Call a Bike for iPhone released

Some cities are massive and walking several miles or kilometers a day is not the best way, particularly if you have no time or you are fatty fatty fat fat. Imagine that you can pull out your iPhone and get a bike anywhere you are! Yes, it is possible:

call-a-bike-iphone

… but only in Germany where German Railway offers “call a bike” service where users can pay for bike by mobile phones, but also, what is more important: they can drop these bikes in any place (no need to bring them back, etc.). Here is description from developer:

The new “Call a Bike” application is the ideal complement to the bike rental system of Deutsche Bahn, which has more than 200.000 customers in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne and at 40 German ICE stations. From now on, there is no more tedious searching for the closest bike. No matter where you are, you will find a bike everywhere. At your front door, when stepping out of the subway, at night in front of your favorite bar or if you are still on the train to your destination. A few seconds after starting the application you will see all available bikes surrounding you. Touch the screen to choose a bike. Your iPhone start the rental call immediately. You can also display the route to the next bike on the a map. Experience the all new fun of riding a bike!

Features at a glance:

– Works in all Call a Bike-cities and systems, whether with stations (ICE train stations, Call a Bike fix) or without stations (Call a Bike flex)

– Display available bikes near your current location, or at a location that you manually entered – Bike positions in Google Map Style View with interactive touch icons

– List of available bikes with distance information – Details on the Call Bikes (exact location, bike number, telephone number)

– Automatically Start of a call to rent a Bike – Integrates the well known routing functions from the standard Maps application

Commentary: Call a Bike app is of interest only to people in Germany, but it shows general trend: number of various apps that are available for iPhone, while individually they might not be “the killer app”, when considered as a whole, constitute the killer feature of iPhone: having apps that other platforms simply don’t have and probably will never have. In other words: it might be impossible to convince people to use other platform than iPhone, if that platform will not have all the apps that iPhone has…