Now if only we could get an app that would cook the sausage when you’re hungry–

Via kottke.org:

Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.

It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales. (via clusterflock)

“I’ve got to get my property re-appraised!” may be your first thought when you load the Zillow smartphone app. It accesses county tax records and a proprietary “zestimate” formula to display property value estimates, which it integrates with an interactive Mapquest-style map (remember those guys?) complete with street view, satellite view or quick-reading list view.

Zillow, founded by former Microsoft execs (who also built Expedia) provides a deliciously naked commercial view of a neighborhood if you’re strolling or driving through, and it’s an invaluable tool if you’re in the market to buy or sell a house.

On GPS-enabled smartphones, it incorporates a zoom-to-where-you-are feature, as well as letting you search any address. Zillow lets you save favorites and links you to their main website as well.

The app goes the extra mile by providing extensive realtor-like informative property details, including bedroom/bathroom count and plain-English description, square footage, recent sales history, property tax assessed, valuation fluctuation history on a 1/5/10 year basis and more.

The only major limitations I see, besides the inscrutable name, are its lack of commercial listings, and its lack of showing MLS-style information regarding whether a given property is listed for sale with a real-estate agent.

I’m not saying it’s healthy, but I have yet to meet the man who isn’t at least a *little* curious about what houses in his neighborhood are going for, and to that end, Zillow is an incredible tool, and an absolute must have for anyone in the real-estate business.

Rating: 9/10

Price: Free

Last year I was at a computer and electronics superstore in a foreign land, and I had a simple purchase in mind: I wanted a TV-style remote control for my computer. Just something I could hold in one hand to do mouse and keyboard operations on my laptop.

Being in a foreign land, I watched television and movies primarily by downloading videos and playing them on my laptop, which I connected via DVI video, to my flatscreen TV. I was stone-age annoying to have to get up and walk to my laptop every time I wanted to start or stop the video player.

Surely there was an easy fix? Not that I could tell. No one stepped up to offer a bluetooth or IR remote control, and a wireless full-size keyboard/mouse was too bulky for my tastes. I continued to be frustrated…until today!

Logitech’s free Touch Mouse & Touch Mouse Server combine to enable your smartphone (an Iphone, in my case) to be a handy remote keyboard and trackpad-mouse for your Windows PC. I love it when a plan comes together!

To make it run, once you have the app installed on your smartphone, download the “server software” – thing you need to install on your PC – here.

It installed without a hitch on my Windows Vista PC. Touch Mouse uses wifi to communicate between your smartphone and the PC, which is a bit like using a satellite to do a walkie-talkie’s job, but hey, no one else was getting the job done, and it works great with practically no lag.

The only problem I came across, which is significant, is that after disconnecting from Touch Mouse on my Iphone, and deactivating the “server” app in Windows, my PC keyboard did not work for five minutes. I”m still not sure why, or even how I fixed it.

I suspect this is just an early-release bug (the software is version 1.0) and will be corrected by Logitech in the near future. I wouldn’t let it dissuade you from trying out this very cool app.

Now I want to see this technology applied to the camera and microphone – how long must we wait for a free app that will convert our smartphone into a roaming closed circuit video camera?

Rating: 8/10 because of the keyboard snag. Otherwise, it is a must-have.

From the venerable and respected Adobe Systems Inc. comes the mobile app version of Adobe Photoshop, their synonymous-with-photo-editing product.

It’s not an outright clunker, but any product that Adobe associates with its Photoshop brand is going to arrive with high expectations, and this app falls short. Perhaps that’s why they give it the initials treatment, calling it “PS Mobile” instead of spelling the word out.

The app is designed to do to things. First it lets you perform basic cropping, editing, and color manipulation onto any image you have on your mobile device. Second, it steers you to engage into its Photoshop.com site, which it wants to grow into a competitor to Flickr, Google Picasa and the like. I didn’t fool around with the website much, I get by fine by posting to Facebook or just emailing my pics, but it may be worth a look.

The editing and color tweaking features are what we’re interested in here. The cropping tool is easy to use. There are controls that ably change the exposure, saturation, tint, black & white, and contrast, although I found that using them was a little tricky. There was 1.5 second lag on my phone, which confused me at first since there was no “hourglass” icon to let me know why nothing was happening.

You can also apply a sketch and soft focus filter, as well as a sharpen filter, which I found useless. That’s it, just three filters…

It gives you a few color effects to play with, but none of which would improve your photo – who really wants to ruin a perfectly good picture by giving it a rainbow hue?

And…that’s it. I keep the app on my phone because I like to crop and contrast-boost my pictures, and for a free app, PS Mobile great and worth it. If this were any other company, I would probably be impressed. But coming from Adobe Photoshop, the Rolls Royce of photo editors, I expected more.

6.5 / 10

I’m typing this post using the wordpress app on an iPhone. The official wordpress app is excellent. It allows you to work with multiple blogs, enabling you to create posts, pages, approve comments and more.

To use the app, you need only know your blog’s username and password, and have XML-RPC code enabled in your wordpress Settings > Writing.

Per the wordpress norm, the app is open source, so it will likely grow and improve as the wordpress platform continues to conquer the market for free website content management systems.

Fun as it was to compose this post, it’s hard to continue typing on my iPhone screen knowing that I could be using my fullsize laptop keyboard. Then again, I could have just saved my fingers and used Dragon Dictation!

9/10

When I downloaded WhiteNoise Lite, which plays a variety of relaxing background and sleep-inducing sounds, the first thing I did was hold it next to my crying 2-month old baby.

First, recalling my Eur-rail days, I tried the "Train Tracks" sound loop. I was impressed – it’s good enough to use in a movie soundtrack (like Transsiberian). But it didn’t please baby. Neither did City Streets or Rain Storm, although the cumulative effect was putting me in a zen-like state.

Finally I made it to "Wind Chimes" and the response from the lil’ guy was immediate. He stopped crying and fell asleep minutes later. Dr. Spock, are you getting this? When his mama walked in, she looked out the window, thinking I had hung up actual wind chimes. I felt like a genius.

Of course, you don’t need a baby or an insomniac to appreciate the other benefits of white noise. I find it useful when I’m at a coffee shop that’s too chatty, or when I’m alone in an office that seems to still. WhiteNoise also has pitch control (I can give the baby a different set of chimes for each nap) and timer with fade-out as well.

I remember seeing a machine that does no more than this app for $30 at The Sharper Image! Maybe I should change the name of this blog to "Must-have-apps" because it’s really more fun reviewing apps like this one that really add value to a mobile device.

Smartphone App: WhiteNoise Lite
Rating: 7.5
Available for: Iphone, Blackberry, Android
Publisher: TMSoft
Price: Free for Lite version; $1.99 for full version with additional sounds

ShopSavvy is a wonderfully empowering app. It cleverly makes use of the phone’s built-in camera to scan a product barcode, like at a grocery or department store. It then queries an online database to identify the product and present you with a price sheet of where to buy the product online or locally, based on GPS.

Now we can all live the dream of going to Home Depot and knowing if that air filter would be cheaper at Lowe’s. Target and Walmart, bring on the real-time Pampers price war. In your face, marketing weasels!

Practically the only thing that keeps this product from getting a 10/10 is the unfortunate frequency that ShopSavvy fails to recognize a product. However, as ShopSavvy’s database grows and they connect with more manufacturer databases, this should improve.

If this catches on, retailers are going to have to either deliver rock-bottom prices or white-glove service. Unless, of course, manufacturers just increase their use of unique models numbers and barcodes for major chains. But I’ll let ShopSavvy’s creators worry about that.

ShopSavvy App
Rating: 8.5/10
Price: Free
Available for: Apple Iphone, Google Android, Nokia
Publisher: Big In Japan

Hail, the inaugural Smartphone App & Game Reviews blog post! Let’s get started…

Dragon Dictation is a terrific app that wows you the moment you use it. You press record, you speak, you press done, and your text appears. Then you decide what to do with it: edit it, save it to the clipboard, or send the text via SMS or email.

I love it when apps are this intuitive. Everyone loves using an app that does cool things without making you grind through a learning curve.

Performance-wise, there is a strong garbage-in, garbage-out factor here – the clearer you speak, the better the results, especially if you don’t slur your words together.

Funny anecdote – I have a friend who showed this app to his boss. My friend said that his boss had trouble getting the app to record his speech accurately. I asked my friend, “Does your boss speak English well?”. Turns out, his boss is from England, and is one of the world’s most celebrated Shakespearean actors.

Sounds like it’s time he learned to talk like a US American! :>)

Anyway, I can say that Dragon Dictation generally works well enough to use productively – 90%+ accuracy if you speak calmly and clearly.  It won’t ever replace typing on a full keyboard, but it is much better at composing 25+ word texts or emails than nearly any smartphone keyboard.

Right away it empowers everyone to be a article writer/submitter. Got an idea? Just start yakking! Pretty soon you’ll have your own mega-database of articles.

Dragon Dictation comes from the same good folks who brought you Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC/Mac. I can’t think of anyone else who is even in the voice-conversion business outside of Google and the telcos themselves.

This app has the potential to change the whole texting-while-driving dilemma as well. Put this in your vent-mounted phone-holder and you can compose a verbose ‘Note to Self’ while drinking coffee, combing your hair, and steering with your knees. No hands on the phone here, officer!

I can see only one problem with this: what if they ban Dictating While Driving?

Rating: 8/10
Price: Free
Available for: the Iphone, maybe others.
Publisher: Nuance Communications