Man, it’s hard to be a blogger.
Well, OK, it’s not that difficult if you’re someone like a fellow Weakley Countian, newscoma, who worked for the local newspaper and blogs a ton. She could probably pull off making a living just through blogging if she set herself up with the right amount of advertising or paid subscriptions, or whatever. (Hey, it works for Dooce, right? In case you don’t know, Dooce makes a living blogging about being a mom and other stuff. I don’t read it, but Karen does.)
But I’m not going to go into the monetizing of online content spiel, because I’m not in a mass-comm-discussing mood.
So anyway, I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for just under two days now. I feel that my productivity has shot up quite a bit, now that I have the Internet in my pocket. There’s no way I will ever go back to going without a phone with a data plan ever again. I’d give up cable way before giving up a data plan. Seriously, Karen and I pretty much watch three or four channels in our 70+ cable subscription. Animal Planet, ESPN/ESPN 2, and Fox Sports South (when they carry the Cardinals games). Aside from Animal Planet, following sports is pretty easy with the iPhone, not to mention MLB has an application which lets you watch games on your phone. We’ve mostly used our TV to watch movies, which is more fun anyway. Before we became obsessive with the iPhones over the last 48 hours (and I’m sure it will subside, at least a bit) we were reading more than watching TV.
Wait, didn’t I say that I wasn’t in a mass-comm mood? Maybe I was just kidding myself.
Since I’m on an iPhone kick anyway, I may as well post some of the more interesting applications I’ve downloaded to increase its functionality. Granted, not all of these are really great or anything, but all but one have been free so I’m taking that trade-off.
- Twitterific (For following twitter updates)
- Stanza (eBook reader with several libraries of free books)
- USA Today
- Lose It! (A food/exercise counter similar to NutriMirror)
- AT&T myWireless (account manager and bill pay)
- e*Trades Mobile Pro
- Shazam
- Remote (iTunes remote control)
- Yelp
- Restaurants Nutrition
- 8 (a “glasses of water” counter)
- iFitness (the only paid app, has 100’s of exercises demonstrated, plus user workouts)
- Instapaper (Downloads Web pages you don’t have time to read so you can come back to them later)
- Bible
- Barnes & Noble Bookstore
- Flixter (movie times, trailers)
- Amazon.com
- WebMD
- Free German Essentials (a trial version with only 130 or so vocabulary words; the full version has 1000’s of vocab to learn)
- Currency converter
- Wikipanion (Wikipedia search)
- AP Mobile (though I’m liking USA Today better, might get rid of this one)
- Wi-Fi Finder
- Mancala
- myLite (flashlight plus some other cool things like strobe light)
- Harry Potter 6 (interactive game, haven’t looked at it yet)
- iSniper lite (Free trial game, kinda boring)
- iHandgun (Sound emulator)
- Lightsaber (Sound emulator)
See what fun can be had! Why do I get the feeling that some of you are criticizing my productivity…