vLingo follows the footstep of Google Mobile by offering voice recognition that will let you initiate calls, search the net and also keep you updated with your friends on social networks like Facebook and Twitter – all without typing. Ok, you’ll still need to tap a few times to start and initiate the voice recognition.
vLingo works by listening for a keyword, followed by the words or phrases to work its magic. Keywords like “call” – to initiate a call, “search” – to initiate Yahoo or Google search and lastly either “facebook” or “twitter” to update the respective sites. After “thinking” about what you said, the app also shows you the possible terms you spoke so that you can fine tune your result.
I’ve no problems getting it to correctly call up contacts from the Address Book, but had more issues with local street and building names, Amoy Street, Maxwell Road and Vivocity all were misses.
vLingo – iTunes Link – FREE but not available for iPod Touch
Amazon also launched their own Amazon App that puts the whole store in your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app allows you to search through the Amazon store, view and edit your Wish Lists and with tier 1-Click system, also makes it easy to purchase their products straight from your iPhone. It also has this feature call Amazon Remembers that allows you to snap a photo with your iPhone, store it on their server. Amazon then employs their Mechanical Turks to search through their inventory and returns you a link to purchase that item from Amazon, a high-tech shopping list.
FYI, the Mechanical Turks, or Artificial Artificial Intelligence, is Amazon’s own humanized work force that gets paid for working on requests by other people or businesses, usually for small tasks like finding a product that matches your photo with the Amazon App.
Amazon App – iTunes Link – FREE but NOT available from Singapore App Store
PhoneBAK Lite (pending approval) is a homegrown product from BAK2u, the mobile security solutions company, that had its original App rejected by Apple. The original version of PhoneBAK was suppose to send out a pre-determined SMS and Email if an unauthorised SIM card was inserted with location of the iPhone for the owner to track. But according to this post from The Singapore iPhone Guide, Paddy Tan, the owner of BAK2u explained that it was probably rejected because they were using private APIs and also PhoneBAK needs to be running in the background for it to detect, which is not allowed by the iPhone SDK. So let’s cross our fingers and hope the Lite version gets approved and you can have more security on your iPhone.
Watch how PhoneBAK would have worked if it was approved.
In the meantime, check out other Apps from BAK2u here.
Lastly, if you are on Twitter, do follow iHeartApple to get updated on our latest entries. And if you have not gotten a Twitter client on your iPhone or iPod Touch, read this review from The Apple Blog which goes through 12 of the most popular Twitter applications you can find in the App Store. There’s bound to be one that you will like. My favorite is Tweetsville and Twinkle. What’s yours?
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The post about BAK2u is such a lie, there are no undocumented APIs from Apple for the SIM change. That is the biggest load of bull I have ever heard. The video shows the person clicking an app, entering a password and if the password is not correct an email gets sent out. It probably got rejected because it was useless, not because they discovered some undocumented APIs. If they did and they mentioned it to a blogger they would also be in deep legal limbo with Apple as it violates the NDA. If you believe this crap I have a $1K I am rich app to sell you.