Ok, I have to admit that I have been procrastinating the review of this application (only because usually these apps aren’t very good) however, about ten seconds into reviewing iSmartDialer I realized I was going to be wrong with this one!

iSmartDialer is an application that allows you to easily search your contacts, send a text and send an email all from your stock dialer. Once you install the app, you will need to activate it. In order to activate it, you have to purchase it which costs $7.99(USD). So, continue reading and you can decide if this is an application you are interested in purchasing.

Once installed, you will see an icon added to your SpringBoard…this is where all of the app’s settings are located (and there are a TON of them!). In the Settings, you are able to turn on/off the application itself, the shake to search feature, the home button double tap, the quick email feature and the quick sms feature. You are also able to change a ton of search options and some keypad options. One cool feature is that you are able to choose a few different languages for the kaypad search (multi-language search). You can also set nine speed dial numbers so that you can quickly call nine contacts directly from your dialer.

Once you have the app turned on in the Settings (which it should automatically do when installed but, you might just want to double check), you can then go into your stock Phone application and then the Keypad option. You will notice a few new features on your Keypad such as; two arrows and an “On” icon on the # button. The “On” icon indicates that the search feature is activated. You can easily toggle, turn the search feature on/off, by shaking your iPhone or touching and holding the # button for 2 seconds (I personally like the shake feature). Now, for the cool part…using the search. To use the search feature, just tap on the numbers that correspond with the letters you are searching for. Note: you do not need to tap the icon three times to get the third letter that corresponds with that number…just tap it once and it will search correctly. So, if I want to search for my husband, I would tap 4,8,7,2….etc. As soon as you begin typing, it will start to bring up the most relevant contacts that match your search. The results are located at the top of the screen. You can search by first name, last name or business name.

Once a contact is found, you can scroll through the contacts using the arrow buttons or if you tap on the search results, you can scroll through them with your finger. Once you select a contact (the selected contact will be highlighted bright blue), a SMS and Email icon are added to the 1 and * buttons. These icons allow you to quickly send a text message or email to one of your contacts (they open directly in the iSmartDialer application). Another cool feature is that you can tap and hold a contact that is in the search results to edit that contacts information. Honestly, there are a lot of cool little features to this application and I have probably haven’t even touched on them all!

Overall, this application is very well designed, it’s nicely integrated and it has a ton of options. The only thing that didn’t work exactly how I wanted it to was when you send and email, it opens your stock email application in order to send the email…I was hoping it would send directly from the iSmartDialer application. Other than that, this application worked smoothly

If you would like to learn more about the app, you can check out their website!

ScreenShots

Well, after a six long days of traveling and family get togethers for Christmas, I’m working my way through the Cydia apps that were released in the last few days. Below are a few notable WinterBoard mods. The first mod is a dialer mod which changes your phone keypad. Apple X Dialer, via BigBoss, does exactly what it sounds like….gives your dialer an Apple X theme. The second mod is a keyboard mod. Carbon Fiber Keyboard, via BigBoss, is a mod that will give your keyboard a carbon fiber look. Both of these mods installed and worked correctly for me. The third mod is my favorite…a Safari Progress Bar mod via BigBoss. This mod changes the loading bar in Safari when loading a web page. It comes in a few different colors including; Dark Blue, Aqua, Red, Orange, Lime, Green and Pink. All of these mods are activated via WinterBoard. SEe screenshots below.

Screenshots:

There are a couple of cool mods in Cydia that I thought I would mention. One is a dialer mod that is actually similar to very popular dialer mod for firmware 1.1.4 and below. Retro Phone Dialer (via modmyi) will change your dialer keypad to look like an old school pay phone dialer…it’s pretty cool! The other mod is a Cydia theme. enBuufydia (via modmyi) is a mod that will change Cydia to match the Buuf theme. I know quite a few of you use the Buuf theme so, here is just one more thing you can mod to match your theme! Both mods can be activated and deactivated via WinterBoard with no issues. Below are the screenshots of both mods.

Screenshots:

Well, it seems that FontSwap has made it’s way to firmware 2.x. A different icon, a much different user interface but overall, the same idea. The application opens to the main menu where you will find four options; Dialer Fonts, LockClock Fonts, Notes Fonts and System Fonts. The Dialer Fonts will change the font of your keypad when you dial a phone number. The LockClock Fonts will change the font of the clock on your lock screen. The Notes Fonts will change the font within your Notes application and the System Fonts change basically everything else. The system font includes your icon labels, pop-up font, font in all your menus, font within applications (ex. Settings, WinterBoard)….basically all other font on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

From the main menu, you can select any of the four options (Dialer Fonts, LockClock Fonts, Notes Fonts or System Fonts) to see what fonts are available for each option. Once you are on the list of fonts, you can tap the font title to select it. Once selected, you will get a pop-up with one of the following options.

For the Dialer Fonts you will have the options to Install & Relaunch Phone, Install Only or Cancel.
For the LockClock Fonts you will have the options to Install & Respring iPhone, Install Only or Cancel. For the Notes Fonts you will have the option to Installer & Launch Notes, Install Only or Cancel and for the System Fonts you will have the options to Installer & Respring iPhone, Install & Relaunch FontSwap or Cancel.

If you are changing more than one of your fonts you can select the Install option however, when you select the last font you will want to select the Install and Respring option. If you are only changing one font…be sure to select the Install and Respring option. Basically you will always want to respring your iPhone when you are ready to leave the FontSwap application.

Once your iPhone or iPod Touch has resprung, you will see the new fonts! Overall, this application works very nicely. I had no issues with crashing or messing up my iPhone. I did have an issue installing the application. I ended up having to restart my iPhone and then install the app. Before I restarted my iPhone…it would crash half way through installing. I also found that the one font option for the dialer font does not work or at least I can’t see a difference in the font.

Once thing I would love to see in this application is a preview option. The developer did say that the Install & Relaunch FontSwap option in the System Fonts is basically a way to preview the font. But, if you are going to respring your iPhone it is just as easy to see the new font on your iPhone as it is to see it in the FontSwap application. I would like to see a preview option within the actual FontSwap application. Below are some screenshots.

Screenshots: