Blogging

This activities ribbon is a welcome addition to YouMail on iPhone.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

We’re big fans of visual voice mail, which lets you view, and then listen to, your voice mail messages in any order you’d like, not just chronologically. It’s even better when that service is free (voice-to-text transcriptions, however, are typically extra). To that end, we were happy to see that YouMail’s visual voice mail app for iPhone updated on Thursday, getting features such as push notification, and a new activities ribbon that lets you reply to and forward messages. You can also now organize messages by folders.

In addition, YouMail 1.5 includes a feature for toggling between speaker and handset mode, the ability to switch on automatic message playing (in the Settings), and long-awaited slide-to-delete functionality for messages. The revised app also adds the fun, but minor feature of shaking the iPhone to refresh the screen.

Sadly, YouMail 1.5 constantly crashed on us in the first 15 minutes of use, even after several reboots. It seems to have stabilized now, so it could have been a mild case of iPhone indigestion.

YouMail Visual Voicemail for iPhone competes with visual voice mail services like Google Voice, which is in beta, which does not have a dedicated iPhone app, and which offers an iPhone Web experience that my colleague Rafe Needleman gently referred to as “a load of crap.”

What do you think of the new YouMail, of Google Voice, or of visual voice mail in general? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Source:
YouMail visual voice mail iPhone app gets pushy

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BlackBerry

Thanks to Dictionary.com, I won a contest this weekend. The challenge: who could find synonyms for a word fastest (it was “fancy,” as in “stop being so fancy about everything.”) I had Dictionary.com loaded on an iPhone; my colleague, the BlackBerry Storm browser. Had he had the free Dictionary.com for BlackBerry, my challenger might have beaten me to the word bank.

At 250KB, Dictionary.com 1.0 is almost identical to the iPhone version. It, too, packs in a dictionary, a thesaurus, a list of recent search terms, and the opportunity to sign up for the Word A Day service in English and Spanish.

However, this build isn’t without its few BlackBerry-only touches. The best one is a context menu option that launches a search for the definition or synonym of a word that you’ve highlighted in your e-mail–that’s an incoming message or an e-mail you’re in the process of composing. You can similarly e-mail or text a definition from the app.

Dictionary.com is available now for free in BlackBerry App World. Version 1.0 weighs in at 250KB and is compatible with the BlackBerry Bold, Tour, Curve, and 8800 series, and the Pearl.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Originally posted here:
Dictionary.com now available on BlackBerry

BlackBerry Messenger 5.0, now with mug shots.

(Credit:
BlackBerry (RIM)

The mobile carriers have in-network calling, and BlackBerry users have BlackBerry Messenger, a BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry instant messenger that works more like e-mail than SMS to send real-time messages through RIM’s servers. On Wednesday, RIM released BlackBerry Messenger 5.0, a version that pads the messenger with “avatars” (but they’re more like your standard social networking mug shots), group chat, and photo-sharing.

In addition to sending photos to contacts, BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 now opens the gates for transferring large files–up to 6MB in size. That’s the equivalent of several photos, or one or two songs. Maybe a very short video. The quantity comes down to the size of your media.

RIM also adds a new way to find friends. Users have been able to connect with a PIN, e-mail address, or name. Now they can lock onto each other with bar codes and cameras. One BlackBerry produces a bar code and the other snaps a photo that Messenger 5.0 can read and translate. It may not be as flashy as the Bump app for iPhone, but we’ll take it.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Originally posted here:
BlackBerry Messenger 5.0: Get friends with barcodes

BlackBerry Messenger 5.0, now with mug shots.

(Credit:
BlackBerry (RIM)

The mobile carriers have in-network calling, and BlackBerry users have BlackBerry Messenger, a BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry instant messenger that works more like e-mail than SMS to send real-time messages through RIM’s servers. On Wednesday, RIM released BlackBerry Messenger 5.0, a version that pads the messenger with “avatars” (but they’re more like your standard social networking mug shots), group chat, and photo sharing.

In addition to sending photos to contacts, BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 now opens the gates for transferring large files–up to 6MB in size. That’s the equivalent of several photos, or one or two songs–maybe a very short video.

RIM also adds a new way to find friends. Users have been able to connect with a PIN, e-mail address, or name. Now they can lock onto each other with bar codes and cameras. One BlackBerry produces a bar code and the other snaps a photo that Messenger 5.0 can read and translate. It may not be as flashy as the Bump app for iPhone, but we’ll take it.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Source:
BlackBerry Messenger 5.0: Get friends with bar codes

Filling in a blank spreadsheet is an uphill battle, but one you can win.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Ever since Documents to Go came out on iPhone–both the standard version and with Microsoft Exchange Attachments–the publisher has been keeping our interest with promises of a version that could edit Excel documents and create new ones in addition to just viewing them.

That version, Documents to Go 2.0, is now here. The update brings Documents To Go back to fairly equal footing with rival Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which added Excel creation and editing support a month before.

In addition to viewing Excel XLS and XLSX documents, both Documents To Go apps can now also create new spreadsheets and edit existing ones. After taking a quick spin through the features, we can say it looks as if publisher DataViz, like Quickoffice, has been able to cram a lot of core features into a small space. There’s support for multiple spreadsheets, and the capability to resize rows and columns and search cells (the Find feature). There are also formatting and typeface tools, and support for older, even password-protected, worksheets.

While the addition of Excel support brings this app back into direct competition with the Quickoffice suite, what’s true in both cases is that it’s infinitely easier to edit an Excel document on the iPhone than it is to create one fresh. However, if you must put your tapping fingers through the pages, then the opportunity is now, finally, here.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Docs To Go for iPhone finally gets Excel