Instead of wasting your time going through the hassle of hacking up the iPad version of the Netflix app to work on the iPhone/iPod Touch you can now just head over to the 
and download the app yourself. Netflix has officially released the Netflix app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This will allow you to stream TV Shows and Movies over both Wifi and 3G! It obviously requires a Netflix account, but it doesn't cost any extra money to stream to your iOS device.
If you haven't heard of ShopKick yet, don't worry it just launched today, but I have a feeling you'll be hearing about it a lot more in the coming months. Basically what it is is a location based reward program where you get points for going to certain places and doing certain things (mostly scanning items). If it sounds a lot like Foursquare, that's because it is, but with one huge difference, you don't check in at places. The participating locations have a device installed near the doors that emits a sound that we can't hear, but the iPhone can, so when you enter the store with the app open it will automatically "check you in" and award you the points for visiting the store. Once inside the store there are other ways to gain points, like scanning different products. I'm not sure what their plan is for other ways to gain points, but at the moment it looked like scanning was the only way (at least at Best Buy). And the point of all this is that once you gain enough points you can redeem them for different rewards, whether it's credits on facebook or gift cards to different stores. There are a handful of options right now and I'm sure that will grow in the future. So that's the gist of the service itself now let's talk about my experience with it today.
Chicago happens to be one of the markets were the devices have been placed in Best Buy stores around the area. Today was the first day that the service has been activated along with the app becoming available in the App Store this morning. It just so happens that we venture out to Best Buy every Tuesday during lunch to check out the new releases and kill some time away from the office, so it was a perfect chance to test out ShopKick and see what it's all about.
The app itself is very pretty, the graphics look nice and it works as you would expect it to. It finds your location and finds different stores in the area that you can either check in to the normal way and gain "non-reward" points that basically just level you up in the game (kind of like MyTown), as well as stores that are participating that you can go to and get points for walking in the door and scanning stuff. With app in hand we made our way over to Best Buy to try it out.
As we approached the front doors I launched the app as I wasn't sure if the app needed to be running in the foreground (I'm pretty sure it does) to pick up the sound that the in-store device is emitting. The phone didn't register the sound at the exact moment we walked in, but it picked it up while we were still close to the front of the store. My co-worker also signed up as we were in the store and the first time he launched it after verifying his account, it picked up that we were in the store and automatically awarded him the 75 points. So it seems like you don't have to remember as you walk into the store as long as you launch the app at some point during your visit, and if you're going to be scanning stuff you'll have it open anyways.
Now let's talk about the scanning of products to get bonus points. For Best Buy there were 5 featured items that you could find in the store and scan for bonus points. I only went through and found 2 of them because I didn't really feel like rummaging through the store with my phone out looking like a jackass... And actually that's kind of what I felt like as I was grabbing a Blu-Ray of The Bank Job and scanning the UPC with my phone. Ok, actually the Blu-Ray wasn't terrible, but I did feel awkward as I grabbed a box for a set of computer speakers and flipped it around to scan the UPC. So while I found the scanning to be a little weird, it definitely makes you walk around the store and look at stuff you wouldn't normally look at.
So the App itself works very well for everything that it is supposed to and I managed to rack up almost 200 points in one visit to Best Buy today. I'm still a little foggy on how many points I'm going to have to get in order to redeem them for a decent size gift card. The app says the Best Buy Gift Card is 500+ points and denominations start at $2, so that would lead me to believe that it's 500 points for $2... so while it's not the greatest reward I'm not spending money on anything so it's basically money for free. So we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks after it's been out for a bit and if there are any changes I'll let you know, but as of right now I'll continue using the service to see how many points I can build up and see if it's actually worth the time.
If you don't know what Ping Chat is, it's a messaging program made by the guys at Enflick that was released for the iPhone with the goal of replicating the features of the Blackberry Messenger program. Basically it's a text messaging client that uses your internet connection to send texts, basically allowing you to text Ping users for free without using a text message plan from your carrier. Basically it's a form if Instant Messaging. It was pretty basic when it first came out, but with the 2.0 release they added a bunch of cool features like group chats, picture/video/contacts/location/etc sending, a notification of when the other person reads the text (like BBM) and more. Shortly after the original coder released it, it was bought up by a larger company that was able to focus more time and resources on it so they could make it better, and that they did.
As of yesterday there are now clients on the iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones and all of them can communicate with each other. This is pretty cool actually because I can now cancel my texting plan and save some money each month. It's nice for me because the few people I text often are now on Ping so even with the occasional normal texts that I receive/send, the $.10 that I'm charged won't add up to even the lowest texting plan each month, which equals money in my pocket.
Personally I've been a fan of this app since the very first release and with it being acquired by a larger company the improvements have been incredible. And the best part of the whole thing is that the app itself is 100% FREE! on all platforms. So there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to convince your friends to download it and start using it.
It's available in the Apple Appstore and the Android Marketplace and to get the Blackberry version just head on over to http://pingchat.com/blackberry from your phone, but make sure that your browser settings are set to Browser Identification: Blackberry. We ran into some problems yesterday with my girlfriends phone because it was set to Firefox so the webpage didn't recognize it as being a Blackberry and wouldn't start the download. Thanks to the developers for responding quickly (via ping) to help me sort it out. And if you don't have any friends on ping and you wanna give it a test run, you can reach me at: treding .
iPhone: PingChat! 2 - Enflick, Inc.
Android: Find in Android Marketplace
Blackberry: http://www.pingchat.com/blackberry (go to from device)
By now I'm sure most of you know that there is a pretty sweet Netflix app out for the iPad, but currently there is no option for the iPhone. Sure, the official app is supposed to come out at the "end of the summer" (or something like that) according to Netflix, but I'm impatient and couldn't wait. So if you're like me and you can't wait and you've got a jailbroken iPhone, here's what you can do to get in on the fun a bit early, and yes you still need a Netflix account for this to work.
*Note: If you haven't jailbroken your phone, simply open safari (on the phone of course) and go to www.jailbreakme.com, then slide to jailbreak... that's it.
I can't take credit for these instructions as they have been posted a million places by now, but I figured one more place can't hurt. Plus I did it all last night it about 10 minutes and it works great.
It's not the most glamorous method, but it works and despite there being 14 steps they are pretty simple and I tried to make them as easy to understand as I could. I know I ran into some vague instructions last night when doing it myself so I wanted to make sure other people weren't having the same issues. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to help if I can.
Update: For those of you that are curious as to how much data this is going to eat up I just ran a test and it looks like 5 minutes of streaming equates to about 17 megs. I believe this is one of the movies that is in HD as well, so it may be slightly less for a normal SD movie, but this should give you a rough idea of how much data you're looking at. So for a 90 minute movie you're looking at roughly 300 megs, so watch your data usage if you plan on using this over 3G without an unlimited plan.
Update (8/26/10): The Netflix App has been officially released in the App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch! Read More Here
Ok, not really any Apple Device, but it's an amazing resource if you're looking for instructions on how to jailbreak a certain device running a certain baseband/boot loader.
http://www.jailbreakmatrix.com
Aside from the site above you can now just visit http://jailbreakme.com from your device and it will automatically jailbreak it for you. I've read some reports of facetime and mms having issues, but I'm not sure what the whole deal is. So beware if you go this route, personally I'm going to wait a little bit before giving it a shot, but if you have an older device (not the iPhone 4) I don't think there are any issues and you should be good (aside from an issue I read about with the iPad on 3.2.1).
