The one thing that London has in abundance is pub’s, we have so many that we use them as our navigation beacons. Turn left at the Red Lion, keep going to the King George, and turn right by the Slug and Lettuce and you are there. Finding a decent drink is easy, but thanks to the new augmented reality application you can now find a decent pub that servers Bulmers Cider and has a garden where you can sit outside and enjoy your drink in the sun.

Like most augmented reality applications the functionality is simple, it will use your current location to inform you what pubs are around you, and as you hold your phone up you’ll see the locations of the pubs in the camera window giving you the general direction. The application displays a handy rating system so you’ll know if the pub is worth a visit. Since the ratings are taken from UseYourLocal.com you are not relying on people who have the application installed to add reviews, therefore there should already be reviews for a good number of pubs.

A general comment about the data provided by the RateYourLocal website. I checked my local pub and was surprised to see that it was missing. On closer inspection I found it was about half a mile away from its correct location. Either someone moved it over the weekend or someone somewhere is licensing a database that needs a serious clean up.

Like the Tiger Beer application you can also opt in to receiving Bulmers Cider related notifications. Based on the Tiger Beer notifications I received in the past, they are generally details about pubs that are offering 2 for 1 or free drink deals. They are not very intrusive so you don’t get spammed. If you opt in you’ll also get details about the Sun Lovin’ Criminals band that are performing on behalf of Bulmers and may appear in a pub near you.

For a marketing exercise, the Bulmers Cider app is a great way to reach out and engage with customers, especially the ability to send them promotions. For the consumer, if you’re a cider fan or just looking to explore a new pub then the app is great, signing up to the notifications may mean that you even manage to pick up a deal in the process.

Bulmers Cider AR App in Action

If you have used any previous Presselite product to help you find tube (metro/subway etc) stations then you’ll find this application looks very similar as it shares the same augmented realty engine. Personally I am not a huge Twitter user, I just don’t seem to have the time to keep up so I tend to read more than take part, but I know it will appeal to many Twitter addicts.

Since I had a rant about privacy the other day I should refer you to this post. Augmented reality and geotagging is fantastic combination when you are at an event and want to see who is around you and what they are saying. But remember to turn off the feature when you don’t want to be found, unless of course you want everyone to know where you live.

Watch it in action

iTunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=330158239&mt=8

Like most arcade games, as you progress you’ll have the opportunity to unlock better weapons to help you fight off the alien hordes, weapons such as Missiles, Continuous Electron Beam and the Bosnoic Field Bomb produce the necessary firepower to survive some of the games harder levels. As with the other augmented reality games that fall in to this new genre, the game requires you to be active, it’s not the type of game you’ll be playing while sitting on the sofa or the train to work. As the game takes place in reality you’ll constantly be looking behind you for the next wave of alien attacks.

If your worried about what the neighbours will think of you running around screaming incoherently about aliens fear not, Pandemica also has two multi-player modes where you can team up with a friend and fight cooperatively against the threat, or you can compete for the highest score. Pandemica is the first multi-player game of this type and it adds a new twist on the game play. If you can get a few friends together I think there is endless fun to be had with these modes.

Pandemica costs $1.99 or £1.19 and is available from the app store.

Parallel Kingdom is a massively multi-player online role playing game that takes place around you. The game uses GPS to figure out your location and places the character directly in your neighbourhood where you can explore, declare war on other players or just fight the many creatures that live there. It’s interesting to see your surroundings plotted with monsters, trees, caves and other exotic items. I had never noticed that there was a castle at the end of my street before.

I have only just installed the game and it seems to be pretty complex and loaded with options so it is going to take a while for me to figure out what the hell I am doing, but like all MMORPG’s the object is to kill, collect gold and build up your level.

Given it’s complexity it’s hard to give a full review but I guess the question is, is it really an augmented reality application? Well that depends on your point of view.

If you are a traditionalist who believes that augmented reality is defined by using the camera and blending computer graphics in the camera feed then you probably won’t see Parallel Kingdom as a true augmented reality game. If however you take the wider view and believe that augmented reality is being aware of you surroundings and enhancing them then you’ll see Parallel Kingdom as the first true augmented reality MMORPG. Either way, Parallel Kingdom is free so worth an install and making up your own mind.

Game Trailer

The first video is a rather ambitious look at the year 2012 but I think it will be more like 2020 before we see anything like this

iPhone 2012

Next is an interesting take on why it wont be a good idea to answer your holophone.

Finally to prove that there’s an app for just about everything, there is an hologram creator application for the iPhone. The images don’t leap out the screen but it’s still an interesting application.

Keeping in touch on the iPhone is so easy. I have switched my email accounts over to Google Mail which now also hosts my contacts and calendar. Synchronisation is easy and any changes in either location get reflected instantly. I’m not that keen on Google Mail as a client, I don’t like the way that it groups conversations together but it’s a small price to pay for the connectivity. Interesting email arrives on my iPhone 20 seconds before it appears in the Google web client.

I’m not much of a twitter person but I have installed SimplyTweet as my twitter client. The push notifications works really well and gives an alert whenever you get a mention or a direct message. SimplyTweet supports multiple accounts but it appears you only get an alert for the active account which is a bit of a shame. SimplyTweet costs £2.99 but they have a free version which you can try out.

SimplyTweet

There isn’t much choice when it comes to push RSS solutions, I found RSS Viewer from ZDNET Development that works pretty well. It has some negative reviews in the AppStore but I find it does the trick and for the bargain price of £1.19 it does everything I need. With RSS Viewer just type in the URL you want to subscribe to and it will find any RSS feeds, hit the subscribe button and when the feed is updated you get an alert to say the page has been updated. It’s a great way for keeping up to date with blogs. There a still a number of improvements that the developers are looking to make, for example creating categories of your feed and offline viewing so the app can only get better. In the meantime £1.19 is nothing so well worth a punt.

RSS Viewer

If you have a Wordpress blog then the Wordpress iPhone application is essential. It supports multiple blogs which is really useful if you have more than one account. You can create new blogs posts or pages as well as manage comments all directly from the phone. It’s pretty useful if you want to blog something on the go or filter out those annoying spam comments that creep in from time to time.

I have tried applications in the past that offer remote record for Sky, but Sky made it too difficult with a complex setup you had to go though with the Sky remote. Fortunately they have sorted out those problems. The Sky+ app is free and looks just like the Sky+ TV guide you get on the box. They say to allow 30 minutes for the record request to arrive on the Sky box but I have found if I set record from my iPhone by the time I check it with the remote the instruction has been received. One criticism however is the performance for the Sky guide is pretty slow. Every time you page down it does a fetch to get the data so casual browsing around the guide soon gets annoying. So you may want to supplement the guide with one of the free guides that have a better response time. The guide from Acrossair is pretty good.

Sky+

There is no shortage of tube maps in the AppStore. Some are free and if you just want a basic map then you have lots of choices. I opted for an application called Tube Deluxe which not only has a map and route planner for your journey, but Tube Deluxe also shows the status of the tube lines and includes a live departure board for all the underground stations so you can see how long you’ll have to wait once you get there, or whether or not you need to start runnings for that train. At £0.59 it’s another bargain.

I blogged about applications before that scan barcodes and how they can save you money while shopping. Red Laser is such an application for the iPhone. Whenever you are out shopping just point the camera at the products barcode and it will check the web to give you online prices. The range it covers is pretty good, I was out shopping and scanned a bag of GoCat dry cat food which I thought would be obscure, however it found a few online stores and gave me some alternative prices which was a real surprise. The range of online sources could do with expanding to cover more stores but scan before you buy is the motto.

Red Laser

We’ll eventually after a lot of ‘oh look at this’ from my brother-in-law I opted for the iPhone.
My shiny new device arrived on Saturday morning in a tiny box. Apple don’t supply you with any form of instructions leaving you to fend for yourself. I had to do a Google search just to find out where the sim card went.  The only instructions were from O2 that simply said download iTunes and activate your phone.

Getting the contacts off my Nokia and into the iPhone was no easy feat either, no phone swap wizard here. o2 mumbled something about looking at their help pages on how to do it, but after wasting time I decided to do it my own way and backed-up and imported into Google Contacts. This works really well as the sync between Google and the iPhone is seemless. After I was setup I spent the weekend installing some apps. I love the appstore, it’s possible to spend hours searching for things to spend money on.

There are a few things I don’t like however, well one really. I have always heard people say the battery life on the iPhone sucks. I can’t really tell as at the moment it’s not out my hands for more than 20 minutes at a time, and during that time it has background process running that are connected to the web retrieving email and what not. Time will tell when I am away from home and using it for lots of calls, but for the time being the battery is lasting a day so it’s not a problem.

People complain about the call quality, I can’t judge call quality yet but I did get cut off on my last call. I’m hoping it was a one off experience. I didn’t care so much about being cut off, it was only O2 doing their welcome call and trying to sell me upgrade packages and insurance so it actually did me a favor.

My biggest gripe is iTunes. iTunes is awful, it’s up there with Lotus Notes in the bad software league. I installed a load of applications from the appstore and today when I tried to copy music to the device iTunes deleted most of the apps. iTunes actually apologised for the fact that it couldn’t delete all of them which was a nice touch in the same way a user friendly virus might apologize if it was unable in infect all of your files. iTunes is so awful, having tried to copy music over for the best part of the morning I’m considering carrying an MP3 player in future just to listen to music.  I can’t figure out how to move just a few tracks over as I seem to have to create play lists for every album I want copied. My last attempt resulted in all my wife’s music appearing on the device so now I have the added bonus of trying to remove them. In general it’s really annoying having to use 3rd party software just to copy things to a device. I prefer a device being treated as mass storage so I can do what I want.

But all that aside I love the iPhone and have a heavy dose of iPhone love (that stage were you start looking around for accessories that you don’t really need but feel you should have) but iTunes is that dark secret that iPhone owners don’t talk about, it’s the app that must not be named.