iPhone App Reviews

Q&F: Christmas Snowglobe Roundup

Michael (Admin) | Dec 13, 2008 Entertainment, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)

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All snow globes, both real and virtual, are inherently useless. But Richard Baker’s TUI SnowGlobe isn’t just useless… it’s also strange and kind of funny. Unlike most snowglobes there’s no music to speak of, but there are a total of six oddball “scenes” (plus the obligatory developer promo) to be revealed by shaking your iPhone.

My personal favorite? The lucha libre wrestling dog!

Give it a try knowing that you’ll probably delete it within five minutes. ¡Feliz Navidad!

Bizarre originality saves this snowglobe from being a TOTAL waste of time

Snow Globe and eCards aspires to be exactly that: a snow globe that also sends eCards. The snow globe part of the app works well enough even though it looks more like a title screen than a functional part of the app. As for the eCards… ehhhh… it’s pretty average and only works if you don’t use any apostrophes.

Putting apostrophes in your eCard message will result in a not-so-Christmasy MySQL error, so as long as you keep that in mind you’ll be ok. The eCard itself will send home computer users to the maal4.nl website and anyone who receives it on their iPhone will have to install the app in order to see it.

If you really want to send Christmas cards from your iPhone, blow $2 on Christmas C@rds. If you want a snow globe, this app probably won’t impress you.

I'll say it again: NO APOSTROPHES! Unless you like getting pissed off.

The iXmas Snow Globe is probably the best you’re gonna do in this bunch. It’s a nice town square Christmas scene, and tilting your iPhone left or right will rotate you around the square’s gigantic Christmas tree. Meanwhile, a nice holiday-sounding piano score mixes with ambient crowd noise and a quick shake will jingle some bells and kick up more snowfall.

The Embassy Interactive Inc. did a nice job on this thing so, if you’re just looking to set a Christmasy mood or impress your loser friends who spent money on real snow globes, this should do the trick.

Embassy has also released several versions of their Tangram puzzle app and the Christmas apps iXmas Tree and Holiday Mistletoe.

Hey where are all the homeless people

Tags: Christmas, free, useless

Q&F: Greater Media Christmas Channel

Michael (Admin) | Dec 11, 2008 Music, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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The Greater Media Christmas Channel touts itself as a “great mix of holiday favorites with a Jersey flavor”. Wow… Jersey flavor!! I have no idea what the hell that is, but if you’re looking for an all-Christmas-all-the-time internet radio station, this oughta do it.

The sound quality may not be the greatest, but Quick Bridge Solutions is giving it away for nothing and it seems to be commercial-free except for occasional station announcements in between songs. If you find yourself trapped at your awkwardly-silent office holiday party, whip out this app and see if you can liven things up a bit.

Willie Nelson sings Christmas! Proof positive that this app delivers variety

Tags: Christmas, free

Q&F: Santa Lite

Michael (Admin) | Dec 9, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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Worst. Christmas game. EVER!!!!

Tags: Christmas, free, lite version

Q&F: Quizmas

Michael (Admin) | Dec 5, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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I think Quizmas is a little better than the 2½ star iTunes App Store rating would lead you to believe. It gives you the option of answering Christmas trivia or watching videos of Santa telling incredibly bad jokes, and both can be pretty entertaining if you’ve had enough to drink.

The quiz questions come in four different categories and they can be pretty hard… plus you have to answer them fast or you’ll be scolded with a vibrating buzzer. The real fun is in watching the joke videos… the jokes totally blow, but the funny part is that Santa obviously thinks they’re hysterical! I actually LOL’d at how much he was laughing at his own 3rd-grade riddles.

Sleepydog Ltd. put a decent amount of effort into making this app and it may not win any awards but it’s really not bad either. It’s free and it’s all about Christmas, so I think it’s worth checking out.

I'll bet you $50 there's an empty bottle of scotch sitting just outside the camera's view

Tags: Christmas, free

Q&F: Xmas Link Up

Michael (Admin) | Dec 4, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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Don’t be fooled by Xmas Link Up’s bizarre app store icon! Why they’re using an emo version of McDonald’s Grimace to represent this app is beyond me, but it’s actually a pretty fun Christmas-themed game.

If you’ve ever played Fuzzle you already know what to do: line up at least four matching tiles to clear them from the board. MeYuMe threw in a couple of surprises such as telling you where tiles will be appearing next (in gray) and there are certain tiles that become locked in place after a period of time.

Xmas Link Up is the lite Christmas version of MyM Link Up which sells for $2.99. This is just a trial version with six levels but it’s fun and challenging enough to warrant a download, and it might even convince you to invest in the full non-themed Link Up.

Here, have some Christmas frustration

Tags: Christmas, free, lite version

Christmas C@rds

Michael (Admin) | Dec 2, 2008 Utilities

User rating: (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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A little over a month ago I reviewed Halloween C@rds which I called “the only one that’s gotten it right” in the greeting-card-app genre. Nothing’s changed with Christmas C@rds -  this app has all the same kickass features as the Halloween version and Hot Chili Apps has thrown in a couple of nice upgrades to boot.

I’m not going to rehash my entire review of the Halloween app, so I’ll just say that Christmas C@rds is exactly what you want if you’re too poor or too lazy to drop real Christmas cards in the mail. The big difference is that now you can make your text pretty much any color you want, you can resize and reposition it at will by maneuvering the text with two fingers, and text now has optional dropshadow to make it easier to read.

There are 39 templates included with Christmas C@rds, and 17 of them allow you to add your own photo. The one thing I wish this app would do is let me add a personalized message to the email that accompanies the iPhone Christmas card. I suppose it could be rationalized that the card should speak for itself, but sending a blank email with just a photo might seem impersonal to some. On the plus side, you can email a single card to as many people as you want… a new CC: field is added to the in-app email client every time a new recipient is added.

Other than that, I can find little fault with this iPhone Christmas card app. It’s widely known that I’m lazy as hell, not to mention broke as hell, so I plan on using Christmas C@rds often this holiday season. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment, it’s bad for the post office (ha!), and my friends and family really don’t care how my holiday wishes reach them. Pay $1.99 for this thing, it’s so worth it.

Tags: $1.99, Christmas

Q&F: Christmas App Roundup, Part 2

Michael (Admin) | Nov 28, 2008 Games, Quick & Free

User rating: (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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Christmas Rock’n'Roll is the lite holiday version of Tag Games Limited’s Rock’n'Roll app. Your job is to guide a psychotic-looking thing named “Roll” through a series of mazes where he needs to collect musical notes and ultimately rescue his buddy “Rock” who has been kidnapped by an evil Christmas-hating bastard.

Maze navigation is done by rotating the map with finger movements along the edge of the iPhone screen and tilting will also affect Roll’s movement. It’s hard at first, but if you play enough you’ll get the hang of it.

Despite being very colorful and Christmasy, I wonder if Christmas Rock’n'Roll will do more to piss your kids off than entertain them. It’s a high-quality game but, between the semi-difficult controls and the big maps filled with obstacles and bad guys, this app might be better suited for grownups and older children who can focus their attention for more than 30 seconds at a time… aww what the hell, let the kids play it. Tell them they HAVE TO rescue Rock or Santa won’t be coming this year! That’ll shut them up.

The full, non-themed Rock’n'Roll is $1.99.

My eyes would be bugging out too if I were stuck in this frozen-hell of a maze

Trivial Memory Christmas is your standard photo-matching game. Tap squares on a board to reveal images and find pairs.

Overall this app’s pretty good. It has a two-player option, three difficulty settings that produce photo grids laid out in 4×4, 6×6, and 8×8 formats, and it plays Christmas music which can be turned off. The game design isn’t the greatest, but hey whatever… it’s free, it’s mildly entertaining, and you’ll probably be deleting it on December 26th. Get it if you like this kind of game.

Trivial Technology also sells the non-themed Trivial Memory for $.99.

This game isn't pretty, but it's very playable

Xmas-a-Mass Free is the very “lite” version of Xmas-a-Mass which Powerhouse Games sells for $2.99.

It’s really a pretty cool game… hold your finger on the iPhone screen to produce a nicely wrapped gift that grows in size the longer you hold it. Let go of the gift before it touches one of the satanic goblins crowding the screen, and keep adding gifts until you clear the level. Meanwhile, an orchestra plays a Christmas showtune soundtrack in the background.

Lite apps are supposed to give you a chance to test-drive the real thing before you buy so, in that sense, I really shouldn’t bitch about Xmas-a-Mass Free… but it’s such a short trial of the game!! Five levels is probably enough for you to decide whether you like it or not, but come on man! Geeeezzz!!!!

Ok, I’m done ranting. It’s a good game, just be prepared for your free trial to end abruptly.

Christmas just isn't Christmas without evil goblin heads among your gifts

Tags: Christmas, free

Q&F: Christmas App Roundup, Part 1

Michael (Admin) | Nov 28, 2008 Entertainment, Quick & Free

User rating: (No Ratings Yet)

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The number of holiday apps in the iTunes App Store is growing by the second! I’ll be picking through them over the next week or three in a series of upcoming Q&F posts like this one. Here’s to hoping you have a nice, safe holiday season, and please remember that it’s very bad to trample Wal-Mart employees to death while you’re doing your shopping. OMG people are idiots.

Don’t you dare pay for a “Christmas Countdown” app! Get the ad-supported Sleeps to Christmas instead and throw the buck you would have spent into one of those red Salvation Army buckets.

Dardan Software, maker of Escape Pod and Alphonetic, apparently realized that a countdown-only app is a total waste of space so they were kind enough to throw some holiday jingles into Sleeps to Christmas. You can choose from eight different songs like Deck the Halls and White Christmas, and a quick tap on Santa’s sign will change it to show how many sleeps (days), hours, minutes, or seconds remain until a fat, bearded stranger breaks into your home through the chimney.

Sleeps to Christmas works as promised and the music is a nice touch, so if the kids haven’t learned to read a calendar yet this app will do a nice job of telling them what they want to know.

Sweet, Christmas is just a 627-hour nap away

If you know the full lyrics to more than a couple of Christmas carols, you are a gigantic loser!! For the rest of us, Xmas Carols Lite provides the words to 20 songs including all of the most popular Christmas carols and several that I’ve never, ever heard of.

Xmas Carols Lite doesn’t play music, it just gives you the words. The developer, Dok LLC, says “we will be releasing a Christmas Caroling app with even more features soon” so I’m guessing you’ll have to buy it when it comes out if you want to do a full-on sing-a-long.

I think it’s nice that you can get all the lyrics to Christmas carols in one app, but if a bunch of Christmas carolers come to my door singing and holding iPhones I’m gonna turn the hose on them. Actually I think I’ll just turn the hose on ALL carolers, regardless of what they’re reading lyrics from. It’s gonna be hilarious!

This will come in handy when the inevitable "12 Days of Christmas" trivia question gets asked.

Christmas Sounds Free is an ad-supported collection of 16 Christmas sound effects. Press a button, play a sound. Press the same button again right away, and now the sound is playing over itself! Once a sound starts there’s no way to stop it, and I’m not sure if this is intentional (probably not) but it’s kind of entertaining.

If you just start pressing buttons all over the place it won’t be long until you’ll have produced your very own Christmas Symphony From Hell. Bonus points to KVapps for making the Santa recordings so amateurish that they’re borderline funny.

Kids will likely enjoy the hell out of this app, so you should definitely get it as long as you’re emotionally prepared for the endless holiday racket that will ensue. An ad-free version of this app can be had for $.99.

"Mommy, why does Santa sound like he's drunk?"

Tags: Christmas, free