STEWIE SOUND-BOARD [TOUCHPAD] – REVIEW (65%)

Stewie Sound-board is released by Fouad Chikh.

“WARNING : May contain explicit language . Stewie Griffin gets his own soundboard. Hilarious clips of Stewie from the Family Guy animated tv series. Lots of Fun.”

This application turns your Touchpad into a Stewie Sound board.

If you are a fan of the family guy cartoon, then you can replay some of Stewie’s most famous lines. Some of the sound clips are short and just reply the text shown on the button, others are full length audio clips for the complete scene it was said.

At present, the application offers 38 sound clips, so the price per clip is reasonable.

To clips have clearly been taken from the cartoon directly, so you can sometimes pick up editing and the sound quality on some clips are not perferct, but each of the clips is reasonable or better quality.

The user interface is pretty basic, with the buttons for the sound clips and a image of Stewie behind them. There are no options, preferences etc.

On the upside:

• Simple to use sound-board.

On the downside:.

• Only 38 sounds.
• Some of the sound are not the highest quality recording.

Overall, for fans of Family Guy and especially Stewie will find some fun here, however, it will get pretty old after listening a few times and showing friends. For a sound board you just about get what you paid for.

Rating: 65%

Size: 54.8 MB

Price (at time of review): £0.79 ($0.99)

Link: Stewie Sound-board – Fouad Chikh

 

BOOKMARKED [TOUCHPAD] – REVIEW (68%)

bookMarked is a internet browsing tool released by Webdata Design Group.

“bookMarked – Manage your favorite webpages with ease! – Home Page – Categorized bookmarks – Web view Tabs This app was designed for those who like to have quick and easy access to their favorite websites. Open up to 4 web views without leaving the app!”

When you open the app it is preloaded with a selection of categories each populated with big name sites in their own categories, such as social, sport and news.

You can add new book marks by visiting a website and the clicking the paperclip. This will allow you to add the bookmark and the category that it will belong to (or add a new one)

You can also star a website, setting the website as your home page etc time the application loads.

bookMarked uses a two column view, with the catagories and links on the left hand side, and then the browser window in the large window to the right. You can change this into a full page display for the browser window.

There is a useful help section and full instructions for the application

I feel this application is very much for people who are new to the web, who want to easily bookmark page and see their favorite sites.

The user interface is good. The application is easy to use and allows you to quickly navigate to the next website you wish to look at.

My biggest issue with the application is the time that some pages take to load, I have a massively fast internet speed and I am use to pages loading within one or two seconds maximum, so when I am waiting 15 to 20 seconds for a simple page to load it is very noticable. It is hard to tell which the loading can be so slow, as sometimes the pages do load at almost normal speeds (especially when cached).

On the upside:

• Good User Interface.
• Easy to add a new bookmark.

On the downside:

• Very slow to load pages at times.
• You have to remember what is on each of the tabs.
• Annoying start up sound.

Overall, this is an interesting application, that in the first days of the Touchpad would have had a place. It does have a good feature list of functions, it just needed to go them a little better. For tab browsing I use Advance Browser and for book marking I use Touch Surf. If bookMarked was quicker and tweaked I may use it but not as it stands. 

Rating: 68%

Size: 3.4 MB

Price (at time of review): £0.79 ($0.99)

Link: bookMarked – Webdata Design Group

 

BLANK MAPS (COLD SPECKS) – S.O.T.W. – REVIEW (70%)

Blanks Maps by Cold Specks is this weeks free single of the week.

This song is a good release from iTunes.

Apple has this marked as an alternative track.

The music track is more acostic in nature with guitar and backing singing, then picks ups a little in pace as the song progresses adding more tune.

The well song is sung by the female singer, her lyrics are very clear.

Overall, this is a nice song to listen to, but lacks any real catchness. The song washes over you and do not grab you in any way. More of an easy listening track than a chart topper.

Rating: 70%

Price (at time of review): Free

Link: Blank Maps – Single – Cold Specks

 

QUICK-KEYS KEYBOARD [TOUCHPAD] – REVIEW (63%)

Quick-Keys Keyboard is a text expander / entry tool released by D Gardner.

“Quick-Keys Keyboard interacts with virtually every app on your WebOS device. You can type one word and send it to any text field on your device. Or With one simple tap of a Quick-Key, You have Quick-Keys that stores anything like a Password, Login, Email, sentence, phone number, or an Address.”

This application allows you to create quick keys and other text expansion on your webOS device.

As a quick warning, the developer does make it clear that the Touchpad does lack functionality that the phone users get, and has issues in the browser application.

The application works by addition a keyboard to your device. There is a standard keyboard and then a quick keyboard with numbers from 1 to 28.

On the Touchpad the standard keyboard is a bit too small for effective typing, but the quick keys are reasonable, as you will be only tapping a single key.

When you first open the application you will set up the preferences for its use and you can edit any of the quick keys, for example, if I tap 1, I have a sizable amount of text appear, if I tap 2, as password could be entered.

When I first came to use the application the keyboard would not appear at all, I would tap on the notification keyboard icon and only the application with its preferences would appear. I rebooted the Touchpad in the end and when I reopened the application after the reboot, and re-enabled the keyboard it worked fine.

After trying to type with the small keyboard offered, I found swipe to type just too small to use effectly, even when changing the response times. I just needed a bigger keyboard.

The quick keys option did work well, and helpfully it does include the user of carriage returns, so you can have limited control over the formatting on the quick text. Allowing for entry of addresses etc.

The user interface is small and cramped. It is a real shame that the Touchpad keyboard could not be replaced or the Keyboard could not make a little more use of the Touchpad screen size, however, these are likely to be limitations due to webOS.

On the upside:

• Quick Keyboard entry is useful.
• Lots of preferences and options.

On the downside:.

• I found it difficult to get it to launch for the first time, it would always return to options screen.
• Keyboard is too small to type effectively.
• Not very user friendly at times.

Overall, the idea behind the application is good, and seems to work better on the Phone than the Touchpad as it is not able to replace the Touchpad keyboard. For me, only the quick key text entry was useful. The small keyboard you can bring up is too small to use effectly. At present, it is worth a look for webOS phone owners, but for Touchpad owners it is not as worthwhile.

Rating: 63%

Size: 8.9 MB

Price (at time of review): £0.79 ($0.99)

Link: Quick-Keys Keyboard – D Gardner

 

UBERRADIO [TOUCHPAD] – REVIEW (71%)

UberRadio makes your Touchpad into a radio alarm clock and is released by MetaViewSoft.

“Now Pre3 and TouchPad (HD) enhanced and extra alarm settings for each weekday. A full-featured internet streaming radio with sleep, snooze & alarm clock! Never oversleep with offline fallback and safe alarm mode. UberRadio – the next generation web radio application.”

When this application first opens it immediately offers you a list of default radio types to select from. These are:

• German Stations
• US Classic Stations
• UK Rock Stations
• US Country Stations
• UK Stations

Once select you will get around twenty stations in your channel list. You can view the list and modify if there are some channels you like or dislike. If you know the website addresses of your favorite channels they can be added.

The application has several preferences and allows you to set up extras to the alarm if you are oversleeping and a default song if the internet connection is unavailable to launch the radio channel.

You can use UberRadio as an internet radio player, and you can set a sleep timer if you are listening before bed.

The internet radio side of things works well, but it did suffer from the occasional halting of the feed, this seemed odd as I have a good internet connection and when tested on another device the same stream held.

The user interface is generally good, it can be slow to find a channel if you set up too many, but you can sort into ones you use more. I could easily set the alarms, but you can only seem to clear alarms in one go from the preference screen.

On the upside:

• Easy to set up with default radio channels.
• Can modify channels if you know the web links to enter.

On the downside:

• The streams seem to stop every so often, I have not had this issue with other applications.
• The only clock on screen once the alarms are set is the standard toolbar clock.
• Not available in Exhibition mode?
• No quick way to get out of the station list, need to scroll to the end and press OK.

Overall, this is a good application. It allows you to quickly set up the radio channels and alarms. It does most of the functions of an alarm clock, apart from a sizable clock. With some tweaks this could be a great radio alarm for the Touchpad.

Rating: 71%

Size: 3.2 MB

Price (at time of review): £1.19 ($1.49)

Link: UberRadio – MetaViewSoft