If you are an attorney who likes to drink wine and you want to keep track of what you like, or if you just want help picking out an impressive bottle during your next dinner with a client, there are quite a few wine-related apps for the iPhone. Ben Boychuk reviews five of them for Macworld, and his review is here. His favorite for keeping track of wines that you like is Wine Pad 2, and his favorite for wine reviews and recommendations is Drync Wine. I have also seem some good reviews of the similar Cor.kz Wine Info. Both Drync Wine and Cor.kz are iPhone apps that require an Internet connection to access an online database — which for Drync Wine has over 800,000 wines, and for Cor.kz has over 530,000 wines.
Another option is to use the Hello Vino web app. Just use Safari on your iPhone to go to http://i.hellovino.com and get some help picking out a wine. This one is limited and aimed at novices, but it is free.
I haven’t spent enough time with these to make my own recommendation, but if you have any favorites, please let me know.
My experiences with the camera on my iPhone are decidedly mixed. If I am outside and have lots of light, and hold the iPhone very steady, I can sometimes get pretty good pictures. Without those conditions, the picture quality varies from just okay to quite poor. But despite this, I still take lots of pictures with my iPhone because first, it is always with me, and second, I like that it automatically geotags photos with longitude and latitude so that I can later find out where I was when I took a picture. For example, my wife and I are anything but gamblers, but we were in Las Vegas with friends earlier this year and I was lucky enough to hit a jackpot — 4,345 times my bet! Before you get too excited, I should disclose that I was only playing a penny slot machine (did I mention we are not big gamblers?), so we are only talking about $43.45. But it was still a fun moment, and I was glad to be able to capture it with my iPhone:
I have been thinking about the iPhone as a camera because I ran across interesting pair of posts on Gizmodo. First, one person was upset about the quality of the pictures that he took with an iPhone when he had the front row at a Bruce Springsteen concert. But as the author points out, he wasn’t allowed to use a real camera at the concert, so in my mind the iPhone pictures still serve as nice memories that wouldn’t exist but for the iPhone, even though the quality is limited.
The second post on Gizmodo points out that, in the right conditions, you can actually get some good pictures on the iPhone. And what I love about that post is this link to 100 amazing iPhone photos at the website Photocritic. Quite a few of these pictures are stunning.
Flickr has an interesting search by camera feature that allows you to search for photographs based on the camera that was used to take the picture. So you can click here to search pictures taken with an iPhone. And some of them are rather interesting, such as this one, this one and this one with some colorful balls. And thanks to geotags, I was able to learn that the picture with the balls was taken in Mandeville, Louisiana — which is not too far from where I live.
The iPhone will never compete with my Nikon D50, but a surprising number of photos on my computer were taken with my iPhone. Because sometimes, you find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you are happy to have that iPhone camera to take pictures like this one.
