iPhone News Updated

Bump, the One Billionth iPhone App

Bump, the One Billionth iPhone App

The iPhone app to earn the distinction of being the one billionth app downloaded uses a bit of legerdemain to make it easy to transfer contacts between iPhones and iPod Touches.

Bump, from a small three-man development shop, uses the iPhone or iPod Touch’s accelerometer, Internet connection, and location data to promote social connection, so it’s a perfect example for the platform.

Here’s the idea behind Bump: you launch it, “bump” your device together with another, and they offer to trade contact information. That’s what it appears to do, but not what it’s actually doing.

When you launch Bump, the app takes a few seconds to connect to the Internet. You choose the contact to send on Bump’s settings screen, along with the fields you want to send: phone, email, address, photo, or the entire contact card.

Then, bump the phone. Or wave it - it’s really just detecting the accelerometer. The app alerts Bump’s Internet server, which checks to see if another phone is being bumped or waved in the same location at the same time. If it finds a match, it pops up a permission screen on both phones telling you who you just bumped with and asking if you want to trade information. Say yes, and the two phones upload their contacts to Bump’s servers in an encrypted format, downloading the other contact in exchange. The whole process takes between five and ten seconds.

You don’t actually have to bump phones together, by the way. A colleague and I waved two Apple devices about ten feet apart, and they connected. Bump’s manufacturers say that if too many devices are bumping too close to each other, the app will just ask to re-bump until the servers can figure out who should be paired up with whom.

Bump has one critical flaw: because it’s server dependent, both devices must have a live Internet connection when you bump them. They don’t have to be connected to the same network, though. I bumped an iPod Touch connected to Wi-Fi with an iPhone connected to 3G, and they worked fine. But this isn’t a truly peer-to-peer data transfer.

A future, paid version of Bump will allow people to send photos and multiple contacts, the company says. For now, Bump is free.

[Thanks: http://www.pcmag.com]

Comments are closed.