Once I saw what the Arrived app did I was very interested but not really for the reasons they made the app. Arrived is a location based app that texts or e-mails friends when you have arrived at a certain place. What makes this different is that you have to set up the place in the app and then who you want to know you are there. Once you set it up (until you change it) it will text or e-mail these friends every time you go to this place. The idea is to invite friends to hang out without having to think about sending them a message. This however is not why I got excited about it.

The idea of Arrived is interesting but what I wanted to use it for is to let me wife know when I went to certain stores. This is happened more than once in my house where I go to Wal-Mart or some store during the day only to get home and have my wife tell me she wished she’d known I was going there. To solve this problem I thought I would use this app to alert my wife when I go to certain stores. The one downside to this is the text isn’t sent right away. I’m sure this app checks every 15 minutes or so to see if you are at one of the locations and then sends an alert. The problem is by the time my wife gets it and text me back I’ve been gone for awhile. This isn’t necessary a faulty app problem but more likely the way it was setup. If it constantly checked where you were it would drain your battery.

This app does have some issues that are the app’s problem. The interface is clunky. It took me awhile to figure out how to delete someone from a location or how to delete a location. If you want to add someone to a location and you already have it setup for other people, then you have to add everyone again. However I think one of the biggest problems is there is no way to setup how to notify the person you are there. Take my wife for example, I have three numbers and two emails for her. With this app I have no way of saying to text her to this number or don’t text her but e-mail her. I contacted the Arrived people about this issue and they said it was something that they would look into.

I think this is a great idea and could become a great app but it needs some work before it’s ready for primetime. It is free though and worth checking out and watching for updates. If they could get the bugs worked out and get a better response time from when you arrived to when the text goes out I think this could be a must have app.

Arrived’s Website

iTunes Store

If you like the Charlie Brown Christmas special then this app is a must have. The app is a book of the story we know and love, Charlie Brown finding the true meaning of Christmas. The app is very well done and includes the voices for the original cartoon. Also it is narrated by Peter Robbins who is the original voice of Charlie Brown. To go along with the story you can play Schroeder’s piano and finger paint with the gang and more. I bought this app when it was $5.99 and thought it was worth it but now it’s only $.99. For that price it’s a must have for everyone that loves Christmas or Peanuts.

Magic Santa has one purpose and that is to make a special video message from Santa. The app will ask you several questions like the persons name, age, is they are a boy or girl, if they have been naughty or nice and a few others. It will also ask for a picture of that person and a picture of a special person in their life. The ones I’ve made have been for our kids and one of the things it says is that they were asked to listen to the parents. It then shows a picture of us during that time. One thing on the name is they try to say the name during the video and have several canned names for you to pick from. I’m not sure what it does if the person you are making the card for name is not on the list. The app is free and so are the videos. This close to Christmas this is a fun app to play around with and give someone a special message from Santa.

iTunes Store

I meant to review these next several apps last week but let’s get to them now. The first one is an iPhone app the Portable North Pole. The app has several sections likes Santa’s Videos, where Santa answers some popular questions like how reindeer can fly, Santa’s Radar so you can track Santa, Countdown shows you how many days are left until Christmas and has special message from Santa and Wishlist. In the wishlist section you can make serval wishlist for different people. This section can come in real handy for keeping up with what kids want for Christmas. Not only can you type in what they want but you can record audio and take a picture. The audio and picture are a nice touch to make sure you get the exact right thing.

Then there is the parent section, in the section you create a special message from Santa. You will need a picture and some information like child’s age and what they want for Christmas. You can also choose to have them on the naughty list or the nice list. After the video is made you can download it to your phone or e-mail a link to someone to watch on the internet. My 4 year old loves watching the video and has watched it everyday for the past week.

While this app is nice it comes up short in many ways. Most videos you can turn your phone into landscape mode and watch them however the video you make from Santa you can not. Also the app is $2.99 and with that they allow you to download three videos but after that you have to pay. This is pretty lame. I could understand if the app was free but for $3 you should be able to make as many videos as you like. There are other apps that allow you to do this including one I will review shortly, Magic Santa. For $3 I would probably find another app but if you do download this one, your kids would enjoy watching the videos.

iTunes Store

I first heard about the Up by Jawbone several weeks ago on a podcast. When I heard about it I was very interested. The Up is a bracelet that tracks how many steps you take in a day, how much you sleep and how much of that sleep is a deep sleep or a shallow sleep. Now how it does all of this I’m not sure. The Up also can be used as an alarm but in a different way. You set what time you want to wake up and the Up will vibrate to wake you around that time. Now it doesn’t vibrate exactly at that time because it tries to wake you up when you are in a shallow sleep.

You might be wondering by now what this has to do with Apple or an iPhone. The Up plugs into the headphone jack of an iPod or iPhone and syncs with an app. This app then shows how all of your stats. The Up runs off a rechargeable battery which they say can last up to 10 days. The best part about the Up is if you can find one you can get it for free. The Up cost $99.99 but Jawbone has had problems with it and to show how much they want to stand behind their products they are offering a “no questions asked refund”. You get the refund and get to keep the Up, how cool is that? The problem is finding them. Amazon no longer sell them (expect for reseller who have marked them up), Best Buy has pulled them from the selves, leaving Target as the only place I could find them. Which isn’t going to change because Jawbone has stopped shipping them. They will be coming back out but I’m sure it will be after the new year.

I have three Targets near me and I went to all three and found several smalls, one medium and no larges. The large is what I need but I did go ahead and buy the medium because I was it looked like it might fit. After trying it on it does fit but is a little tighter than I would like. Here’s a picture from Jawbone’s website telling you how to measure to see the size you would need.

If you decide to try and get one good luck finding them. Below I’m including the letter from Jawbone’s CEO Hosain Rahman, a link to get a refund, and a link to the Up website.

To the UP community:

Earlier this year, we unveiled Jawbone’s vision to help people live a healthier life with UP. We’ve been thrilled by the passionate response to this product. We heard from tens of thousands of you through emails, tweets, blog posts and on our forums about how you’re changing your lifestyle and becoming consumers of your own health. In just four weeks, UP users have collectively taken over three billion steps, gotten more than 300 years of sleep and captured hundreds of thousands of meals.

While many of you continue to enjoy the UP experience, we know that some of you have experienced issues with your UP band. Given our commitment to delivering the highest quality products, this is unacceptable and you have our deepest apologies. We’ve been working around the clock to identify the root causes and we’d like to thank everyone who has provided us with information and returned their bands to us for troubleshooting. With your help, we’ve found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands. We’re also fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware. Typically, these issues surface within the first seven to ten days of use. The glitches are purely performance related and do not pose any safety risk.

We’ve also received helpful feedback on the application experience, including bug reports, ways to make signup and finding friends easier, user interface suggestions and new feature requests. Your comments are invaluable as we continue to improve, so please keep them coming and check back frequently for updates to ensure you’re always enjoying the latest features and enhancements.

We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action:

The UP No Questions Asked Guarantee

This means that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, you can receive a full refund for UP. This is true even if you decide to keep your UP band. We are so committed to this product that we’re offering you the option of using it for free.

The program starts December 9th and full details can be found at http://jawbone.com/uprefund.

For most of you, this program is simply meant to offer peace of mind. Please continue to enjoy your UP band and keep sharing your experience with us. If you encounter any problems with your UP band, contact Jawbone directly for your choice of a replacement and/or refund under this program. It’s that simple.

Jawbone remains deeply committed to addressing all issues with UP, investing in the category and giving our customers the tools to live a healthier life. We’ve temporarily paused production of UP bands and will begin taking new orders once these issues have been sorted out. In the meantime, we’ll continue to release app updates for existing users.

We regret any disappointment we’ve created for our community of users and appreciate the trust you’ve put in us. The fact that you’ve taken the time to talk with us and help us make a better product is simply phenomenal. Our customers have always been part of our team and we’re incredibly grateful for that.

Please know that we’re doing – and will continue to do – everything we can to make things right. This is just the beginning for UP and we are excited to keep improving until we realize the powerful vision of what this category can be.

If there is absolutely anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Hosain Rahman
CEO
Jawbone

Up Website

Refund

Ever wish you could easily put pictures and birthdays on your phone contacts? If so MyPhone+ is that app that you need to see. MyPhone+ matches the names of your Facebook friends with the contacts on your phone and when it matches them it then imports pictures, birthdays, and e-mails. The first time I did this it matched most of my contacts but there was also a list of conflicts. These might be names that are slightly different than on Facebook so the app pulls them out to make you confirm that they are the same person.

After running the app all of your contact that were matched up will then show up with their Facebook profile picture. To update the pictures you have to run the app again. The other big part of this app is birthdays. This app will also pull in birthdays from your Facebook friends. If you allow notifications you get an alert when it’s someone’s birthday.

This app is a pretty simple app but it does a good job. The syncing process only takes a couple of seconds even on 3G. It’s .99 in the app store and if you like to have your contacts updated then it’s worth it.

iTunes Store

We finally got our annual dashboard update this week and to my surprise we also got our very first Xbox LIVE app put out by Microsoft. Now there have been apps that allowed you to see who was online and send messages for awhile but nothing from Microsoft, until now.

The app does many of the basic things that you would think that it should like see who’s online playing, check messages, and send messages. You can also see your achievements and compare them to your friends. While doing this you will notice unlike other apps this app shows your avatar with motion much like the dashboard. There are also videos from the dashboard that you can watch. Most of this stuff has been done before by third party apps, the main thing this app does that others didn’t is allow you to customize your avatar. Just like from the dashboard you can dress your avatar or change their appearance all together.

Overall I like the app and it will replace what I was using to do the same thing. There are somethings this app doesn’t have that I wish they would of included like being able to schedule downloads of demos or being able to purchase games and have them download when you start your Xbox up. These are some of the things you can do these things from the xbox.com. Something I would love for them to do is to have the ability to join a Xbox party from your phone. This is something that they should be able to do and would take the social part of gaming to the next level. Maybe that’s something that will come out in a later update. For now the app is free and if you own an Xbox it’s something you should have.

iTunes Store

Stupid Zombies is a physics game in which you have to kill all the zombies on the screen with a certain amount of bullets. It starts off very easy but after a few levels you need to plan out how to take the zombies out. Some of it is skill and there’s a little luck to getting all three stars. Some of the early levels you can shoot the zombies directly but later on you have to blow up red cans or use similar type things to get the job done. The few the bullets you use the more stars you get, much like any other game in this genre. The graphic are ok but not great. However it clear that’s the style the designer was going after. The game works fine and is pretty fun if you like this type of game. You get one free pass called an Air Strike if you can’t pass a board and then you can buy more in the store. It’s .99 for 5 Air Strikes all the way up to $3.99 for 100. I believe this is a paid app but it’s been free for some time now. It’s worth picking up and checking out.

iTunes Store

If you have kids in a school that uses Process Portal then you want to check this app out. Process Portal is a website where you can go and see you kids assignments and grades. It’s really a nice site if the teachers at your school keeps it updated. Well now there is an app as well. With the app you can check on most things you would use the website to do. It’s not a fancy design but one that works well. There are six sections in the app: Daily Planner, Assignments, Attendance, Grades, Schedule, and Settings.

The Daily Planner shows your kid’s schedule for the day. In my case my high schooler has four classes and when I click on a class it gives me all kinds of information about that class. I get the teacher’s name, his or her e-mail address, location of the class, and a quick glance at what the assignments are, grades, and attendance. This is good for kind of an overall quick look at that class.

The Assignments sections shows all of the assignments for every class. In the Daily Planner you would have to look for every class and you would only see the latest assignments for that class. However in this section all of the assignments for all of the classes shows up in one location. At the far right of each assignment it also shows the grade for each assignment. By clicking on an assignment you see what the total amount of points where, the day it was assigned and when it was due.

Attendance is pretty simple, it shows you how many times your kid was absent and if they have it down as an excused or unexcused absents. The Grades section shows you all the grades for the year. You can look by quarter to get an overview or reminder of what their grades were and you can dig down more and see all of the grades for each assignment. The Schedule section is pretty much the same as the Dailey Planner section with the exception that you can look ahead to what the schedule will be in the future. For example my high schooler has four classes the first two quarters and four different classes the last two quarters. I could look and see what classes she has the last two quarters, along with who the teachers are and their e-mail.

The app works well and like I said if you have a kid in a school that uses Process Portal then you should pick this app up. One thing that I learned is there is a difference between a student login and a parent login. The information is the same but if you have two kids in school and use the student login then you have to log out and back in to change students. Also with a student login you get an ID that you can’t change and it’s a long number. However with a parents ID you can pick your login and all of your students information is there under one login. There is a button in the top right that allows you to pick what students info you want to see. This is very helpful. Of course it’s only your kids that show up under the app. You can’t go check how your kids friends are doing in school. The app is free and worth checking out.

iTunes Store

Want a good way to waste some time, then you need to check out Snoopy’s Street Fair. I’m not sure why it’s called Snoopy’s Street Fair and not Charlie Brown’s Street Fair because the reason for the street fair is to raise money to buy uniforms for Charlie Brown’s baseball team. The game is a farming type game (much like Farmville) in which you buy and setup different booths. Each booth gives you a certain amount of money and experience in a certain amount of time. Like a Popcorn Cart will cost you $5,000 to build but will give you $3,60 and 255XP every 2 hours, that is if you are there to collect it. If you are not there to collect the money it will stay there but that booth will not collect anymore money or XP until you collect what is there. You know it’s ready to be collected by a Snoopy coin over the booth.

The game is free but like other games like this they do have ways of making money. Certain characters takes Snoopy dollars to be able to buy. These are different than the Snoopy coins you collect from the booths. From what I’ve seen so far the only way to get these is to level up and when you do that you get $2. The first character you can buy with these Snoopy dollars is Linus which is $30, (most of them are $20 or $30 with Woodstock being $75.) You can earn the money to buy these but as you might guess it would take a long time. The other way to get Snoopy Money is to buy them (with real money). For $4.99 you can get $50 Snoopy dollars and it goes up to $99.99 for $2,000 Snoopy dollars. These are done as in game purchases so you would need to have your iTunes password to be able to buy them. The reason I say that is to say that a kid playing this game couldn’t accidentally buy Snoopy dollars and as long as they don’t have the password they couldn’t buy them at all.

The game also has a social feature. It ties into to either or both your Gamecenter account and Facebook account. This way you can see other friends you have playing this game. Once you add a friend you can go see their fair and give them gifts.

The app also features some mini games like Snoopy trying to make lemonade, making Snoopy jump into piles of leaves and several others. There are also a couple of other cool features like being able to read some Peanuts comics and taking a picture that makes it look like Snoopy is kissing you.

Overall the game is a time waster but one of those that I find myself getting pulled into. Maybe because me and my daughter try to see who can level up the most (without spending any real money.) It’s fun and if you are a Peanuts fan something you probably want to check out. For free even if you only play around with it for a couple of minutes it’s worth checking out.

iTunes Store