Get In My iPhone

What could possibly be cooler–at a trade show or swap meet–than processing credit card payments via your iPhone or iPod Touch?  Engadget reports that a company called Square is developing just such a solution–with a magstripe reader that plugs into the headphone jack, yep the headphone jack, of the iPhone. It’ll even capture signatures that look like they were written with those fat preschool crayons.

Forget about battery life and brightness for a moment and think about how helpful (or just plain cool) it would be to have a video projector built-in to your iPhone or iPod.  According to Digitimes, a pretty reputable tech manufacturing rag, Apple has commissioned Foxconn (one of the companies responsible for making current iPods and iPhones) to develop the technology to do just such a thing.  According to the quoted source,  projector-enabled sets will be available for the end of 2009.  Almost makes you wish you hadn’t re-upped with AT&T to get that 3gS doesn’t it?

Seriously — with some blockbuster movies weighing it at close to three hours, and a few hundred ounces of Coke or Mountain Dew coursing through your kidneys — it’s nearly impossible to get through a flick without taking a leak. Thankfully, the good-natured software developer Dan Florio, has solved this problem with an iPhone app called RunPee.  The app contains a chronological log of all scenes in new movies, along with cue lines to listen for so you know when to make your exit and bolt for the bathroom.

Lest you lose track of that one-of-a-kind Simpsons collectable you’ve been eyeballing, eBay’s iPhone app might just be worth your while.  Here’s eBay’s description of the new version of eBay for the iPhone:

eBay Mobile… Now eBay buyers and sellers have The World’s Online Marketplace at their fingertips, wherever they go. The new eBay application for the iPhone is specially designed to run natively on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Using a streamlined interface that’s as elegant as it is practical, eBay members can search, bid, and check their activity on the go. Buyers can sneak in that last-minute bid on a hard-to-find item, sellers can check on their sales, and everyone can act on time-sensitive information on the spot without a computer. eBay is now open for business anytime, anywhere on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

Those of us who recall the glory days of electronic gaming hold a special place in our hearts for pinball machine tables, and it was only a matter of time before pinball sims started showing up on the iPhone. Oddly enough, some of them are curiously unlike the old mechanical machines that had their hayday in the seventies and early eighties.

The best of the iPhone bunch, however, is a straight-up table simulation called Wild West Pinball. This game serves up a delightful pinball experience, themed with elements of the old west, like a goldmine jackpot, a bank robbery jackpot, and a cute mini-game where you get to “shoot Dirty Harry” with the ball when it hits a mission activator on one side of the table.  This game is stupidly addictive, and I’ve no doubt that, along with its fairly liberal tilt feature, it’s the best free game on the iPhone. 

Pinball Dreaming, on the other hand, is a direct, authentic port of the slower, less-realistic classic Amiga game Pinball Dreams.  There’s a touch of the nostalgic in this game, too, but unlike Wild West Pinball, the Pinball Dreams game’s nostalgia comes from the nifty old-school Amiga music and 2D, vertical-scrolling pinball table, a trademark of Amiga pinball sims back in the early nineties. The paid version of this game includes the four original pinball tables included with Pinball Dreams.

We also took a look at Smallball Pinball, which is sort of a hybrid between a pinball sim and a puzzle game, though we found this implementation a bit frustrating.  It doesn’t feel like Arkanoid, and it doesn’t feel like pinball.  As you advance through the levels, the biggest motivator is not losing your ball and retreating the previous level.  So there’s not a hugely compelling reason to keep playing. That and the physics–which are neither like Breakout nor like a pinball table.

For our money, Wild West is the best pinball sim for the iPhone.