Mini Reviews: Flashcard Touch, Slingshot Cowboy, Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds Free

What do flash cards, wallpapers, and killing cows with a slingshot all have in common?  They are all available on your iPhone or iPod Touch!

Flashcard Touch

Flashcard Touch is, at its core, a pretty good notion.  Flashcard Touch is essentially utilizing the iPhone as a source for educational flash cards.  To get the flashcards you want you go and search in the Quizlet Flashcards to find exactly what you want.  In this section, which is selected right from the opening Flashcard Touch screen, you can choose from a number of categories.  These are things like Languages and Vocabulary, Math and Science, History and Geography, and Standardized Tests.  In each of these there are specified sub categories, and once you have selected one of these you will get a number of specially created flash card systems.   These are created and submitted to Quizlet by different users and you can preview them before downloading them to your iPhone.  The download process is very quick and you can then browse what you have downloaded right from the opening Flashcard Touch screen.  Each of these flashcard sets have different levels of usefulness, and a number of them are awkwardly formatted for use.  The general interface of Flashcard Touch is relatively nice in presentation, but it could be a little easier to switch from card to card.  Over all there is such a wealth of knowledge and study tools in Flashcard Touch that make this free iPhone application a great choice for any young iPhone users in academic need of almost any sort.

Slingshot Cowboy

Shooting games have had variable success on the iPhone.  The touch screen lends itself to the first person viewpoint in certain ways, but there is also a desire to find a way to utilize the touch screen in interesting interactive ways.  Slingshot Cowboy tries to integrate these two things in a way that it fun and new, but instead it mainly is successful at badgering you to buy the full version for $5.99.  In Slingshot Cowboy you are given a bulky, animated slingshot and asked to fire rocks at passing cattle and other animals of the prairie.  Even though this logic seems a little strange and sadistic, it could still be fun and it is.  You have options as the wielder of the dangerous rock to tilt the slingshot in different ways and vary the strength at which you pull pack the rubber band.  This is all in a careful effort to nail the wildlife, and once you hit them enough time they flip on their back in death retreat.  Slingshot Cowboy gives a few different gameplay options including the Classic, Time Race, and Practice.  Beyond Classic the others are really just conventional ways of milking the original gameplay concept without developing anything new.  On its own Slingshot Cowboy is a fairly simple free iPhone game, and if it was just that it would be fine.  Instead you get constantly barraged with clever ways at trying to get you to upgrade to the full expensive version.  The paid version of Slingshot Cowboy is not worth the price at all, and this should be avoided.  If you can deal with the annoying requests to upgrade then you will have a little fun with Slingshot Cowboy.

Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds Free

iPhone wallpaper applications are quick and easy ways to get onto the top of the iTunes' App Store download list.  These are usually free iPhone applications that provide a little ad support along with the wallpapers.  This is somewhat counterintuitive since you can really just get any image you want through the photo functions or online through screen shots, but since they are free iPhone applications you are not really losing much.  Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds Free is just another of these free wallpaper applications and is not better than the rest.  This essentially means that there is nothing inside Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds Free that really warrants its inclusion on your iPhone.  The only way that one of these iPhone wallpaper applications could really be deemed a dramatic success is if it provided an interesting collection of iPhone wallpapers that you may not find in other locations easily and do so in an efficient manor.  In this way Epic FAIL is more concrete than Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds, though it is not really bad in essence.  There are a lot of branded images in Cool Wallpapers and Background Free, but also some fun and innovative images.  These do not make up the vast majority of the images and you may have to really shuffle through the wallpapers to find what you want.  Having more than one iPhone wallpaper application is really not worth the trouble so you have to decide if Cool Wallpapers and Backgrounds Free is that one.  It is by no means the worst, but it would take quite a leap to call it the best.