The Verizon LG En-V and LG En-V Touch models are the only two feature-phones (not smart-phones) that I have ever been proud of. Who hasn’t seen one of these things, in fact I still see them in use daily. The weird thing about them was that they were surprisingly faster at doing things then our smart-phones. The branding EnV was also really effective, it almost reminded me of what Apple did with the iPod brand. Now that Android and LG are making products together, LG more or less has to redefine what consumers, who don’t want a smartphone, should be using. If LG brought back the EnV brand and gave it a usable flavor of Android, I could see this brand really raking tons of new customers for Verizon and LG.

And please don’t point me to those poor excuses for phones known as the LG Optimus Series. They look terrible and are too slow. 

The Smart Cover is a really intuitive cover, I mean I love that it can easily snap on, instantly turns on the display when you open it, and the folding mechanism is just genius but the aluminum back is anodized which is said to be really strong against scratches and dings but if you looked at the back of my iPad there are plenty of black lines that I had before purchasing the Apple case. Wow that was not the longest sentence ever. The colors are so fun, but if it were up to me I would still chose the previous generation of iPad’s case. It covers the whole body and it still maintains some of the iPad’s beauty. On occasion I will take the case off to caress the cold aluminum curves. 

You can not say this graphic design didn’t steal a page from Amazon’s Kindle’s book. Hahaha puny. 

Reeder 8/10

High score I know but I owe this app some major love seeing how it has added hours to my day that were usually spent surfing through websites and getting updated. Google Reader is an RSS reader that is synced to a Gmail account. I find it to be one of the most unattractive Google products ever made but the concept, caching stories and displaying them ad-free, is really clever. 

Reeder is a beautiful app. The colors are really organic looking and the whole design is very streamlined. I found it very clever that they used the status bar space to quickly notify that the app was downloading articles. Little design touches mean a lot to me. Caching articles can take at least 30 seconds but it is way better than loading up the internet page. When you open the unread tab, all the articles you have not read are listed by date. You can share articles through a variety of services and star articles through Google reader. 

Not having flash is a bit of a bummer, I usually end up reading 10 or 20 articles on the Mac version of reeder, but that is not Reeder’s fault. No universal app support is disappointing. Also not being able to search and add feeds on the go puts Reeder way behind competitors offerings in the AppStore. The key here is that it is simply a pleasure to navigate, read, and quickly get updated anywhere you go. It seriously saves me hours everyday. I really recommend this app to any blog junkies. 

Download Reeder for $2.99 on iTunes.

Noteshelf 6/10

Taking notes on the iPad for classes has always been kind of tricky to me. There is Pages by Apple that lets you do rich text editing but for people like me that have to handwrite things out to learn, it is kind of a waste of time. Then there are apps like Penultimate, that have wrist protection but the lines are so hard to write on, your fingers will cripple with arthritis. Then there are zoom writing apps such as Note Taker HD that give you a zoomed in keyboard to handwrite on. All are great but all have their weaknesses. Then I found a gem in the AppStore called Noteshelf which blends the sharpness of Pages, the perfect zoom keyboard of Note Taker HD, and the simplicity of Penultimate, all together. 

To start taking notes you have to create a new notebook. Noteshelf comes with a variety of notebooks to choose from. There are basic yellow pads to guitar tab sheets to Cornell styled books. The selection of notebooks is just about perfect for any task you are currently taking on.

The design is pretty smooth but I have to admit that orange wood throws me off a little, there is another theme option that is a weird beige color. The toolkit on the top couldn’t be more simple. There are a series of drawers with different colored pens, erasers, stamps, and one filled with your iPad’s album photos. The zoom handwrite keyboard works so well. The scale can be altered anyway you like it. It can get a little finicky when you swap pages or change the line height but it usually does play nice. Wrist protection is also here so you are able to lay your wrists on the screen and not activate the touchscreen. Exporting was actually kind of disappointing because the images definitely lose that sharpness they have in editing mode and the exported images don’t have the lines that you wrote on, just what ever you wrote. There are plenty of places to upload your notes such as Evernote and Dropbox. 

Do you want to take notes on your iPad? Well I wanted to give it a shot because the idea of always having them with me is very intriguing and I did find myself looking back at the notes from time to time. Emailing notes is also such a simple way of sharing your notes with a friend that may have missed a lecture. I did have at least 2 app crashes in my 7 days of playing with the app which were both heartbreaking times to lose my notes completely. I wish there was some kind of autosave feature but I do suggest closing your notebook after 10 minutes of use just to make sure the notes are safe. 

This app is worth giving a shot, it is definitely the most intuitive way to take notes and I find it really engaging and fun (changing pen colors, adding photos from Safari, etc.) The reason I give it a 6 though is that the saving should be more solid, losing my notes was not a fun experience but it didn’t happen more than twice so Noteshelf I am not too mad :). 

Download Noteshelf for $4.99 on iTunes.

FitFu 7/10

Do you ever sit on the couch, and feel as if you should be exercising instead of being so lazy? Well that’s me all the time, usually lounging with my iPhone. When I first discovered FitFu I assumed it was going to be rubbish, I’ve tried a plethora of accelerometer based work out apps and none of them would calibrate right and usually displayed data all wrong. But let me reassure you, FitFu is the first work out app I’ve tried that has got the accelerometer perfect. 

The exercises are basic things you could do with out an iPhone (So I could see the $2.00 price tag being decreased to a dollar) but the big innovation I see here is the social networking part of the app and the unlock-able features. The social side works just like Facebook, basically keeping up with friends and making sure they work out. The unlock-able part keeps things fresh. Every time you work out you get points toward a new exercise just like in Wii Fit.

The app can get a bit finicky at times. Sometimes the count will start blurting out tons of numbers when the phone for instance gets a text message. The exercise won’t even begin until you stop squirming which it yells at you over and over again. It can get a little bit annoying. Also it only supports iOS devices with 256 Ram or higher, which was a disappointment seeing my whole family owns iPhone 3Gs.

Overall I really enjoy the app, it is really good for keeping you involved with basic exercises on the go at all times. It is also really nice having the app to keep count while you listen to music. 

Download FitFu  for $1.99 on iTunes.