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The Apple iPhone is without doubt the hottest cell phone of the past year. And it's no wonder -- it's a beautiful touchscreen phone with multi-tap technology, Wi-Fi support, a full HTML Safari web browser, and of course, the familiar iPod music and video player we all know and love.
But we can't just leave well enough alone, can we? Almost as soon as the iPhone hit the streets, hackers across the globe took to dismantling it and figuring out to unlock it and add third-party applications to it. Apple in turn began updating the firmware, sometimes disabling hacks, and thus the race began to see who would be ahead of whom.
If all this is over your head, no worries. In this slideshow, we'll show you some simple things you can do right now to pimp your iPhone, without having to learn UNIX or use a soldering iron.
The Apple iPhone was probably the most hyped cell phone in 2007, thanks to its amazingly sleek design and unique touch-screen interface that made everything accessible at the tap of a finger.
One of the first things you'll want to get for your brand new iPhone is to get a headphone adapter. For reasons unknown, Apple has decided to design the headset jack of the iPhone in such a way that it is too recessed for most existing headphones. Sure you could use the bundled iPhone earbuds, but what if you have a really good expensive pair that you want to use instead? Luckily, companies like Griffin and Belkin have made headphone adapters that will attach the iPhone to your favorite earbuds. The pair seen here are from Griffin.
So if you don't want to use the headphone adapters and you don't want to use the iPhone's bundled earbuds, you can also go the high-end route and get yourself a pair of good quality earbuds made specifically for the iPhone. These V-Moda Vibe Duo earbuds are just that. Not only do they have excellent sound quality, with a great fit, these earbuds also have a built-in mic so you can chat on the phone too.
If you want to go completely wireless, a Bluetooth headset is a good choice. Unfortunately, the iPhone doesn't support stereo Bluetooth, so you'll have to settle for mono options, and you won't be able to listen to music with the mono headsets. Most Bluetooth headsets will work just fine with the iPhone, but Apple makes one specifically designed for it. What makes the Apple iPhone Bluetooth headset so special? Well it comes with a dock designed to charge both devices simultaneously, and when placed in the dock, the headset pairs with the iPhone immediately -- without having to go through any sort of pairing process.
Instead of providing a software development kit for third-party applications, Apple decided to encourage a trend of creating online web applications designed to run on iPhone's Safari web browser. And online companies everywhere jumped on the bandwagon, especially Google. Google has just recently optimized a whole suite of its applications (which include Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, as well as plain ol' search) to run smoother on the iPhone, with an iPhone-friendly interface to boot.
As an iPhone owner, you probably already know about the YouTube application that lets you watch streaming video from YouTube right on your iPhone. But what if you want to watch video from Google Video? Or Vimeo? Since iPhone's Safari doesn't have Flash support, you might think you're out of luck. Well think again, because Veveo's vTap service uses some RSS web encoding fu that lets you watch streaming video from almost any site you can think of. Yes it'll take forever if you're roaming on EDGE, but if you're on WiFi, the experience is golden. So if you have the iPhone, head on over to vTap to check it out.
You might think that the only way to get video on the iPhone is to stream it on YouTube or download a show from the iTunes Store. Well not if you have iPhone format converting software on hand. On the Windows side, DVDVideoSoft makes a free Video to iPhone converter that'll convert all kinds of file formats (AVI, MPG, WMV, and MOV just to name a few) to the iPhone's special MPEG4 format. If you have a Mac, you'll definitely want to pick up either iSquint or the more advanced version, Visual Hub, to convert your videos to the iPhone format. Both of these programs make video conversion a super easy process, so there's no reason not to load up the iPhone with home videos of your recent vacation to Hawaii to show off to your friends.
One of the iPhone's standout features is Coverflow, the ability to flip through the albums on your iPhone with a flick of the finger. Though you can get a lot of the album art automatically via iTunes, you'll be missing a lot of them if your music tastes are more eclectic. Luckily, senior editor Donald Bell has detailed a way for you to fill those missing gaps in your album art collection with a little iTunes magic and Google image search. Check out his step by step tutorial here.
Sure the iPhone may have a great iPod music player, but unfortunately it's only saddled with 8GB of music, when you probably have many times that amount of songs on your hard drive. So what to do? Again, senior editor Donald Bell steps up to show you how to optimize your iPhone playlists in a more sensible way using the iTunes Smart Playlists feature. And then maybe you won't have to worry about listening to that Christmas album six times in a row.
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