May 15th, 2009 by admin

Looking for free iPhone downloads? Because the big entertainment companies each try to get us on board by offering free music downloads and more…. we can get over 40 music downloads and we pay NOTHING at all for them. All up, by joining these sites (its free to join) you can get free music (all OUR choice, and from all the best and most popular songs - which come with no DRM) and two weeks access to download as many movies and TV shows and games that you can!

First Great Site- 10 free songs + Movies + TV Shows + games + free video converter (and you have 14 days to download all the movies and TV shows and games you can!) You can cancel your free subscription at any time and its easy - details here

Yet Another Great Offer: Get 25 FREE iPhone® music downloads(and you have 7 days to download them and they are DMR free) You can cancel your subscription any time by going to your account page. But if you download MORE than the allowed 25 MP3s, you will trigger an upgrade to paid membership status. So BE WARNED! But, any problems and you can contact them here.

We recommend that you join all three of these sites (did we mention its free?), to get the maximum number of free downloads! Don’t you just love all the free iPhone downloads we get? Well add more free trial offers as we find them.

Be warned, though - you must cancel your free membership before it ends in order to avoid being converted to paid membership. You need to follow the links we provide to get the max number of free downloads and to know where to go to cancel once you have your free MP3s - if you decide you still want to…. (they are great entertainment sites!).

AND - while we are on the topic of free trials, check out the two week free trial offer on the amazing FRS health energy drink - see banner in side bar or follow this link.

July 1st, 2009 by admin

Every time a new model iPhone hits the stores a rash of “win an iPhone” contest emerge. Which is great, because there is usually little effort in going into the drawer for a chance to get a free iPhone. We have reported these contests in earlier posts - though the number are getting fewer as the hype around the iPhone has settled somewhat.

Currently there are opportunities to win an iPhone 3GS in UK, US, Canada and down under in Oz land.

To win an iPhone from hivepal’s ““Funny Video Contest“, requires the most work - although not if you are a rabbid youtube performer already! You have to click the link in the sidebar to get the details.

For the Geeksugar contest (ending soon and only for US residents) you must register with the site and then answer an easy quiz.

The squarespace contest has been widely promoted around the web - so there will be a lot of people to compete against. On the other hand, there are 30 being given away over 30 days (only a week to go on this one as well) . To participate in this contest you must send out (at least) one twit from your twitter account. You can get the full details by following the link.

A UK site - Gadgets4Nowt - is also giving away a free iPhone 3GS. If you are a resident of US, Canada or UK you can answer a simple quiz question  for a chance to win it. Contest closes in September  2009.

Another twitter-based contest is being run by Brian Norgard  who is giving away two iPhones 3GS. Who is Brian Norgard, you ask? No idea - but he’s giving away two freeiPhones - so, go be a Twit and find out!

Finally, Gizmodo down under is offering up 5 iPhone 3GS  32GB towin. All you have to do is put in your details, select the iPhone 3GS as your prize. Select the accessory you would like to win with it, and submit!! Competition ends 31st July 2009. Couldn’t be easier!

June 29th, 2009 by admin

Here is something that - when you consider the crazy rush to develop iPhone Apps, and the massive popularity of sites like Vistaprint (in the top 1000 sites on the web) - is quite surprising. There are no decent iPhone apps related to printing or business cards or from the big printing companies.

The big print companies, after all, do huge promotions - like the one illustrated to the left! So why haven’t they developed Apps for us?

Don’t get us wrong! There are hundreds of business apps  - and a few of these offer some printing related service (more of this below). But we discovered that most of the apps that offer printing-related or business card-related benefit get the thumbs down from users - with most rating them a 1/5!

Still, given the huge popularity of printing sites and the fact that there are nearly 2 million searches a month for terms like “business cards” and over 7 million searches for “printing”, we decided to see what apps - with ratings over 3/5 - do offer print related solutions for iPhones.

FREE - The Bump App makes the above two obsolete! And really takes advantage of the iPhone technology. All that is required is  bumping two hands together while holding an iphone and the contact details are transferred. It does need  two iPhones to work! - but is great for exchanging business details with other iPhone owners.  So - eliminates the need for a business card! (3 star rating)

And one printing company has put out an App - HP, of course!

This one is FREE and is called HP iPrintPhoto. With it we can print out 4″ x 6″ photos from images stored on our iPhone from most HP networked ink jet printers so long as they are connected to a local WiFi network. (Thishas a 3 star rating as well)

The Print App costs $2.99 - But, once we install “Print” app on our iPhone and download the free WePrint software for our desktop/laptop we can then print directly from our iPhone. This appps allows us to print out contact address and phone numbers, web pages,  and photos from our iPhone Photo Album. We can also take a photos with our iPhone and print it straight away. Handy!(3 star rating)

The ACTPrinter app costs $0.99 - and acts in reverse of the previous app.It allows documents to be printed to the iPhone.  It allows us to “print” any document from our Mac to our iPhone or iPod Touch. It means that we can stop wasting paper! (3 star rating)

June 24th, 2009 by admin

Are iPhone wallpapers dangerous? Well - according to recent research - it depends on what sites you go to to find them!

But first - what do we mean by dangerous? Well, we’ve all had that nasty experience when we go searching for sites where we can get information, or freebies or entertainment or news…. whatever, and instead, the minute we click on it, we start having a file downloaded to our computer THAT WE DO NOT WANT! And we hit the panic button, right? These are sites that attempt to access our computer without our consent. This is the work of cyber criminals -  who aim to get us to download a file or program that comes with a malicious payload.

They have many strategies - and not all of them are as obvious as the example above. In fact, according to recent research done by McAfee in conjunction with Hitwise, these cyber crooks target many popular search terms that are related to downloading. So when we go looking for “wallpapers”,  “screensavers”, “software”and so on, we are potentially going to visit dangerous sites and/or download potentially dangerous malaware.

The research found that the most targeted (riskiest) search terms are:

 ”screensavers,” with an average risk of 34.4 percent, followed by “free games” (6.8 percent), “work from home” (3.1 percent), “Rihanna” (2.4 percent), “Wekbinz” (1.9 percent), “powerball” (1.5 percent) and “iPhone” and the “Jonas brothers,” both at 1.2 percent. 

McAfee also provide a free tool that tells us which sites are dangerous. Its free and does take the worry out of our search for downloads - the following screen shots show how it works.

McAfee has automated testers that continually patrol the web and set the safety rating based on results. Sites are rated as dangerous (red cross, or - as shown above - can be set to be highlighted in red), “caution!” - minor risk (yellow cross or highlights) and SAFE (green cross or highlights).

The following image show some of the results for the search term “iphone screensaver” where we found (using SiteAdvisor) that  15% of the top 100 sites were regarded as dangerous or risky! The first one of these is a site that offers iPhone wallpapers!

By contrast, the search term “free iPhone wallpapers” only resulted in one site being redflagged - although it was the fourth site in the Google results. And the search term “iPhone wallpapers” also only had this one site redflagged (it was number 35 for this search term in Google. We noticed that some of the sites listed are not rated by the SiteAvisor - because they are too new. This may be a way for cyber crooks to evade beeing red flagged as they are super fast at adapting to means of detection.  We have decided to avoid a site that has not been tested.

But, you will be happy to know that your favorite iPhone Downloads site has been given the green light of puredom by the McAfee:

The tool is actually fun to use - you can download it here.

June 18th, 2009 by admin

Those who went to the recent WWDC were able to be part of a revolutionary new iPhone experience - at least they could be if they had the iPhone OS 3.0 beta! Those that had it, were able to watch live TV - from Tel Aviv, no less - of the finale of ‘The Amazing Race Israel”. But the stream only worked with iPhone OS 3.0.

So you will want to know what that means for us - the average iPhone user. Well, several things - firstly, the iphone OS 3.0 is being released to developers today. That means that we can expect a pretty quick response from at least some TV stations around the world and be able to subscribe to their networks in the near future.

It also means that we should see the iReshet app released any day now - as the promise at the WWDC was that the iReshet app would be released soon after the iPone OS 3.0 had been released. Reshet is the top/ most successful channel in Israel - you can get a preview of the quality of their shows in the above video.

Finally, the app will allow live TV application for both the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch. So keep an eye out for this app - if only to get a look at whatis in store for us with live TV on the iPhone.

And if this new development does not excite you (we don’t believe you) then here is some of the other great new technologies available in the iPhone 3GS:

June 15th, 2009 by admin

There are a number of ways to get internet radio on the iPhone - and we have blogged about some of these in the past. The hot site we are reviewing today, allows us to have access to thousands of radio stations worldwide, and 90+ ad-free, DJ-free channels across a wide range of genres. Good enough?

Well, its always nice when there is more -and there is with this site. Because it is currently offering free software for watching videos and 10 free MP3s for our iPod/iPhone along with 14 days free access to their massive selection of radio stations! We thought that was good enough to check out.

Its easy enough to sign up for their free trial and checking out the huge choice of radio stations we can get on our iPhones was a real pleasure - the whole team gave it the thumbs up. We were also pleased to find that the free trial was super easy to cancel as well - we know because we tried it out (and then signed up for the membership as we liked it so much). It took mere seconds to cancel. And, they also nicely made it clear we could still continue to use the service till the end of the free trial period, even though we had canceled.

We were impressed.

June 10th, 2009 by admin

The last two years has shown us all that Apple is not just great at design. Apple also has a fantastic PR machine. And they do know how to throw a media event and do so on a regular basis. The current one - the  Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held in San Francisco this week at the Moscone Center - sold out!!

Now for most of us, this event is just a geek-fest. However, Apple always keeps the public involved in its events by announcing exciting new gadgets, updates, software or specials. And this event is/will be no different.

Already, the new iPhone 3GS has been unveiled - with side serves for those of us who are happy to buy the “old” models. Check out the details from the Mercury News “live blogcast” direct from the WWDC event:

Some of the features of  the new iPhone that may tempt us to upgrade include:

It is said to be twice as fast as the existing 3G model, with greater storage, longer battery life, and the introduction of long-missing options such as cut-and-paste and expanded landscape keyboard functionality.

We’ll keep you posted on any other goodies relevant to us iPhone users as they get revealed.