Top six weird or disturbing mobile apps
According to Apple, you can get hundreds of thousands of apps for your iPhone. And there are tens of thousands of titles available if you have a mobile phone which uses Google’s Android system. As you’d expect given the choice, there are plenty of useful apps. And there are plenty of lists to help you find them. But there are plenty of useless, weird and disturbing ones too. Here’s our rundown of the top six. If you don’t want to install them, we completely understand: The ASBOrometer. Ever wondered how where you live or work ranks in the anti-social behaviour league tables? Wonder no longer: the ASBOrometer uses government data to give you statistics for anti-social behaviour right on your iPhone. Just the thing if you’re the jumpy sort – next time you’re wandering in a strange neighbourhood, you can check exactly how safe you are. Wheretheladies.at. This app is in development. It was recently covered on TechCrunch and uses information from Foursquare to find places near you which have the most women ‘checking in’ to them. Seriously. Whatever your opinion, it’s quite telling that there’s no corresponding service to help find where the men are at. MEanderthal. This app comes from the highly-respected Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, yet still has the ability to make your photos look decidedly odd. It does this by transforming your face into the face of an early human. Disturbing? Yes. Educational? Probably. Give it a go to decide for yourself (warning: it’ll probably make your nose much bigger). Find out more > HealthMap. If the ASBOrometer hasn’t done enough for your levels of paranoia, hop on over to HealthMap, a service which tracks the global state of infectious diseases. Of course, it plots them on a nice map, so you can see exactly what outbreaks are happening near you. It could be essential, if swine flue returns this winter. Honest. Find out more > Photo Shooter. Having a bad day? Use this app to pepper photos of your choice with paintballs or bullet holes. Ok, so even though they’re not real bullets, we still can’t help thinking that if one of your colleagues finds their photo covered in bullet holes, they might feel a little worried. Find out more > iLickIt. Like the website says, ‘to make the iPhone hygienic, clean it with an alcoholic wrap’ before you use this app. It’s the first iPhone game you can play with your tongue – you have to lick clean a plate displayed on the screen. Ideal for a gadget which gets carried all day in grubby or dusty bags and pockets and doesn’t react well to water. Find out more > So, those are our top six (and we didn’t even have room for iDrunkTxt or Pocket Heat). Have you found any other weird apps for your mobile? Leave a comment here and we’ll go check them out.
Wimbledon? Yep, there’s an app for that too
You’ve probably noticed that this is a particularly sport-filled June. Not only is the football in full-swing, but the annual strawberries-and-creamathon that is Wimbledon has opened its doors too. Where there’s a big sporting event, you’ll usually find big technology. And Wimbledon has tech in spades. From Hawk-Eye‘s computerised assistance for close line calls to the 41 miles of cable the BBC installs, technology is key to the tournament’s success. Get Wimbledon on your phone As you might expect, the organisers of Wimbledon haven’t been slow to jump on the mobile phone bandwagon. Last year they released an application called IBM Seer that allowed people attending the tournament to point their phone’s camera at the match they were watching, and superimpose information onto the screen. That could be anything from statistics about the players to the location of the nearest bar. Well, you can’t expect a Wimbledon-goer to manage without a glass of Pimms for long, right? This year’s version takes things further. Apparently, if you’re wandering around the tennis club and hear cheering, you can see video of what’s going on by pointing your phone in the direction of the noise. And you can check queue sizes without leaving your seat. This video shows the new Wimbledon app in action: Many people seem to think this sort of augmented reality is the next big thing for mobile phones. And we have to admit, the way it combines what you’re seeing in the real world with information from the internet is pretty cool. However, we do have two reservations: There isn’t much for people who don’t attend the tournament. Yet in our experience, when you’re actually there, watching an exciting sporting event, the last thing you want to do is keep your eyes on a small mobile phone screen. It’s going to need a good connection. As football fans will know, the crowds at big events can make it hard to even send and receive text messages, never mind get a connection to watch streaming video. That could make the app a serious source of frustration. Still, we’ll reserve judgement till we’ve seen it in action. The IBM Seer app is free. It’s available for iPhones and mobile phones running the Android operating system – you can find it by searching for “IBM Seer” in the iPhone app store or Android Marketplace. If you’re off to Wimbledon and have a compatible phone, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear how well this works in practice.