Among the first full books I read on my iPhone using the eReader app was Sail by James Patterson and Howard Roughan. (Good book- good but not great)

It was on sale at the time and while I don’t recall the actual price, it was somewhere below the current price of $18.89 on eReader.

That’s not inexpensive but it IS below the retail price of the book.

When I got my Kindle2 last week the first thing I did was get a trial subscription to the NYTimes.

Having previously used the TimesReader on my tabletpc I was excited to see how the Kindle2 did with it.

Fact is, while it is better than the first gen Kindle (thanks to 20% faster page load times) it is still a somewhat tedious process to navigate the Times on it. It WORKS but it isn’t a seemless process.

Well, as luck would have it the iPhone Times app just got updated to version 2 and it is a HUGE improvement!!!!

It is, quite honestly, the new app is an entirely different experience. Here’s why…

The lack of ability for apps to run in the background is becoming increasingly frustrating for me. I mean, the fact that Beejive IM has to resort to a workaround is bad enough, but more and more, I’m seeing and experiencing the limits that result in not allowing background processes to run on the iPhone.

The latest "crippled" app to catch my eye is a small utility called NotifyMe. NotifyMe is

an advanced speaking clock. Open this app and set up an alarm for the time of your appointment. Press start and from then on the phone will tell you how much time you have left. The notification
system is intelligent and can give you notifications more and more often as you get closer to the deadline. Alternatively, you can ask for notifications on fixed time intervals. E.g. every minute like a standard talking clock.

It strikes me as a potentially useful app, if only…

No sooner did I post that iNews was on sale last night than I got pinged to update the app on my iPhone. Turns out version 1.3 has been released and it offers some nive updates to an already excellent RSS reader.

Among the updates-

Best of all… we have a few copies to give away. For a chance to win one just leave a comment below…

Stereotypes are bad. No matter how you slice it stereotypes are just bad. They may be totally, completely, utterly true — but they’re still bad.

Except, of course, when they’re funny.

So I wasn’t going to spend a dollar on this application. I just wasn’t going to do it. Sure, anyone who would name and app simply "Jewish Mother" deserves at least a moment’s recognition but I wasn’t about to spend a buck to buy an application that stereotypes Jewish mothers.

Then, last night, my wife forwarded me some cartoons from her aunt. A couple of them were really funny, including one in which Moses is standing on Mount Sinai holding two tablets and saying,

"No people, you don’t get to pick one from each column".

I figured it was a sign — what we call beshert — so I downloaded the application.

Here’s the Description
Now you can have a hilarious, bite-sized version of your own Jewish mother, trapped in your iPhone. With over 100 (and growing!) hysterical, guilt-ridden phrases, she’s everything you need to make your friends & family laugh. She’s so smart, she’s got different phrases for men and women, and adjusts if you’re single or married. Like your own Jewish mother, she knows everything.
And this isn’t any amateur comedy. We’ve enlisted comedian Steve Hofstetter, star of "The King Davids of Comedy." Steve writes humor for everything from the New York Times to Maxim, and you’ve seen him on everything from CBS’ "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" to VH1’s "Countdown" to E!s "True Hollywood Story."
So spend a dollar already and have a laugh. Don’t make your Jewish mother wait any longer. You know that’s not good for her.
See more of Steve at https://www.stevehofstetter.com/

So? Nu? What did I think?

I recently got a Kindle2 and am quite happy with it. It is great for reading books and carrying my reference materials with me. It is not, however, ideal for reading newspapers or RSS feeds. Sure it CAN do those things but I find my iPhone a far better tool for such things. (On the flip side, while I do use eReader for books on the iPhone the Kindle2 is a far better experience and the availability and price of content is a huge improvement.)

As a result, I am always on the lookout for the next great improvement in iPhone RSS readers.

Well, Manifesto a "simple, efficient, and powerful news reader" just got updated.

I reviewed iNews a bit back and was quite impressed with it. Although it doesn’t sync with Google Reader it has a killer feature… it is fast! In my review I wrote-

I’ve been using this app because it is by far the fastest reader I have found. It’s fast when it comes to updating posts and it’s fast when simply using it to read.

It is definitely worth a look and is currently on sale for just$1.99. You can read more, and find a link to buy it, HERE.

The normal price will return with the next version which will add… Folder Sync to Google Reader Starred Items!

The New York Times’ David Pogue recently had a great piece on Twitter. He did a super job explaining the rapidly growing, incredibly useful and fun, but little understood phenomenon that is Twitter. In it he noted the growth of desktop and handtop apps and the ways in which they make the service even more useful.

Twitterlink is yet another tool for Twittering that is quite useful. It enables you to send a shortened link to Twitter from Safari.

Here’s how it’s handy.