Archive for the ‘Free’ Category

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I Want an iPhone without AT&T!

Monday, June 29th, 2009

I was talking to a friend that I recently met and she knew that am a tech savvy person and so she asked me whether it’s possible to get an iPhone without having to sign up with AT&T and the reason is that she just dislikes their network offering and prices yet she’s so eager to own that cool Apple device.

After thinking for a while, I gave her three options:

  • Get an iPod Touch [aka iTouch]
  • Or Get a jailbroken iPhone
  • Or Wait for a while as there are big rumors that iPhone is coming to Verison next year

Her answers were:

  • I still want to make phone calls
  • I don’t want to engage in something “illegal”
  • I don’t want to wait and I don’t believe in rumors!

So obviously I could not help her out and she left me unhappily…

When I came back home I was still thinking of her question, and finally I’ve got a better idea ;)

You can still use the iPod Touch as a phone

iPod Touch is equipped with WiFi and there is a dedicated free Skype app that you can install on it and it would allow making FREE and LOW COST phone calls both country wide and even internationally.

All you need is:

1) A second generation iPod Touch: this is important because the first generation devices has no microphone support. Note that we are talking here about the device itself [hardware] not the new iPhone 3.0 OS. How to tell the difference? Second generation devices has contoured design and oval shaped antenna over the left upper back corner compared with a squared one of the first generation.

Second generation iPod Touch Second generation iPod Touch

2) A simple mic and head phone: pretty much all compatible with iPod as it has the standard 3.5 mm jack, check this Amazon page for a long list of these. Moreover, if you upgrade your iTouch’s OS to the latest iPhone 3.0 OS you can even pair it with a wireless bluetooth headset [check Amazon options] making calls conveniently without the hassle of wires.

3) Install the free Skype or TruPhone for iPod Touch that gives similar functions.

That’s it you are good to go…

Even more:

  • If you are worried about receiving calls not only making calls then Skype can give you an online number that people can dial and call you on. You can do that from within the app itself;
  • You can even use your iPod Touch to send SMS text messages! Yes, most carriers support email to SMS. So you can email your text and your friends will receive it in their SMS Inbox. The email address is in this format [your friend's 10 digit phone number including the area code@your friend's carrier messaging domain];

Here are examples of the most common US carriers.
AT&T: 1234567890@mobile.att.net T-Mobile: 1234567890@tmomail.net Verizon Wireless: 1234567890@vtext.com Sprint 1234567890@messaging.sprintpcs.com Nextel: 1234567890@messaging.nextel.com

Finally my friend was convinced as she has Wifi both at the hospital where she works and at home :)

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Posted in All, Free, Opinions, iPhone | 6 Comments »

DocGuide, your journal community on the iPhone

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

DocGuide a website that provides individualized insight into the latest updates and literature filtered from over 200 well recognized national and international journals has recently released an iPhone app that allows access to our account on the go.

One of the great features of DocGuide is that subscribers can star an interesting article they have just read which translates into a voting system enabling us to see which articles have shaken the boat recently.

DocGuide is a physician only community in that they check the license of each and every subscriber. This is good in ensuring a pure doctors rating of the articles.

Another great feature of DocGuide App is that it’s highly individualized and tailored to our needs. For example when you choose pediatrics you get to see only those articles that are of interest in pediatrics and even you can segment that into what type of articles you want to see such as pure research, clinical, news and press and others.

Not only that, but you get to choose what journals, diseases, and drugs [see screenshots above] you want to keep an eye on!

The app is free [download in iTunes] and subscription to DocGuide is also free.

The only missing feature from this great journal app is the ability to earn CME credit. Nowadays, it’s hard to convince a physician to read an article on the go without simultaneously earning CME on the fly.

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Posted in All, Free, Journals and Medline Search, News, Pediatric RSS, Updates, and Alerts, iPhone | No Comments »

Skyscape Medalerts, a great free service

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

If you have a look at the current voting results of the Best Free PDA application poll on Pda4peds you see that Skyscape’s MedAlerts ranks the second best.

This post is to revisit this cool free service from Skyscape, specially with the latest improvements that we noticed.

Here’s how it looks on Windows Mobile;

One of the most important enhancement recently added to MedAlerts is the push notifications. So that not only when we dock and synchronize the device we get the latest news but also these feeds can be pushed into the device if we choose to do so [as seen on the screenshots above].

The app will find your internet connection whether it’s Wifi or 3G and get you the news right in.

Another new feature recently added, is the option to send the news to our friends via email. A new small email icon now appears next to the title [circled in red in the screenshot above] which if tapped will allow us to choose the email addresses that we want to send the news to.

As we mentioned before, Skyscape MedAlerts can be totally specialty specific by choosing from the list in the Skyscape/my account page and it installs with a free desktop version.

Further detailed reviews of MedAlerts on Pocket PC and MedAlerts on iPhone are available on Pda4peds.

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Posted in All, Best, Free, Pediatric RSS, Updates, and Alerts | No Comments »

App Store Top medical free and paid Lists are Incorrect!

Monday, February 9th, 2009

As we previously mentioned that Apple finally understood that there are so many medical apps and medical users of iPhone and iPod Touch so they created the new medical category.

What’s interesting is that we can keep track of the most commonly downloaded apps in this category whether they are free or paid right from the device app store or in iTunes;

However, the list of free apps is inherently incorrect because these developers like Skyscape, Epocrates, and Unbound Medicine provide free mini or demo versions of their actual content.

For example; Epocrates free version only includes Rx and if you need the full Essentials package then you must subscribe through their website. Likewise, Skyscape Medical Resources includes a small number of free goodies but if you want more titles then you’d have to purchase them from Skyscape’s website. Similarly, Unbound Medicine is offering just a template of the product on which you can download the content if you are a current subscriber.

The only ‘big’ company that offers a fully functional paid app is Lexi-Comp via their different suites including the Pediatric suite. But, this is arguably a bad marketing model because people may get intimidated by the price if they don’t actually see the wonders inside.

So the top free list [and consequently the top paid list] is Incorrect because we don’t know how many users who have downloaded those free apps have actually paid and subscribed to the full version and so they should be counted in the paid list.

Another problem with the list [we mentioned that previously] is that the inclusion criteria of these apps into the medical category are not very strict. So the top paid app “Eye Test” is very unlikely that it has been downloaded by medical professionals, it is most probably downloaded by non-medical people because of it’s nature.

So two recommendations to the people of App Store:

First, ask these developers to make two versions of their apps, one free and the another full PRO version.

Second, edit the medical category and remove those apps that share common interest and put them in their old category [Health and Fitness].

Lastly, if you want to know what is the pediatric ranking of the large native iPhone apps then you may participate in the Best Native Pediatric Apps on Pda4peds.

[Update 3-18-2009], the new iPhone OS 3.0 comes with a new SDK that allows In App Purchase and Apple will likely ask the developers to apply this new technology and there will be no more subscriptions via the developer’s website only through iTunes store. Read related post.

Posted in All, Best, Free, Opinions, iPhone | 6 Comments »

Unbound Medline

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

There are many PDA applications and portals that help us search the medline right from our devices [check this Pda4peds category for a list of these]. But, the Unbound Medline, is a special way of searching the Medline as it is packed with features that are missing from the others.

Here’s how it looked on the Windows Mobile screen;

And here’s how it looks on the iPod Touch;

Comparing the above two screens it’s obvious how the iPhone platform supersedes, with wonderful colors and a large screen which translates to more content per look and with all the “wow factor” that iPhone’s Touch technology adds to the experience.

Just type www.unboundmedicine.com/medline on your device and you will be taken to this free service.

This mobile website is a smart website in that it can recognize whether you are visiting it through your iPhone, iPod Touch Safari or through some other mobile devices so that it changes its skin to fit the platform.

It can also be visited by the desktop also. But why should we visit a third party website when the actual PubMed website is there and fully functional. However, it is definitely helpful when we want to look up the Medline through our mobile device.

This is not new to Unbound Medicine as they were the pioneers in introducing a Medline search function into their popular Mobile Merck Medicus software.

The new features here included the following:

  • A special disease section and special drug look up category and even a medical news filter.
  • Advanced search functionality with optional emphasis and level of evidence.
  • The abstract is linked to the original journal website and the link can be shared with a friend via send email function.

This is, without doubt, the place where we want to be when it comes to looking up the medline on our devices.

Check the Best Medline search application to see this app’s ranking.

You can also get the Unbound Medline as search option when you download our LinkedPeds Toolbar.

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Posted in All, Free, Journals and Medline Search, Mobile Sites, iPhone | 2 Comments »

PALS on the iPhone

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

[UPDATE: 04-29-09] This app has been removed from the app store and is no longer available

A small app called PALS has been recently published to the iPhone platform [download it here from iTunes] which is providing an easy to use step by step approach to all PALS scenarios.

Here are some screenshots;

The flow of pages in Yes or No guided steps allow us to refresh the procedure in our minds in matter of seconds before encountering the ER child, which is really what we want in a rush situation and we don’t want complicated interfaces that takes us minutes and hours to digest.

At a $5 price this app is a must have to any child health care professional [doctors and nurses] exposed to life threatening cases.

However there certain improvements that has to be considered in future updates of this little app; first they should provide us with a list of references so that we know that the content is from a trusted source; second they should at least add some drug dosages of commonly used medications in PALS scenarios with a built-in calculator; third they should add NALS to the package in order to make it a complete pediatric ER algorithms app.

You can also read this Pda4peds review

Posted in All, Free, Pediatric Emergency | 10 Comments »

Free Archimedes Versus Archimedes 360

Friday, November 28th, 2008

Skyscape Archimedes set of calculators is undoubtedly the most comprehensive clinical calculators tool that we can have on the PDA or Smartphones [If you agree or disagree participate in this poll].

Skyscape publishes Archimedes in two versions Free, and Archimedes 360 for $25 for all platforms and $19 for the iPhone.

The obvious question here is What’s the difference?

Skyscape titles are all equipped with Main Index so that when we type in the search box we can find what we want. In Archimedes the same calculator might be indexed twice or even more in the main index so that for example if we search for Pediatric maintenance fluids or maintenance fluids pediatrics we’ll be then linked to the same calculator. Which is not bad at all.

But the problem here is that what they mention on their website of the free Archimedes having 130+ and Archimedes 360 having 200+ is not precise because these are main index numbers and not actual number of calculators! So the difference is NOT 70+ between the two.

In fact, if you compare the two version side by side you’ll find that the difference is only 46 calculators [for a list of these calculators check this pda4peds page].

As far as we [pediatricians] are concerned with, we will not miss these calculators in the free version because these are not so commonly used formulas except perhaps for immunizations schedules and growth charts.

For the latter two, check out the vaccines and growth categories of pda4peds for a list of free resources.

So the advice still holds true, don’t waste the 25 bucks and be satisfied with the free version.

You can download the Free version here and you can buy the Archimedes 360 here.

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Posted in All, Calculators, Converters, Tools, Free, Opinions | No Comments »

Epocrates Online: Is It Ready Yet!

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

Since the first moment I had a look at Epocrates products I was wondering why these guys are not putting their various Essentials components online.

Now, they have done it, not for all products though it’s only the Rx, Dx, Multicheck, MedCalc, and Tables right now. Many of these products are available for free EXCEPT some features.

Of course the Rx has been there online since the birth of Epocrates and now it’s coupled with Dx. That’s great news and we can sense the smell that in the near future all of their great products will be available online.

Check the Epocrates Online website and see how does it work

Epocrates Dx Online

The still missing stuff:

  1. We are still waiting for the Sx, and ID portions and perhaps the dictionary and ICD codes also.
  2. There is yet no wireless version of Epocrates Online so we are still unable to log on using our mobile devices, check out the pediatric mobile websites currently available.
  3. The Dx portion is only available for US and Canada, folks elsewhere are still unfortunate!
  4. The Dx is not yet available for the iPhone version of Epocrates!

So the answer is that it is not yet ready for all of our needs.

We just wish that they’ll soon add these missing stuff soon and thanks Epocrates for adding the Dx.

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Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Free, News, References & ebooks | No Comments »

Epocrates, Finally a built-in iPhone app

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

One of the major reasons that I used to tell my colleagues (read this article) why not to switch to the iPhone is that it doesn’t accept third party applications and therefore we have to use Palm or Windows Mobile devices in order to install those medical porgrams that we all crave for.

Now that has changed, Apple finally opened up the iPhone platform for developers and Epocrates is the first ever medical application that is available for the iPhone.

However there is a caveat here, this is not the full Epocrates Essentials package this is only Epocrates Rx. However there are great pros here:

  • Once they started with Rx it means that they will soon add the Dx, and Sx and other features of the Essentials.
  • There is Pill ID pictures which is missing from the other PDA version.
  • The application is 100% free download from iTunes store. However I’ve received some emails from the Middle East and they are frustrated over there because iTunes is not available worldwide!

If you used Epocrates Rx on your Iphone and you really liked please vote for it as the best pediatric iphone application.

Make no mistake about it, iPhone is going to be the next device that physicians holding in hospital corridors (after years of domination by Palm and Windows Mobile).

iPhone.. Welcome to our world

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Posted in All, Drug Guides, Free, News, iPhone | 8 Comments »

Clinical Xpert – A step towards the medical PDA dream…

Friday, June 20th, 2008

Clinical Xpert from Thomson Health Care is an all-in-one PDA application that has all the features and sections that we may ever need at the point of care.

Clinical Xpert

The pediatrc PDA dream software is to have a single interface where we can have drug information, drug interactions, news and alerts, calculators & tools, differential diagnosis, disease information, lab and tests info, and CME all combined in a single program.

Clinical Xpert

The Xpert has most of these except for CME and the best part is that it is available for free for PDR and Micromedex subscribers.

Once you are subscribed you can log on to their online account management and choose the sections that you would like to install on your PDA. These sections will be downloaded/updated upon your next synchronization.

Although these services are still deficient when compared to industry standards such as Epocrates Essentials but hopefully the next versions will include much more contents.

The various sections of Clinical Xpert are reviewed in details in pda4peds. Go to Clinical Xpert review page and from there find reviews of these sections.

Posted in All, All-in-one Applications, Free | No Comments »

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