Too tired to go out in the backyard and kick around that soccer ball? Well, now not only do you not even need to go outside, you don’t even need a soccer ball! ARSoccer for iPhone is another one of thoes augmented reality apps, the ones that make things appear through your iPhone’s camera that aren’t actually there in real life.

ARSoccer by LaanLabs sports two game modes and three difficulty levels. You can choose either Arcade Mode of Free Play. Arcade Mode keeps track of your stats, including “hits”, and how long you have been kicking around the virtual ball, whereas Free Play simply lets you brush up on your skills.

One bad thing about the app is the fact that your floor must be perfectly clean in order for the app to work right. Before playing for the first time, the app warns you of this and somehow meters how clean your floor is, not quite sure how it does this but whatever. I have noticed that only on some floors does the app register my kick. On some it will ignore my foot and the app simply won’t work. This would have to be the one and only problem I have with the app.

This app is great for showing to friends [If you can get it working right!] and costs only $0.90 in the Apple App Store.

Do I recommend this app? Yes!

The iPhone 4 has to be one of the most popular products of the year, up there with the iPad. Today I’m going to both tell you about my buying experience and give you an un-biased review.

I woke up at about 5 a.m. the day of the iPhone 4′s launch and walked over to my neighborhood Apple Store. As I had already pre-ordered the phone, I didn’t expect there to be that long of a line. But boy, was I wrong. By 6:45 a.m. (before the store was even open) the line stretched way out of view of the store. I stood in line for a few hours. My dad called at about 8:45 to remind me that I had a 9 a.m. doctor’s appointment. I left the line that I had already waited in for two hours to go to my appointment. I got back at about 10 a.m. and got straight back in line. The line ended on the other side of the mall and the Apple Store employees warned us that there was a 4-5 hour wait. After about seven hours of standing around and listing to Leo Laporte’s “This Week In Tech” podcast I finally made it to the front of the line. I purchased the phone and got the heck out of that mall.

So that was a breif summary of my buying experience. Now, let’s start the review now, shall we?

Hardware

Unlike the 3G S, the iPhone 4 brings many new hardware features to the table including the new design with the metal band, the front facing camera, the A4 chip and the 5MP camera with flash. The iPhone 4 feels a lot sturdier and less fragile then the previous iPhones, the 3G and the 3G S. Also, the glass in the iPhone 4 is said to be less fragile than the glass in previous iPhones.

Camera

The camera in the iPhone 4 is stunning. It takes 5MP pictures and records 720p video. It absolutely blows away the cameras in the iPhone 3G and 3G S.

Here are some sample photos taken with the iPhone 4: (Click to enlarge)

A4 Chip

Even though the frequency of the new A4 Chip is still unknown, it sure does increase the speed and power of the new iPhone. As you can see here, the new processor makes the new iPhone 4 a lot snappier than the iPhone 3G.

Retina Display

One great new feature of the iPhone 4 is the Retina Display and the higher resolution. Steve Jobs pointed out at the announcement of the iPhone 4 that the pixel density of the new phone is so high the human eye can’t even recognize the pixels from the average viewing distance; however, there has been some debate as to weather or not this is true.

The Antenna Issue

As of today, June 29, 2010, the issue with the iPhone 4′s new antenna has still not been fixed. When holding the iPhone in the bottom left corner the cell signal drops dramatically. As of now, the only way to fix this is to use a case such as Apple’s Bumper case or to simply hold it differently.

Software

Multitasking (Fast App Switching)

One of the biggest features of iOS 4 (Previously known as iPhone OS 4) is multitasking. I think multitasking on the iPhone 4 is great; however, most iPhone apps in the App Store right now do not support it. Even though it works with out-of-the box apps and around a dozen third-party apps from the App Store, the fact that Apple gave developers little time to update their apps to support iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 really kills the feature. Overall, the feature has a lot of potential and could become quite useful once developers update their apps.

Mail: Unified Inbox

One of the downsides with the Mail application before iOS 4 was that you had to go back in the menus quite a bit to change inboxes. Now, just like Mac OS X’s Mail application, you can view e-mails from all your accounts in one inbox.

Folders

As Folders are not the biggest feature in iOS 4, they are still welcome. Folders are a great way to simply clean up your homescreen. Until iOS 4, there was no simple way to do this so people like me with over a hundred apps would have to scroll from page to page to find the app they wanted. Now, you can keep your homescreen nice and tidy with folders

Custom Homescreen Wallpaper

Finally, Apple lets you change your homescreen wallpaper! Jailbreakers have had this option for years, now Apple decides to catch on.

iMovie for iPhone

No, iMovie is not included in iOS 4, neither is it free. It costs $4.99 and it’s available in the App Store for iPhone 4 only. I downloaded it right after picking up my iPhone and I have to say, it’s not all that great. It’s basically a really, really skimmed down version of iMovie ’09 for Mac OS X. Unless you are BIG into movie editing on your iPhone 4 you might as well sync your iPhone with your computer and edit it on there.

Rating

Overall, I have to give the iPhone 4 a 4.25/5 stars because of the antenna issue. Once Apple fixes this, I will give the phone a perfect score, 5/5 stars.

What do you think? Do you have a iPhone 4? Are you getting an iPhone 4?

Along with Safari 5 came a nice little feature, extensions. Extensions allows developers to make little modifications/additions to Safari and then let people download them like they would an application. Today, I am going to be telling you my top five favorite Safari Extensions.

You may need some help enabling Safari Extensions. Click here. Also, make sure you’ve installed the new Safari 5 before trying to turn extensions on!

Gmail Checker

Gmail Checker places a little button with a mail icon in Safari’s toolbar next to the address bar. The little red notification dot appears when you have new emails in your Gmail inbox. This extension is great for power users who use Gmail for email.

Google Reader Snow Leopard

Google Reader Snow Leopard basically changes the feel of the Google Reader UI to match the Snow Leopard UI. It makes google Reader look like Mail or iTunes except that It’s still on the web.

GReader-Checker

Like Gmail Checker, GReader-Checker checks Google Reader for new articles and displays how many unread articles are waiting for you in Google Reader. It places a little button by the Safari address bar with the RSS icon. When you have unread articles waiting for you, the little red dot will again appear.

Add to Google Reader

Have you ever noticed Safari’s little RSS button right by the refresh button when reading a blog? Typically, that button will take you to Safari’s RSS reader and display that website’s RSS feed. With this extension, instead of taking you to Safari’s reader, it will take you to Google Reader where you can subscribe to the feed.

Q-URL

You go to dozens if not hundreds of websites a day. You don’t have much time but you don’t want to have to keep bookmarking sites you want to read later. This is where Q-URL comes in! When there’s a link that you want to save for later, you just simply right click it and add it to your queue of links waiting to be visited. When you do have time and oyu want to visit the links that you have queued up, simply click the Q button next to your Safari address bar.

What are your favorite Safari extensions? Click here, here, or here to get more information on Safari Extensions!

Do you like saving time? Do you find yourself typing the same thing over and over again on a daily basis? Why not try TextExpander for Mac? TextExpander is a Mac application which allows you to give it some text that you routinely type and then set an abbreviation for the text. For example, say I always type “CPAley’s Tech Blog”. I could set it so that when I type bblog it automatically takes bblog and replaces it with “CPAley’s Tech Blog”.

TextExpander has to be one of the best productivity apps out there. It’s more of a tool than an application. If you have multiple computers, you can even synchronize TextExpander though either MobileMe iDisk or through Dropbox. One thing TextExpander is good for is email signatures. If you want an easy way to add an email signature in an email, you can just make a new snippet for it. Another way to utilize TextExpander is to create snippets for words you misspell often. As an example, when typing “Hey”, sometimes I accidentally type “hry”. So what I did was made a snippet and set the abbreviation as “hry and the snippet content “Hey”.

TextExpander can save you a lot of time. It even tells you how much time you have saved with a nice little stats window.

You can also purchase an iPhone version of TextExpander from the App Store for $1.99. However, that is not what I am reviewing.

Overall, I have to say that it takes a week or so to really get some use out of this application. Right out of the box, it’s not going to appear like the most useful thing. After a while though, chances are you will be using it often like I do.

I thank the wonderful people over SmileOnMyMac for sending me a review copy of this sweet little application!

How do you connect to the internet? WiFi? Ethernet? Yesterday I picked up a new wireless router for my home. I got a Belkin N+ Wireless Router for about $75.00 from Amazon.com. Today I will be giving you an in-depth review of the router.

The Belkin N+ Wireless Router is a great router. It supports 802.11n, USB network storage, gigabit ethernet, and up to a 1200 feet range. One feature that I thought was nifty was the light that shows you how much data you are downloading at any given time. As for the USB storage, there’s still a lot missing. First of all, its a little buggy. I can’t seem to get it to work on my Mac. It keeps saying “Connection Failed” Second of all, there’s no way to manage settings for the USB storage.

Pros:

• Fast, 802.11n wireless networking.
• Four gigabit ethernet ports.
• Download speedometer light.
• Very long range.

Cons:

• Mediocre USB network storage.

In The Box:

• Router
• Power cable
• Short Cat 5e ethernet cable
• Setup CD (Not needed for advanced users)

Price:

$119.99 from Belkin.com, $75.00 from Amazon.com

That’s about It! I would definitely recommend this router to a friend if only because of how fast it is and how long it’s range is. I would give this router a solid 4.5/5 stars.

What wireless router do you use?

Have you ever wanted to video chat on the Xbox 360? This is where the Xbox LIVE Vision comes in. The XBL Vision works as both a camera for video chatting on the Xbox 360 and also as a webcam. Today I will be reviewing the camera both as a webcam an as a video chatting device for the 360.

360 Video Chat:

This is pretty lame. I don’t know why but for some reason, it’s hard to video chat when nobody has a camera. It might be because I don’t have 3,000 friends on XBL. Does Microsoft need to utilize the camera more in games? If they do, it just might send some people to the store to by the XBL Vision!

Webcam:

The Xbox LIVE Vision is a pretty good webcam. It works seamlessly on Mac OS X and on XP, Vista and 7 with a few drivers. It delivers 30fps video with 1.3 megapixel still photos.

My Rating:
3/5 stars

Do I Recommend This Product?
No.

Do you watch live streams? They seem to be the new big thing online. With services live Ustream and Justin.tv, anyone can broadcast a live show directly from their desk. But how do we watch their streams? Yes, we can watch them on the streaming service’s website and sometimes on the streamer’s website. But what if you want to watch it on your desktop without opening up your web browser? That’s where StreamDesk comes in.

StreamDesk is a dead-simple application for both the Mac and PC which allows you to watch live streams from all the popular streaming services right on your desktop. StreamDesk is great, both simple and useful.

In my opinion, one of StreamDesk’s best features is that when watching Ustream streams, you do not see those commercials that stop the video and take up the whole screen. I really do not support advertisements like these, ones that stop you from reaching your content. However, Ustream has to make money somehow and I think it would be a lot better for the consumer if the ads were less intrusive.

Price:
Free!

Link:
http://streamdesk.ca/

This is a guest post by RJ:

Ever wanted a dock on your PC?

The simplicity of having a uncluttered desktop, hide away icons, unlimited customization and more?

Well look no further, ObjectDock by StarDock is here!

ObjectDock is a dock available on your PC. Specifically, we will be taking about the free download version.

Object dock gives you the option to make your desktop less cluttered. You have the opportunity to customize it as much as you want, from having running programs on the dock, to adding a Start Menu shortcut.

With object dock you can add shortcuts, display running tasks, put docklets, zoomed icons, a appearance when the task is in use, four edge positioning, running task snapshot of window, windows start menu, a assortment of skins, swinging icons when pointing over.

Compatibility:
ObjectDock’s compatibility is strictly Windows. It’s compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

System Requirements:

~Windows 7/XP/Vista (32 bit versions only)

~20MB free drive space

~256MB RAM

~Impulse must be installed in order to download and update software

~ Internet access for download, activation and/or purchase.

Languages supported:
English, French, German, Italian, Polski, Russian, Spanish, Serbian (srpski) Note: The interface has been localized for these languages, but the documentation and help (where available) will be in English.

Download ObjectDock by StarDock now!

This is a video review of the Speck CandyShell case for iPhone 3G and 3G S.  Full review after the break.

Good:

• Does not scratch iPhone
• Durable
• Comes with screen protector and cleaning cloth

Bad:

• Not easy to insert/remove iPhone from the case

The bottom line:

The Speck CandyShell is a good case if you plan to drop your iPhone and are afraid of breaking it.

Price:

$34.95 from the Apple Store

My rating:

5/5 stars.

Do I recommend this case?

Yes!