Just recently however, iSikhi (www.isikhi.com) have announced the Gurbani Searcher App which is set to be released mid November through the App Store although no pricing details have been given on their website.

Giving users a chance to search using a familiar method of first letter per word in Gurmukhi, the results come back giving you the Shabad in Gurmukhi with English translation. They are currently in late Beta stages so we should expect to see it soon!

Here’s some sneak peaks for you…

You can access the BBC iPlayer on your iPhone or iPod Touch just by visiting their website at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ by WiFi connection (the EDGE connection is too slow to stream video).  When you try and access the iPlayer website, it detects that you are surfing via your Apple iPhone and shows you the Beta version of the iPhone compatible version and streams shows at 516Kbps (400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio) rather than the standard flash version which you would get if you access the iPlayer website via a PC or mac.

From here, you have access on your iPhone to the last 7 days of TV programming to watch at your leisure such as Eastenders, The Apprentice, Dragons Den, Dr Who and much much more. Playback quality is excellent and the load times are just as impressive. It only took a few seconds via our 8MB WiFi connection to start playback of a 30 minute episode of Eastenders the first time I tried it and even after over a month of usage, I have still not encountered a significant waiting time while it buffers (YouTube may want to learn something from these guys!)

The iPlayer is still however in Beta and some of the shows take a good few hours after they have been broadcast to find their way onto the iPhone version of iPlayer even though they are available on the normal iPlayer quicker than that. All in all, its definately something that deserves a shortcut from your home screen. To do this, just click the + button on the bottom of your Safari screen and choose ‘Add to Home Screen’ and voila - You now have a nice glossy iPlayer icon on your home screen ready for the next time you miss Eastenders!

Just click on the corresponding icon (MSN for us) and you simply enter your user name, password and click save. Simple as that. Now whenever you start up the program, you are shown of list of accounts you have set up within the App and allows you to log in to them by clicking the appropriate one in the list.

Log in was quick and simple and we had no problems in talking to our MSN buddies. You can set MobileChat to alert you via a sound or vibrate when you receive a message and also have the ability to keep the wifi connection alive even if your iPhone screen turn off via a settings in the options screen.

Another nifty feature is the ability to rotate your iPhone to landscape view to show you the bigger keyboard to make it a little easier for you to type in your messages, just as it does in Safari. You can also set your status as online, away or sign out etc and all online contacts are visible with a green icon beside them to show them as online, or red to show them as online but with a status set or away or back soon etc. It also hides all offline contacts to clear out all the clutter.

Its a great free app available via the installer, and if your an IM user, you got no excuse. Get it on your iPhone!

Rating: 5 out of 5

A year later and after numerous failed attempts at iPhone killers by other mobile phone manufacturers, we saw the announcement of the new 3G iPhone on the 9th June 2008. Although Apple kept the lips sealed about the announcement beforehand, it was pretty obvious from previous reports that a new release was due very soon and this again had many mobile phone users worldwide in anticipation as to what we may see.

Having used the original iPhone heavily for the past 6 months, I know I and many others worldwide would like to have seen Apple include quite a few new improvements (listed below) in the new iPhone but what did we actually get?

Haptic Feedback

Cheaper Price

3G

Better Camera (5MP+)

Video Recorder

MMS (Multimedia Messaging)

GPS (Sat Nav)

32GB version

Front Facing Camera

Better Battery Life

Copy & Paste (thanks Bigz)

So, did it live up to its hype? Don’t get me wrong… The iPhone is a great phone. In fact, the iPhone is the best phone I think I have ever used but it is worth jumping from the old iPhone to the new iPhone3G?

Well, we we were all fairly certain we were getting 3G so that was no surprise. GPS is the best addition to the new iPhone and its probably worth the upgrade just for that feature alone. Maybe its just me but I think that’s the only feature that tempts me towards upgrading. I think I may just stick with my original iPhone for a bit longer.

What do you think? Are you going to be buying one?

VoiceNotes (or VNotes as it is named on the dashboard after install) is a free and very simple application that allows you to use your iPhone like a dictaphone with no limit as to how long your recording can be. We found it nice and simple to use and it does exactly what it says on the tin. The conversations we recorded were nice and clear although a little on the quiet side.

Once you have finished your recording, your voice file is saved with a file name comprising of the date and time of recording and all voice notes are accessible for playback or delete through the VNotes application. Unfortunately, you are currently unable to boost mic sensitivity (as of version 0.31-beta-113) but I expect it wont be long though before its added in a future update.

Rating: 4 out of 5

iPhone Video Recorder however only allows a 30 second record time (enough for most people) with the demo version. By purchasing the full version however, you get permanent free upgrades to future versions and there is no restrictions on record times - it just keeps going until your iPhone runs out of space. And with a 1 hour recording file as small as 60MB (depending on settings) you could record over 100 hours of video on your 8GB iPhone!
To install iPhone Video Recorder to your iPhone, go into the Installer and add the source:

http://www.iphonevideorecorder.com/install

After it has refreshed your installer sources, you will find iPhone Video Recorder in the Multimedia category from where you can install it. Once it is installed, you will find the Video Recorder icon on your home screen.

Due to the processing power needed to record video on the iPhone, as standard the app records the video but doesn’t encode the file into a mp4 video file until straight after the recording has finished. You can within the options choose for the app to encode the video as it is recording but the much lower video quality this causes is obvious. Now, as standard, the app is set to auto-encode after a recording which does take some time and whilst it is encoding you cannot record another video (unless you stop the encoding taking place) so what I found worked best was to turn off auto encoding. This way I can record video after video when I need to and can just get the app to encode the files later.

Clicking on any video in the recordings list lets you play the video, share it by either uploading to YouTube or by e-mailing the mp4 file. You can also easily rename or delete the file from there.

In the settings, you have the ability to adjust picture brightness brightness and amplify sound levels. You can also toggle Image quality within the settings. The better the quality settings, the bigger the file size and longer the encoding will take. In our test recording at best video settings and 64kbps audio settings, a 28 second file took exactly 2 minutes to encode and left us with a 2.3MB mp4 file. A 28 second video with lowest video settings (same 64kbps audio) however took 1 min 40 seconds to encode and left us with a 403kb file although the picture was very blocky. Considering the small time difference in encoding time, I think we will stick with it left at the best quality settings.

All in all, a great app… perfect as it is if you only record short clips but it you want the ability to record longer clips, then register within the app to get full functionality. Well worth the money!

Rating: 5 out of 5

Snapture starts up with a brief splash screen and leaves you with a nice clean interface. Across the top of the screen is a slider for the zoom control. Starting a normal 1x magnification, it goes up to a maximum of 3x zoom. Unfortunately, you can see why Apple left it out of the original photo app as adding any amount of zoom leaves the image looking a bit worse for wear. Down the right hand side of the screen there are 1 click access to options to change the size of the photo taken, a 3 times multi shot photo, a timer setting and an option allowing you to take some snaps in grayscale mode.

In the settings tab accross the bottom, you have the ability to set the timer, enable a quiet mode, toggle the multi-shot option, disabling the auto rotation mode and activating a level aid which shows faint lines on the screen indicating angle of you taking the picture.

To take a photo you can either press anywhere on the screen or press the volume up or down button and a little grey spinning circle will appear on screen showing that the picture has been taking and is processing. A cool feature however is that you are also able to take photos in quick succession and Snapture will postpone the processing till after your done taking photos leaving you with very little time wasted!

Overall, we think its an amazing app that deserves to be on every iPhone. Its free and there are no annoying donate or purchase messages… so what are you waiting for? Get it now.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

Downloading and installing the package is as simple as always through the installer and finished with a message telling you: ‘Please place all PDF files in /var/root/Media/PDF’. So that means you need to find a way to get the PDF files onto the iPhone.

PDF files can be easily transferred within a Windows PC using a free program called WinSCP. This program lets you drag and drop PDF files onto your iPhone using a standard Windows folder view interface. Once you have downloaded WinSCP you will need to logon to your iPhone through your PC.

So the first thing we need to know is the IP address for your iPhone. This can be found under Settings> Wi-Fi. Click the little blue arrow beside your active Wi-Fi network and you will go to a new screen giving you further information about your network including your IP Address.

Enter this IP Address into your WinSCP program alongside the username of root and password of alpine. Click login to logon to your iPhone and navigate to /var/root/Media/PDF. We found here that we needed to create the Media and PDF directories ourselves. This PDF folder is where you will need to drag and drop your PDF documents into.

To test out this PDF reader app for the iPhone, we dropped the 3.88Mb iPhone User Guide PDF by Apple onto the iPhone PDF directory to see how well this app worked. By choosing the new PDFViewer icon on the home screen we go to a screen listing the avilable PDF’s and the iPhone User Guide was one of them.

We were impressed by how quickly the 3.88MB PDF loaded up. The quality seems very good and you can zoom in to a level that suits you using the normal two finger swipe. You page back and page forward are handy too and it runs very quick although it is a shame none of the other buttons worked yet (zoom and thumbnail page view) although you have to keep in mind that this is still a beta release.

Having browsed the web quite often and finding ourselves tilting the iPhone to get landscape mode, the biggest dissapointment we found with this app was the inability to view the PDFs in landscape mode. There are no options othe than using this in portrait mode. Hopefuly we will see this capability added in at a later date. Overall, if you a after a PDF viewer and don’t mind viewing in portrait mode only then we think you’ll be happy with this great little app. We however are going to hold out for a viewer that allows landscape viewing.

Our Verdict: 3 out of 5

Just press and keep pressed any icon on the home page and after a few seconds you’ll see all the icons begin to shake. You can then drag any icon around the screen to move its position or you can drag an icon over to the far right hand edge of the screen and this will slide to show a new blank screen.

This allows you to have up to 8 additional home screens on which you can spread your icons over so for example, you could have your top used icons on screen 1 and spread the other icons over the remaining screens.

Apple when making the iPhone produced a ‘locked’ operating system meaning that only applications given the seal of approval by Apple themselves would work on the iPhone. However, some members of the iPhone community thought different and were quick to develop a ‘hack’ which would essentially allow 3rd party applications to run on the iPhone. It was like breaking out the iPhone jail hence the term ‘Jailbreak’.

Your probably thinking now ‘is that it?’ But if you think about it, the possibilities are endless and you can get some cool apps for your iPhone right now (nearlly all free) that boost your iPhone usage levels through the roof.

Maybe you get up first thing in the morning and fancy listening to a bit of radio. No problem, just install an app like ‘iRadio’. Then your off to a work meeting, just turn on your sat nav application like ‘Navizon GPS’ which will guide you turn by turn. Get there and turn on your voice recording application like ‘Voice Notes’ to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Get out your meeting and maybe take a few photos of local attractions using an application like ‘CameraPro’ to zoom in. Then start up ‘iFlickr’ to upload your photos to share with your friends online. Then get back home and relax by playing some old skool games using the ’snes4iphone’ Super Nintendo Games emulator. I think you get the idea!

Jail breaking your iPhone is simple. Plug your iPhone into iTunes and then download and start up ZiPhone and choose the Jailbreak option. That is it, give it a few minutes to work its magic and when it’s done you’ll find a new ‘installer’ icon on your home screen which gives you instant access to hundreds and hundreds of free Apps ready for you to install!