. Yelp allows you to browse by type of place or by map, and narrow your search based on things like price and business hours.

The big problem I have with Yelp is that you can’t use it to write an on-the-spot review like you can with Whrrl. Instead you’ll have to gather your information, photos, etc, and wait until you’re in front of a computer, or you can try logging into the Yelp web site via Safari, not a fun way to write a review.

Cost: Free | Rating: 4 Stars