Christmas Cards | Best Iphone Apps Review

Christmas Sudoku is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

Hey sudoku nuts, are you ready to tear your hair out? Christmas Sudoku is a holiday-themed sudoku game where the typical rules apply… even when you’re playing with “goodies” instead of numbers.

That’s right, in this game you can choose to play with either numbers or nine little Christmas goodies like candy canes, snowmen, and jingle bells. I’ve never been good at sudoku to begin with, and it only gets harder when you take away the numbers and throw in the tiny pictures.

Not only does Christmas Sudoku come with the fully functional sudoku game, it also includes a bunch of other extras like “Hug-a-Friend” for creating and sending a Christmas card from within the app, “Tug-a-Friend” which pits you vs. another player via bluetooth as you race to finish the puzzle first, and several different background themes for the game.

I have absolutely no complaints about the sudoku part of this app… it offers hints, a “campaign” mode which is timed, and a “Quick Game” mode which isn’t timed, and you also have solve and undo options. I’ll say again, playing sudoku with the goodies is a LOT harder than playing with numbers, but if you really love this kind of puzzle then it should be a refreshing departure from the hundreds (or thousands?) of puzzles you’ve already completed.

The Hug-a-Friend holiday card thing, on the other hand, could use a little work. It’s hard to expect this part of the app to be perfect since the main focus is the game instead of greeting cards, but as long as the greeting card is there it would be nice if the text would behave better than it does. The card starts off with a “To:” field, but when you input a name the “To” disappears. No big deal, just type “To: So and So”, right? But when you go to email it, the word “Dear” is inserted in the stock email that’s appended to your card, leaving you with “Dear To: So and So”. The actual creation of the card is done pretty well, though, and if you have a child it might be fun to dress up one of the four different card backgrounds with stars, holly, ornaments, and a lot of same “goodies” that are featured in the game.

I haven’t tried the two player Tug-a-Friend mode because, as always, I have no friends, but I’m impressed that it’s there.

If you’re up for a new sudoku challenge that’s in keeping with the holiday spirit, Christmas Sudoku should be worth the $2 price tag. It’s a fun take on a classic game, albeit agonizingly difficult for sudoku noobs like me.

iTunes Link – Christmas Sudoku
Version 1.1
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1.2

Bookmark this Iphone App Review Post

Hide Sites

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

POV: SMS-BOX Christmas Time! is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website

* “POV” (Point of View) is a new feature that we’re testing out *

Flysoft’s rating: 9.0
IAR’s rating: 7.0

Russian developer Flysoft arrives in the Nick of time (see what I did there?) with a nifty little holiday messaging app called SMS-BOX Christmas Time! Does it send visions of sugar plums dancing through your head or give you a case of the humbugs? Flysoft is pretty confident it’s the former so let’s see what they have to say first then I’ll try to confirm or deny with plenty of opinions along the way.

Flysoft’s summary:

What SMS-BOX Christmas Time! does:

SMS-BOX: Christmas Time! is a massive collection of Xmas text messages and cards. Congratulate your loved, friends, colleagues, relatives and everyone you wish. Add one of the 50 original greeting cards to your message!

To send a card or message, just pick one of many, choose which method you’d like to use: SMS, MMS or e-mail (if you have iPod Touch only e-mail), pick to whom the message is going to and send! Standard messaging rates may apply.

What this app does right:

It’s just on time for Holidays as it gives a wonderful opportunity to congratulate anyone in a very special way. Moreover, it manages to send cards via MMS, SMS and email.

Where this app needs to improve:

The following option might be added – integration to contact list, so that user can see whom he had already congratulted, whom – not.

Features and improvements planned for the future:

- increasing the number of texts and cards

IAR’s take:

In a nutshell this app lets you send either text-based (via SMS) holiday messages or quite artfully created greeting cards (via MMS). Yes, we know the Apple SDK prohibits 3rd party apps from talking directly to the ’Messages’ app but hey, they can still talk INdirectly right? As a workaround the app copies your message/card to the clipboard then closes itself down and launches the Messages app where you simply paste and send. Not elegant of course but it gets the job done and works just fine (not to mention there’s no other choice anyway).

Having someone else do the thinking for you is nice sometimes so the wide variety of text greetings is a good thing. In fact, they’ve got them organized into the following categories: Wishes For, Happy New Year, Toasts, Jokes, Short Poems, Invitations and X-mas. A few problems do exist however. The grammar and syntax are not always accurate and there are several duplicated entries in the Toasts section so a little QA/QC wouldn’t hurt. Fortunately, you can edit/change every greeting within the Messages app before tapping send. Also, and this is of course just my opinion, many of the messages are kinda sappy/silly and it would be hard for me to find situations where I’d use them as opposed to just composing my own text messages to friends and family.

Fortunately however, the real highlight of this app is the greeting cards. It should be noted that unless I’m seriously missing something, the paid app has 29 cards, not 50 (perhaps the Lite has 21 others?). Anyway the cards are illustrated quite skillfully and make for good holiday eye-candy. Each one comes with a default caption but as with the text greetings, they are often grammatically incorrect or just simply make no sense (probably just yer basic translation issues going from Russian to English). Fortunately, you can edit/change these as well before you send which is great and adds a lot of value. Useful hint: you can easily turn a text greeting into a card caption without leaving the app by just pasting it in.

Note the paid app (not sure about Lite) is not for kids as it contains some adult humor and subject matter. Oddly, I didn’t receive the standard Apple warning about this when downloading the app although Flysoft does represent this fact adequately in the iTunes description.

My biggest suggestion to make this app better is to add more content to the greeting cards as in my usage this was the exclusive reason to load it up (and as mentioned whoever did the art for them is quite good).

Hold on to your sleighbells folks, the developer was kind enough to provide 10 promo codes for us to publish so head on over to the comments section!

Version reviewed – 1.0
Reviewed on – iPhone 3GS OS 3.1.2
iTunes Link – SMS-BOX Christmas Time! / Lite version

* POV is sponsored by the developer