Reviews

iRealSMS 3.0 for iPhone is a jailbreak utility that you can use in place of the default messaging app.  Up until this point, I had always used QuickReply for SMS.  A several of you TiPb'ers recommended I look at iRealSMS 3.0 so I did. And I'm impressed.  iRealSMS 3.0 exceeds the features of QuickReply for SMS by a landslide.

QuickReply for SMS functions basically as an expanded plug-in to the built-in SMS app.  There is no icon for QuickReply and it just interacts with built-in functionality.  QuickReply attempts to solve a lot of the problems that the native SMS app still has.  The major one being when you get a text, you have two options, either close the text or view it to respond.  If you're in the middle of doing something on your phone, it'll close you out of it in order to take you to the text app.

QuickReply solves this problem by adding another button.  In addition to the traditional close and view buttons, you'll see a reply button to the right.  When you click reply, it'll simply bring up a keyboard and you can reply to the text without interrupting the app you are currently running.  When you're done, tap send and you're done!  The keyboard disappears and your text sends in the background. In settings, you have the option of changing the traditional keyboard to a transparent type keyboard if you'd like as well.  You'll also see an option to replace the view button with a call button.

With the latest update to QuickReply, contact pictures were added. I thought this was a really neat addition. If you have a picture set for a person in your address book, it'll pop up in the right hand top corner of the text on the homescreen. Speaking of the homescreen, QuickReply also allows you to reply directly from the homescreen. Enabling the lockscreen option in settings will allow you to double-tap a text off the homescreen and bring up a keyboard to respond without even having to unlock your phone.

QuickReply is definitely one of those apps I'd sorely miss on a stock iPhone. For anyone who's jailbroken, it's definitely worth the $2.99. And if you'd like to try it out, they have a trial period available.

[$2.99 - Cydia Link]

TiPb has done the full iPad review, of course, but while we're iPhone, iPod touch, and now iPad-centric, there are a lot of more general technology columnists and gadget bloggers out there who've gone touch-to-screen with Apple latest mobile device, and different perspectives are decidedly a good thing. So here's a roundup of what they think:

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says it's "pretty close" to a laptop killer. He also got 11:28 of battery time on it!

After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.

David Pogue of the New York Times actually writes two reviews, one for the more tech-centric critics and one for the more positively inclined mainstream.

The techie review is decidedly negative:

The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?

The mainstream review is more positive:

The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.

Ed Baig of USA Today says it's a winner.

The iPad is not so much about what you can do — browse, do e-mail, play games, read e-books and more — but how you can do it. That's where Apple is rewriting the rulebook for mainstream computing. There is no mouse or physical keyboard. Everything is based on touch. All programs arrive directly through Apple's App Store. Apple's tablet is fun, simple, stunning to look at and blazingly fast.

Over the last month or so we took a look at several of the more popular stereo Bluetooth headset options so we could get ready for the iPhone 3.0 goodness set arrive sometime today. In case you're itching to get your ears on some as well, here's a quick roundup of what we looked at: