Many of us like playing games on our smart phones. Angry Birds is probably our first thought when it comes to whiling away a few minutes using a mobile phone, but there are lots of other games that people love to play from racing games like Real Racing to gaming apps like Foxy Bingo. There are also some games that are said to work on your mind and improve your brain power. Here we give you an example of the top brain boosting apps.

Sudoku
Any brain-bender has to start with sudoku. The puzzle has been credited with warding off mental illness, memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease all the while strengthening reasoning and logical skills, according to studies by a variety of universities. One of the most popular is the Electronic Arts sudoku, but look around and find one that suits you.

General knowledge apps
Test your trivia and the breadth of your knowledge base with a general knowledge quiz. The quiz by Obaid inc is a recommended one. A broad general knowledge is a great base for creativity, the more you can see the links between things, the easier ideas will flow. It is also associated by greater openness to experience and fluid intelligence.

Physics games
Physics games help you learn the laws of physics and use your brain at the same time. One of the best ones is Newton which uses a powerful physics engine.

Catch all puzzles
Puzzles are still a fine way to give your head a little work out and the PuzzleManiak is a grab bag of some fiendishly inventive ones. It’s available at a reasonable price and should keep you occupied for all those long journeys and long mornings in the dentist’s waiting room.

DeskSMS is a quality product brought to you by the same developer that is infamous for his ROM Manager for rooted Android phones.  But, unlike ROM Manager, this app is not free.  Someone has to pay for all be bandwidth it generates.  There IS a free trial period of a couple of weeks, but after that, the service is a very reasonable $4.99 a year.

The key to DeskSMS is that it links the texts to/from your phone to your Google account.  This allows you to access your SMS (and contacts) via a number of ways.  You can send/receive them via Gmail, via Google Chat, via Google Talk, via Google Chrome extension (there is also one for Firefox), and via an independent web page.  I’ve tried other apps that allow you to do this via a web site, but nothing I’ve found is so easy to set up and has so many different delivery options.  Because you can access your SMS messages and contacts via a web page, you can also create an application shortcut to that page and even run it as a separate app on your computer.  And, because you can access it via Google Talk, any Jabber IM client on your phone, computer, or tablet can be used to access them.  That means that you can even cross-platforms and do things like respond to SMS messages to your Android phone via an Apple iPad, for example.   And the person you are conversing with has no idea that you are not typing at 70wpm on your Android phone.  To them, it all is from your phone.

Setup could not be easier.  Install the app, log in to your Google account, and tell the app whether to send your SMS to Gmail, Google Talk, or to the Browser/extension channels – or any combination of these.  You need to choose these wisely though based on how you have alerts set up though.  The last thing you want is to have Gmail, Google Chat, Google Talk, and browser extension alerts on your laptop going off simultaneously with the SMS alerts, mail alerts, and IM alerts on your phone.  You don’t want to get overloaded with alerts, so it is best to limit them.  Right now, for example, I have Google Talk on my laptop pop up when I get a SMS message, but that means it ALSO pops up on my phone – along with the SMS alert.  I don’t want to block the alerts on my phone in Google Talk because that will also block the contact on my laptop.  So I use GoSMS to set custom alerts for those SMS contacts to not give me the audible alert and that way the GTalk alert on my phone is the only audible one I receive.  So you need to think through how you do this if you have your SMS sent multiple places on multiple devices.

There *is* a little lag time as the SMS is forwarded to and from your phone, but I have found that to be minimum.  And, since I can type a whole lot faster on my laptop than I can on my phone, the person waiting for a response doesn’t really notice any lag in the end results.

The benefits of this system go beyond convenience though.  Say you leave your phone at a friend’s house and can’t call him because he not only has your phone, but his number is stored in your phone.  If you have ever had a SMS conversation with him, you can text him from any internet connection by accessing your email or GTalk or the browser site.  And, just in case you can’t remember the web site URL and need to access it from somewhere, I created a bit.ly/desksms  short URL to it.  :)  Also, since SMS conversations are sent to your GMail account and/or GTalk, there is an online archive of them should you ever need to search them for that phone number or address that someone shared with you some time back.  This archive can quickly fill your inbox though, so creative use of filters to label and archive them are probably best.

The way the system works via Gmail or GTalk is by creating a unique email address for the people you are sending and receiving text messages from.  This address is their number followed by @desksms.appspotchat.com.  So as long as you are using your gmail account to send something to 1235551212@desksms.appspotchat.com, the owner of the 1235551212 number is going to get the message as a text from your Android phone.  And this “desksms.appspotchat.com” domain makes it easy to set up filters for these messages in your gmail.

My suggestions for this app are very few.  It is absolutely perfect at what it does, but I would love to see it expanded.  I would love to see the ability to add an additional email account to your desksms.appspotchat.com settings so that you could send/receive texts via more than just your primary Gmail account.  That way, you could add something like a work email in case you work places that block things like access to Gmail or GTalk.    I’d also love to see the app, where possible, to be able to create contact names and pictures in my Google contacts called “SMS Firstname Lastname” or something similar for selected folks already in my SMS history or my address book.  Maybe it could put them in a separate Gmail contact group or something.  Right now, every time I get a call or SMS, I am prompted whether or not I’d like to add that number@desksms.appspotchat.com address to my GTalk contacts.  If I have already chosen a lot of them to add to my SMS group in my Google Contacts, a lot of these notices could be avoided.  And if I had the option to NOT forward these messages or calls to my GTalk, Gmail, and Web destination unless they were on this “white list” or could, conversely, set it to to automatically block contacts that are already in my contact list as being work numbers or home numbers, that would cut down on the requests to add/block every new contact.  Finally, and associated with this “black list” idea, I’d love to have some way to automatically block the forwarding of things on a formal black list (like text alerts from my bank or my current data usage from ATT) or to even filter on things like “Reply with your comment or “like”” so that you could filter out things from FaceBook.  I seriously don’t need a separate GTalk contact for every status update from every FaceBook or Twitter account I follow.  Maybe some option to not forward texts unless it is a full 10-digit phone number would block a lot of this as well.

Overall though, I’d give this app a full five stars (and did).  It is solid, dependable, and highly configurable.  So the 4.4 rating on the Android market is well deserved.  So I’d highly recommend everyone take this app for a spin.  If you don’t like it, you still have two seeks to play with it at no charge whatsoever.

I grew up without a television in our home from the time I entered elementary school until I was in college.  I read.  I read a LOT. The summer that I was 12, my brother and I would each check out the limit of 20 books at the library and, over the course of the next week or so, we’d real all 40 books.  All through my high-school years, I had a wallet in one back pocket and a paperback book in the other.  I’d read during classes, in between classes, after classes, and on the ride too and from school.  By the time I finished high school, there were several authors that I had completely read all of their works.

As I got older, my interests matured and changed.  I had less time to read, but still had a library at the house full of books on theology, religion, origins, apologetics, and so forth.  All that changed though on March 15, 2005.  I became disabled and could no longer concentrate enough to read much.  I haven’t read a complete book since.  Luckily though, than handicap doesn’t include listening to audio books.  I have over 200 titles in my Audible.com collection, and over 200 gigabytes (about 2,000 hours worth) of books in the popular M4B format.

The M4B format, for those of you that are not familiar with it, is kinda like an MP3, but is designed for longer works, often with chapters defined in it, that you might return to on occasion and want to pick back up at certain places.  In other words, you can bookmark it and don’t have to start the file at the beginning every time you want to listen to it.  And, like MP3s, you can include cover art, author, and other “tags” in the file.  This is perfect for audio books.  There is very reasonably priced software out there that will allow you to combine MP3 files into these m4B files yourself.  I myself use Chapter Master for creation of these files, but there are other products out there as well.

Once you have these created for your listening pleasure though, you need something to play them.  On a desktop, that is easy with iTunes.  On an iPhone or iPod, they natively recognize the M4B format and will play them.  But a dedicated player that allows for easy navigation between chapters and bookmarks is essential for the best listening experience.  And that, finally, is where Amimbo comes in.

Akimbo comes with a free trial version and a paid version for $2.50.  While there are a couple of other apps out there that will play M4B files, Akimbo is, by far, the best.  It has a comprehensive set of features, is regularly updated, and Reed, the developer, is lightning fast in answering user questions and incorporating user suggestions.  He can be reached directly via email, or via the app’s Facebook page.  Contacting him directly though is usually not even necessary due to the complete online manual available for the app.

And, while I focus on M4B audio book files, this player does a whole lot more.  It also plays M4A, MP4, MP3, and ogg vorbis files.  This makes it not only perfect for books, but also for podcasts and lecture series.  I even use it for sermon series from places like SermonAudio.com if I find a series on a topic of interest or a series on a particular book of the Bible.  And it does so with not only the player itself, but with an optional widget, as displayed in the image to the left.

Since audio capabilities differ a bit depending on the age of your Android and its OS, it is recommended that you try to free version before purchasing the full one.  It has the full feature set as the paid version, but pauses for 15-seconds after every 5-minutes of playback.

As I mentioned, the app has a great set of features.  Besides all the different formats of audio files that it plays, it boasts of the following:

Don’t let my feature request list deceive you though.  This app either already does pretty much everything you need, or is likely to in the future.  So go ahead and grab it.  If you are a fan of listening to anything other than music MP3s, it will be the best $2.50 that you ever spent.  And, to help you along, I’ll even include the QR code for it!

One of the first things I did when I got an iPod was to search the podcasts for Christian podcasts. As I am disabled and don’t make it to church regularly, I was looking for something to replace that.  While I subscribed to several of the podcasts, NOTHING had a bigger impact on my education and enlightenment as The Theology Program.  The Theology Program is, in short, a series of theology courses for lay people.  Think of it as accessible seminary by the same people that bring you the widely popular Theology Unplugged podcast and Parchment and Pen blog.  Michael Patton, the lead lecturer in the series, is also the creator of Theologica, a great forum with over 2,200 members for the discussion of theology, politics, news, etc.  (In full disclosure, I’m not only an active member there, but the head moderator.)

Each of the six courses in The Theology Program, taught by seminary grads themselves, involves ten sessions of audio/video teaching which includes slideshows of illustrations.  While intended for Christians, I think the courses would be beneficial for anyone trying to understand what Christians believe and why they do so.  The courses do not focus on what to believe as much as teaching why different groups of Christians hold to a particular belief.  In other words, a key to the courses is not that you end up believing what Michael Patton does, but that you have a firm, defensible basis for what you believe.  Another key thing about the courses is that it is done in a very fair, objective, and irenic matter.  If there is more than one interpretation of things, both the strengths and weaknesses of a position are explored.  That approach alone is something that makes this series unique.

While you can watch or listen to the classes online, and can even take part in online classes in a live format, having the workbooks and DVDs of the classes is the best alternative to being able to take them in a live setting (online or in person).  To purchase each course though is $110 dollars.  You can get a discount by purchasing the entire series of six courses, but that too comes to a $500 total price tag.  Don’t get me wrong here.  It’s the best $500 investment that you will ever make in theological training and I’d highly recommend the series to anyone.  But that $500 investment is still an obstacle to many.  In today’s economy, many would hesitate to make that investment.  But now, that obstacle has been removed.

Credo House Ministries (formerly Reclaiming the Mind Ministries), the people behind The Theology Program, have now released all the video and workbooks for the entire series, something that would normally cost you hundreds of dollars, for the bargain price of $6.99 as a convenient iPhone app.  That incredible price is cheaper than the cost of just one of the workbooks.  Just a PDF version of one of the six workbooks is $10.  But you can have the entire series of videos plus all the workbooks on your iPhone for the bargain price of $6.99.

Simply called Theology, the iPhone app consists of 60 hours of theological training, more than 1,800 slides and more than 1,200 workbook pages.  That’s about twelve cents per hour of class.  As someone trying to figure out how to get two kids, through college, that is so close to free as to make me wonder why they didn’t just give it away.  I think it is because they want folks to have at least a bit of an investment in the series in order to take it seriously.  While $6.99 is not much for a seminar series, much less a collection of six lecture series, it is a bit higher than most apps on the iStore.

The interface of the app is very simple and intuitive.  It is easy to select both the course you are interested in as well as the class within that course that you want to view.  If you wish to jump to a specific section, like my favorite class about the Stage of Truth (course 1, class 4), you can do so in just a few taps.  And, as you can see from the screen shot on the left, you have access to not only the videos, but also the slides being presented and the workbooks for that class.  The “more” option brings up some additional recommended reading options.

As with any app release though, particularly the initial release, I have some suggestions.  First, it would be great if the app kept track of which class you were watching and would automatically launch that class’s slides when you went to the slides area.  If it could automatically go to that particular course’s workbook, that too would be nice.  Second, the classes have some optional reading suggestions.  I’d love for there to be some links to something like the Amazon store, preferably using a referral code so that Credo House could get some revenue from it, so that you can easily purchase recommended books.  Third, Credo House has a ton of other resources, some of which I have linked to above.  It would be really handy if the app had screens that would take you to the different blogs, podcasts, forums, browser toolbars, and so forth that they offer.  Fourth, I’d love the option to keep the audio playing when you exit the app so that you could listen to it while doing other things.  In combination with the timer option of the iPhone alarm that would let you sleep the device after a period of time, you could even use it to listen to it with a sleep timer.  It is not quite like having a “sleep in an hour”  option (or a note taking option within the app), but it would be nice to be able to load up a notes app and take notes while continuing to listen to the lecture.  If the option is ever added to add notes within the app, being able to attach them to a specific place in a video or slide or place in the workbook would be awesome.  And, finally, I’d love to see an option for push notifications for when live classes start online.  There is nothing quite like going through these in a live environment where you can ask questions and discuss things with other students.  And ability to do this online via the iPhone or an iPad would be a lot to ask for right now, but at the very least I’d love to have an option to be notified so that I could join in via computer.

Overall, I’m totally sold on the content of the Theology app.  It is as comprehensive as it is unique.  While it may be possible to view some theology or seminary classes in iTunes University, having all the slides and workbooks for the courses make this an incredibly comprehensive and convenient way to get a good understanding of Christianity and what Christians believe.  This app definitely made my Must-Have list and I could not recommend it any more highly.

If you’d like to see this app in action, there is a nice YouTube video to give you a taste of it.  The interface is simple.  You can not only tap on an item that you “see” to find out a lot of information on it, but you can also go into the “catalog” and select an item and then follow the “arrow” that shows up on the screen to locate its current location.

Because this app heavily depends on your compass, it is important that you calibrate your compass in order to get the best results.  This only takes a few seconds.  Once that is done, it is also important to update the database of objects.  To do this, click on the “+” sign on the top of the screen and then the update status on the bottom of the next screen.  This short download updates the catalog in the app and gives you the most up to date information.

One of the really cool features is the animation feature.  Once you get some of the orbital paths displayed on the screen, you can tap the screen and then “scroll” left and right through time to see where objects are going to be along that trajectory.  If you want to see where and when the orbits of different planets align, for example, it is only a finger swipe away.

I had a lot of fun with this $4.99 app.  But, because the app is more focused on satellites than stars and constellations, I think it is missing a large potential audience.  If the catalog was updated with major stars, nebula’s, and constellations, I think the $4.99 price would appeal to a lot wider audience.  If you really are into communication satellites though, this app could really help.  As you can see in the photo to the left, it could have really helped my DirecTV installer in locating our dish so that the trees did not get in the way.  Without this though, he ended up trying a couple of different locations before he found one that worked.  This app is a perfect example for occasions like that.  Heavy users of GPS and satellite phones will also find this app very beneficial.  For the casual user though, it is going to have a short “that’s really cool!” factor that might not justify long-term use and the $4.99 price point.

The advantages of this implementation are obvious in the end result.  First, you end up with better brightness/contrast level across all the of panorama.  When you take individual photos, you often get different exposure settings on the camera.  Second, and just as important, you end up with seeing where you need to “cover” more area in order to complete the image.  No more taking a couple of dozen images only to find, when stitching them together, that you missed an area.

The 360 panorama app is currently on sale for $0.99 and is a must-have for anyone that is a heavy user of their iPhone camera.  It is super easy to use.  Choose an area to start “filming” and press the “Start Capture” button.  As you pan around and up and down, your progress is mapped out on a grid.  You can create just a part of your surroundings, or even do a full 360-degrees.  Once you finish, tap the “Done” button.  If you are in a low-light situation, the process even lets you know so that you can go more slowly in the creation of the image.

After you take the image, you are given a choice of eithe white or black background or the choice of a 360 view or a Stereographic view.  I’d suggest experimenting with both of these as they produce different results that are both interesting in their own right. 

The results come out real well, and there are several things you can do with them.  You can save the completed image to your photo library, email the full image to someone as a flat image, or email the interactive 360-degree panorama to someone.  This file, with a .360 extension is roughly the same size of the flat JPG image, but your iPhone mail app will open it in your 360 Panorama app.  This allows you to use your iPhone gyroscope to pan around in the image or, if you would rather, you can pan around with intuitive finger swipes.  You are also given the option to upload the image to either TwitPic or yFrog for posting on Twitter and are given an option to enable or disable location tagging on the image.

My only real suggestion for the app would be to allow uploads to Facebook and Picasa as well.  Facebook uploads could always be done from the Camera Roll, but having it built in would be nice. 

I am attaching the finished product from the trial photo I took from the deck of my house.  There are some “glitches” in some places, but that is due to a lot of camera movement on my part.  In order to take  the best possible images, you shouldn’t turn around or walk around with the camera, but keep the camera lens in as stationary of a position as you can and rotate it around.  With a bit of practice, you can come up with some really sharp and clear images.  If you would like to see the full 4096×1011 size image, click here.

AppShopper.com is basically an online web-based version of the app store.   While you still have to purchase the app through the official store (a convenient link will take you there), this web site not only displays the typical descriptions and screen shots, but tracks the app’s history of updates, price changes, and total sales over the prior 30-days.  But you don’t have to download iTunes and go to the App Store and fetch information any longer.  By marking an app as already purchased or adding it to your wish list, you can get notified when the app changes or the price drops.

These notifications are really what makes this web site and iPhone app that syncs with it powerful.  From the web site, you can receive them via email and/or as RSS feeds for your news reader.  In the iPh0ne app, you can get these push alerts as sounds, popup messages, and badges.  In other words, you can get this information sent to you in a number of ways.

The other really handy thing that makes this site and app great for shopping is the combination of selection criteria available for browsing the site.  As you can see in the screenshots, you can select between popular apps/games/utilities, those that have ad recent changes, those that you already own, and those that you would like to get one day.

Once you get into that selection for all new updates or just popular ones, you can choose to limit it by iPhone apps, iPad apps, Universal apps, or All apps (this is done in the settings).  Another selector lets you choose what category (or combination of categories) you want to browse, whether you want to limit it to paid apps or free apps, and whether you want all types, just updates, new apps, or price changes.  So, for example, you can select to just see iPhone games that are free due to recent price changes. With the Wish List and Purchased App selections, you can limit it by categories and sort your list by date of update, name, or ascending or descending price.

There is only one thing that I wish this iPhone app and/or web site would do that isn’t part of its current functionality.  I wish you could set alerts based on price change below a particular amount.  There are things on my wish list, for example, that are in the $7 or $15 price range.  I’m not interested in them until their price drops to at least half of that.  So I wish there was a way to say “alert me if this title drops $2.99 or below”.  There are other apps out there that do this, and this only, but it would be nice if it were incorporated into this one.

The iPhone app for AppShopper is free.  It is ad-supported, however.  The recent 1.3 version update to the app allows a one-time $0.99 purchase to remove the ads.  It also allows you to filter out foreign language apps that hit the US app store and block certain categories of apps that you may not be interested in.  That is really convenient.  And, as I recently posted on my Facebook page, the timing could not be more perfect for this app.  I’ve received a number of press releases recently telling of sales and free apps coming up next week for the celebration of Thanksgiving.  If you want to stay on top of all of the price drops on some really popular titles from major publishers, and even the titles that you may think are treasures that others consider junk, there is no better solution for that than the AppShopper web site and iPhone app.

Another nice feature of the app is that you can swipe on the screen to find similar stations. The comprehensive list by location and such is handy, but a single swipe is sure safer while driving.

While the app says that you can play streams in the background using Safari, I found that the app is fully iOS 4 aware, either by design or accident, and the streams continue to play fine as a background app on the iPhone 4. Developers are already working on some iOS 4 specific functionality, so I am really looking forward to seeing what the next release has to offer.

While I feel that the $4.99 price point is a bit high considering some of this apps competition, it is a quality app with excellent support and I’d have no problem recommending it to anyone.

Upon first launching the app, you are presented with a screen to select an existing project or create a new one from a new photo or something in your photo library.  A help option is also available and I highly recommend it so that you know what the different controls do.  You can get back to this screen by choosing the “close” button in the popup window.

For best results, I’d suggest an image that didn’t have extreme light and dark areas.  The recolorize options really work well on areas that are not of extreme contrasts.  In my sample image, I could do nothing to color either my son’s black shirt or my daughter’s white one.  Faces worked real well though.

The color picking tool works very well.  Not only can you select any color from the color spectrum, but also colors from the image itself.  This is very beneficial when you are going back and re-editing something.

My sample picture doesn’t really do the program justice, so I recommend checking out the YouTube video.  In fact, the video does such a great job of showing how to use the software that I wish the developer would actually link to it as a tutorial in the app itself.   Other suggestions that I’d like to offer is the ability email completed images to someone and/or share them on Facebook.

The only issue I had with the app is probably not app related at all, but Apple related.  There seems to be a bug in the new iOS 4 that doesn’t let you view photos in your Photo app that have been added by third-party apps like this.  I’ve reported it to Apple, but they act like I’m the only one that has ever encountered this problem.  There is a work-around though.  If you launch your Camera app and select the thumbnail in the bottom left corner, it will launch your photos and will let you share them as you normally would.

All in all, I’d give this (and have) five stars.  If I were more of an artist and saw myself using this on a regular basis, it would even make my must-have list.  For the serious artists and photographers out there though, I’d highly recommend this application.  It is well worth the $1.99 price tag.