Of course I couldn't, not really, not with my penchant for socially awkward faux pas anyway, but nevertheless it was neat to see what one of the Apple higher ups had populating his iPhone.

Also making the iPhone App Schill-list was CNN's app, the always-popular Facebook app, and a couple of games, like Eliminate and geoDefense, reports the New York Times. [Bits]

The listing demands that an applicant for the position:

Be knowledgeable about and/or interested in becoming an expert on the existing user interface paradigms used on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, and Palm WebOS

Of course, if they are just looking for people to work on this now we can't really expect to see it this week or next, but at least it is in the works. So what are you waiting for? Apply, so we can watch the end of the football season on our HTC Heroes and Palm Pixies! [Sling Media via Pre Central]

Without having to use your computer, the printer was designed to print out reformatted Web content - maps, coupons, etc. - right from the Wi-Fi enabled printer using the 4-inch touchscreen (which we have seen to work like a charm). And now the company is releasing its App Studio and a SDK letting any web content developer create applications for the printer.

Getting the apps on your printer seems simple enough: you hit the Get More button on the user interface and select from different categories of applications which will then be downloaded over Wi-Fi. You can also browse the apps on the App Studio website. HP will start to roll out more and more applications over the next couple of months (especially as developers start working with the SDK), but some of the first applications will include ones by Disney (for printing out coloring pages for kids), CBS News (for printing text versions of 60 Minutes), Flickr (for printing photos directly from the printer), and Tabbloid (for creating and printing customized RSS feeds).

HP also annouced partnerships with USA TODAY, Google (maps and calendar applications), Coupons.com, Fandango, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews, Snapfish.com and HP Creative Studio.

All the applications are free, but the PhotoSmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (an app to shorten that product name would be nice) itself costs $399. And hey, maybe HP won't make its app store approval process so hellish. [HP App Studio]

Indeed, while our tipster could see the Apps menu beckoning them to smudge the screen with an eager fingerprint, their attempt to access the secrets within were met with disabled wifi and a definitive no-go. We kind of know games will reside there already, but an overall App Store-esque experience wouldn't surprise anyone should that be what lies beyond the top level Zune HD Apps menu.

More images and video at Engadget, where there was apparently an unconfirmed mention of a Zune HD SDK. Intriguing! [Thanks, Jarnet]

According to MacRumors, the four-flavored app covers the U.S. & Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and, naturally, New Zealand. Pricing:

- U.S. & Canada: NZ $124.99 (US $84.41)
- Western Europe: NZ $179.99 (US $121.55)
- Australia: NZ $104.99 (US $79.90)
- New Zealand: NZ $119.99 (US $81.03)

Earlier this month, UK retailer Handtec let slip that the equally anticipated TomTom for iPhone car kit would sell for about $195. The price included the app itself, a GPS-boosting receiver, windshield mount, car charger and speakers. That news, and the perhaps premature New Zealand launch this weekend, would seem to indicate a global release is imminent.

Updated: The TomTome or iPhone app has appeared in several European App Stores, according to the latest reports at MacRumors:

Benelux: Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg and covers these three countries
- D-A-CH: offered in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and covers these countries
- France: Available only in France
- Iberia: Available in Spain and Portugal and covers Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar, and the major islands of the Balearic and Canary Islands
- Italy: Offered in Italy
- Nordic: Available in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden and covers these four countries
- U.K. & Ireland - offered only in the U.K. and Ireland

Seems like the global deployment has begun. [MacRumors]

The basic model resembles Apple's app store except that rather than requiring users to set up accounts or enter credit card information, the Vcast app store will use Verizon's existing billing system and slap the charges onto users' monthly bills.

Verizon says that it hopes to have an application approval turn around time of under 14 days, but what I'd like to know is whether there'll be a Google Voice app among the bunch or if it'll be rejected. [CNET]

And good on them, I say. Medicinal Cannabis use works, alleviates pain, and allows people who need some serious stress relief—say, from cancer—to get that relief and feel great doing it.

The app is based on Ajnag.com, which has existed for a while as a legitimate medicinal Cannabis location site on the Web. In fact, once you download the app to your iPhone, you have a veritable smorgasbord of legal Cannbis services at your fingertips:

Once you have received your medical cannabis recommendation from a qualified physician, you will need to locate an organization that can provide you with medical cannabis. Access the Cannabis application again. Press locate. The nearest medical cannabis collectives, cooperatives or facilities will appear with little green dots on a map of your current or selected location. Get real-time door-to-door directions. Add the locations' details to your iPhone contact list.

If the unfortunate happens, and you find yourself in legal trouble over your medicinal herb, pull out your cannabis application once again. Pin point local attorneys who specialize in marijuana-related offenses.

And one more thing... If you need medicinal marijuana and don't live in one of them wonderfully progressive hippie states, like California, there's an app for that too. This one:

Not living in a medical cannabis state? The only way to make cannabis change is to take action. Your new iPhone application will locate the nearest cannabis-reform group so you can get involved.

If you're suffering, and get approval from a doctor, get some herb. This $3 app will help you keep tabs on where to get more when it's all out. Ed note: And yes, my newly promoted commenter friend, you might have to be high to pay three bucks for such an app. But, if you're new to an area... [ajnag.com - Thanks, Cheryl]

The short story is that Cydia—the other non-official iPhone app installer—won the battle against Installer. Installer was the first pretty application installer to appear for the iPhone, but Cydia became more popular over the last few months. Ripdev—which was involved in the project since version 3—says that the Installer repositories will be available until July 1st, 2009.

But fear not, my young apprentices, because we still have Cydia and Icy, which is an iPhone app installer that plugs into Cydia directories—made by Ripdev. [Ripdev—Thanks John Gregorio]

As we previously speculated, others who don't already have a subscription will have to pay $3 a month, which isn't so bad considering the original subscription is around 20 bucks. [Yahoo]

Here's a piece of what Ars is quoting from the new agreement:

You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise, create any Application or other program that would disable, hack or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so...

It also says that anyone using the SDK to develop software can then only get distribution through the App Store, and at Apple's sole discretion. As Ars points out, it's not going to dry up jailbreakers, but it will make those gray area developers a little more skeered of swerving from the path. [Ars Technica]

The process works by installing an app onto your iPhone that's not quite jailbreaking, but is enough to allow those not-quite-official applications to get on there. If you gave us the choice of paying $7 or running jailbreak on our phones—which is fairly easy as long as you have some tech knowledge—we'd choose real jailbreak. [Ripdev via 9 to 5 Mac]

The Dsi—at least the Japanese version—currently connects to the DS Shop and DSi Ware, Nintendo's bite-sized gaming store. But according to Developer, the company is allegedly hoping to get shorter-form non-gaming stuff on the device as well-things that could turn your Dsi into a personal lifestyle gadget, rather than just an entertainment one.

I guess it'd also be a way for the Dsi to really differentiate itself from the DS Lite. While the DSi is definitely more gadgety (what with camera and audio player), many were underwhelmed thanks to what they were losing.

There's only a week until Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's keynote, so we expect to hear more then. [Develop via Kotaku]

Just like MyHeritage—a celebrity facial recognition Web site—FaceDouble is a free iPhone application that will be able to determine which celebrities you look like simply by analyzing a photo you have saved on your phone. I personally like to think I look like Angelina Jolie, but I'm sure FaceDouble will tell me I'm more of a mixture between Mulan and Dora the Explorer. (Oh wait, I was wrong; apparently, I'm Ashley Tisdale). Hmm... [FaceDouble via GeekSugar]

Realize that the software isn't officially TiVo-branded. And we wouldn't call the UI stunning, or even attractive—though it certainly looks easy enough to use.

But since it's priced at a buck, we're willing to take our chances (and hope for a glossy black update sometime in the near to far future). [iTunes and TiVoRemote]

It's a clever idea. Avoid that $15 unlimited texting plan from AT&T by using your free email to send SMS messages. With SMS Touch, you can write an email (complete with the landscape-style keyboard and spellcheck functionality) and send it as an SMS to anyone in your phonebook. When they respond to your text message, instead of coming back to your phone as a chargeable SMS, the message actually arrives in your email.

In other words, you can send SMS messages while all the while communicating in email. Priced at $5, part of that fee goes to ongoing backend support for the program. And if you're interested, it'll pay for itself three times in one month anyway. [SMS Touch]

But oh do we still have some ground to cover. I'm envisioning a world of platform-agnostic pizza acquisition apps on every web-connected device everywhere, and it's a world in which I'm pretty sure you'll want to join me in delicious reality.

Granted, we live in a pretty good time right now as far as zero-human-interaction, chainstore-pizzeria-to-mouth-in-shortest-time-possible pizza acquisition systems. You can go to any of the major chains' web sites and have a pie on the way in just a few minutes. Maybe a side of cheese sticks too? And hey, we're running out of Coke. Throw in a two liter. I can't be bothered to go out in this cold/rain/beautiful weather.

They'll even save your credit card number so you don't have to even think about money beyond the five seconds the subtotal is on the screen. And tip's on the card.

I will admit that I was late to embrace the online pizza ordering paradigm. I live in New York City, and I can literally walk to the end of my block and get a delicious hot NYC slice whenever I want it. That is, when the King doesn't feel like shuttering the doors for no clear reason at prime mealtimes. Which he does on a disappointingly frequent basis. But I've been doing it more lately—learned from a couple of friends who have Papa John's online ordering down to a science—and I must say I like.

Fitting with my wish, we also live in a pretty good time as far as being able to customize our devices with third-party applications. Pizza Hut has a Facebook app that can order your pizza. That's a good step, even though it's no different from the main websites, save for the ability to broadcast to all your friends when you place a couch order. But please, further. Take Netflix as an example. Watch Instantly is now on Blu-ray decks from LG and Samsung, the Xbox 360, the aforementioned TiVo and of course the dedicated Roku box, with more partnerships on the way. This is the model we should be following as far as pizza ordering is concerned—the path to the life that I've imagined.

So it is you, major pizza chains, that I address. Embrace our software-is-king future. Open up an API into your respective ordering systems, or better yet, tie them together into one magical mozzarella, tomato and dough delivery web framework. And after that's all set up, encourage the use of this API by manufacturers which will soon, in turn, make everything an application platform in order to respond to this exploding demand for pizza ordered from the couch. Don't just stop at an iPhone app—there's no reason there shouldn't be an App Store for every web-connected device in your home.

They say that where the porn industry goes, tech follows. And it's true. But I say let pizza, glorious pizza, be the trailblazer. Wake me up when this is how things are—I'll be asleep on my couch, surrounded by empty Papa John's garlic sauce cups.

TuneWiki: TuneWiki, the lyrics + music video music player, is fantastic. We plugged in a live track of Flight of the Conchords and TuneWiki was smart enough to have the lyrics to it and sync them in time with the music. Impressive! Other features like "Top 50 Songs" Today/This Week/This Month come up with the music video and lyrics most of the type, and you can even search YouTube for your own favorite videos. Yes, Never Gonna Give You Up works.

PAC-MAN: It's the same wakka wakka you've been playing for the last 20+ years, but now adapted to either the touchscreen or the roller ball. The swiping touchscreen motion works, but it's not wonderful—the ball is the way you want to go for this. Pac's sound effects are exactly the same as they were when you were a kid, so if you ever go back in time to tell the childhood version of you to buy Google stock at its IPO, you can bring this with you and blow his mind.

Accuweather: The app has today's weather, three-day prediction and radar view for easy home meteorology, but that's about it. No ten-day, no allergy conditions or anything more than just the barebones. What it does have is a very prominent link to their website under each view that launches your browser, which leads us to believe that they want you clicking over there (so they can collect ad money). Still, it's free and it shows you how hot it is. Update: Go with the Weather Channel app, reviewed below.

ImeemThis Pandora like music service only allows you to search by artist name to play music based off similar artists, but there is also the option to play featured music which range from new and notable artists to the Top 100 imeem songs. The automatic song selection is decent and when listening to a song there is a menu option to buy it in the Amazon MP3 store. Overall the app works great over both WiFi and 3G, and surprisingly song buffer and sound quality are pretty good over either.

Twitroid: The first Twitter client for Android. Visually, it looks very good, but when you switch back and forth between landscape and portrait you can tell that it's a beta app (it asks you to log in again). It does have features like direct messaging, picture attachments and even search. It's a pretty darn good Twitter client that looks even greater than some of the Twitter apps on the iPhone.

Any Cut: A sort of system-level app that lets you create shortcuts on your home screen to directly call or text someone. You can also make a shortcut to just about any activity on your phone, such as Wi-Fi settings or SIM lock. They all work fine. This is one app you'll definitely have to pick up.

Shutter Speed: This app allows you to enter your SLR or DSLR camera ISO and aperture settings and it will determine the exposure setting that's best. Unless you are a professional photographer this app is going to be very confusing and will seem useless. It only determines a single camera setting and has no ability to take pictures.

WikiMobile Encyclopedia: A portable version of Wikipedia that requires an internet connection to grab articles from the actual Wikipedia and formats it to your screen. It's good—the text is legible and you can swipe from screen to screen—but for larger articles jumping from section to section is a bit of a pain. It's definitely better than reading the Wikipedia site on your browser, that's for damn sure. On a side note, someone needs to update our Wiki page. That thing's ancient.

Weather Channel: Much better than Accuweather, this thing displays wind speed, visibility, humidity and UV index along with a 10 day forecast. It's not filled with links to the Weather Channel site, either, which is great. Definitely a superior weather app compared to Accuweather.

Maverick: This Google Talk instant messenger app allows you to chat with your Google Talk buddies as well as send pictures, scribbles and your current location. The scribbles and pictures are sent by creating a Picasa web album under you Google Talk account. The web album link is sent in a message and the recipient can view it in their web browser. Same goes for sending your location, a link to a Maverick branded Google Maps is sent and the recipient can view it in their web browser. App works quick over both WiFi and 3G.

BreadCrumbz: People can set up routes, which are made up of instructions, notes and photos, for anyone to follow. For example, one of the routes already online was for the "Best Study Room in Stanford", which lead you through the campus to the library, then an elevator, then a study room. I'm surprised there weren't more routes with the label "sexiest room on campus" which lead to some dude's dorm room where he's waiting for you in just a robe, but Android's only been out for a couple days. Neat app, definitely one we'll want to check out more as more routes are released.

Translate: Pretty much just a self-contained app that sends text to the Google translation services and displays it back in whatever language you want. There are 150 "language pairs" covering most of the major languages, so it seems fairly useful if you're traveling and want to ask someone something—just type it out in English and hit translate.

iSkoot for Skype: This app brings Skype calling and chatting to Android. Major downside is it doesn't allow true VOIP because it routes all calls through the cell line, even Skype to Skype calls. So cell minutes are being used on top of Skype credits. The call quality is good and the app works well under both WiFi and 3G.

QuickList: A super simple to do list that lets you type in what you want and tap to strike them out. It's so simple that it doesn't have line wrapping and any item more than two or three words get chopped off. Keep your list items short on this one.

ShopSavy: This barcode scanning app allows you to scan or enter a barcode of any product and will display a range of information. It will search the web and local retail stores, based on your location, for the cheapest prices. You can also read reviews and have an alert for when there is a price drop. The app works great and is really a must have tool for every frugal shopper.

Divide and Conquer: D&C is exactly like the old game you played on a PC 20 years ago (I forget the name) where you draw a line on the screen to box off bouncing balls without the balls hitting your line. The point is to trap the ball in something around 90% of the screen. It's just as fun now as it was then, and best of all it's free. A commenter tells us the old game is called Jezzball, just FYI.

Bonsai Blast: The iPhone equivalent of this is Puzzloop, but it's a game very much like Bust-a-move, except instead of the balls dropping from the top, they go around a track and you have to hit them while they're moving. Definitely fun, and the touchscreen controls are precise enough that you should be able to get through the game without too many crazy misses unless you're a Shaq and you have sausage fingers.

Brain Genius Deluxe: Holy crap! This is like Brain Training for the DS, except free and on your phone. You have four types of exercises, which include observation (which type of leaf did you see the most of) and memory (how should we rotate this picture to get the previous picture). It's as polished a game as we've seen yet on Android, so definitely pick this one up if you're a fan of puzzles games or Brain Training.

CB Blackjack: It's blackjack by Hudson Soft (maker of Bomberman and various other games). It's really difficult to screw up blackjack, but this version is slightly sluggish. Maybe it's the cheesy 1980s game soundtrack? It's blackjack, so if you want blackjack, it's blackjack. Blackjack.

CB Klondike (Solitaire): It's solitaire.

CB Reversi: It's reversi, and you can play with either the scroll ball or by touching the screen. There are guide lines (shown above) if you play using your finger, which cuts down on accidental piece placement. The feel is so retro and so early '90s video game that you actually welcome how cheesy it is. Reversi (or Othello) has always been fun, and you can play this either by yourself or vs. a buddy.

Barcode Scanner: This app allows you to scan a products barcode with options to view a Google product search or web search based on the product's code. Because it doesn't appear to have any other functions ShopSavy is a much better Barcode scanning Android app.

Lights Out: Touch a spot to turn off (or on) the adjacent lights. Purpose is to get all the lights off. Same game you've played for years, so you should know whether or not you like it. No surprises on this one.

Compare Everywhere: A Barcode scanning app that allows for product searches by barcode or keyword and has the ability to create and save shopping / wish lists. By far the most robust barcode scanner app for Android. Will display online and location based prices providing complete store information with maps, directions, phone number and web address.

PicSay: This picture editor is extremely fun is basically a robust image manipulator. After selecting a picture you can add word bubbles, words, props, and effects to transform the image into anything you want. Once your art work is complete you can save to SD or share it using Google mail or messaging.

Locale: This app acts as a settings manager based on a few different personalized conditions. Depending on your battery, time, contact, time, or location your phone can have preset settings that change automatically depending on your set conditions. Right now the only settings options to be changed are ringer, volume, network twitter, and wallpaper. By far the best feature of this app is the ability to have the phone automatically detect your location and mute you ringer, which perfect for those who go to school or work and need to have their phone on silent.

Photostream: This Flickr photo browser app allows you to search a Flickr contacts name and view their photos. There aren't that many features yet but you have the option to save a photo to your phone and also be notified when one of your contacts adds new photos.

cab4me light: This app will find cab companies that service your current or preferred location. Just tap Call Cap and it will give you a list of available cab companies and the ability to call them. Right now the app is pretty basic but the developer states it's currently titled light while they add more features and cab companies.

HotSpot Locator: All this app does is locate the closest T-Mobile Hot Spots. Since the G1 lets you use WiFi for free at any T-Mobile HotSpot location it's kinda nice to have this feature at the touch of your finger. The app is utterly basic though because it's just a link to search results that pull up in the web browser, but still very usable.

iSafe: I can't believe this app is one of the first in the Marketplace. This app searches your location for possible unsafe conditions like sex offenders, reported crime, weather, allergies, air-quality and speed limit so it can alert you if the area is unsafe. The best part about this app is if it detects a registered sex offender nearby it will sound an alert every few minutes saying "Potential Sex Offender Nearby!" Yea I'm not kidding around, this is a real Android app.. CRAZY!

Both Mobihand and Handango are totally allowed to open their own third-party Android app stores, thanks to the “don't worry, you don't need to jailbreak anything,” position Google's taken. But you have to wonder if having a whole bunch of application outlets isn't a tad bit confusing. What does it mean to have so many parallel marketplaces? Will certain stores sell specific apps for cheaper? Can you bargain? With the minutes counting down to the G1 launch, it would be nice if we at least knew how buying things on the Android was going to work.

MobiHand launches the first dedicated Android app store – OnlyAndroid.com.
New App Store launch coincides with release of the T-mobile G1 Android-powered smartphone.
San Mateo, CA. — October 21, 2008 — MobiHand, Inc., a leading provider of mobile content and application stores, today announced that it has launched OnlyAndroid.com, the first store supporting both free and paid applications for Android-powered smartphones.

With OnlyAndroid, developers can sign up, list their applications, and start selling within hours. Applications that are entered in the MobiHand catalog will appear in the new dedicated OnlyAndroid store (at http://www.onlyandroid.com), in the MobiHand store (at http://www.mobihand.com), and within all multi-platform co-branded stores in the MobiHand Network.

OnlyAndroid allows developers to sell their products for a one-time fee or as subscriptions with automated re-billing. The OnlyAndroid store is available both on the desktop and on-device with both versions supporting over-the-air delivery of product files direct to the device for easy installation. Developers can also choose to provide free trial versions of their applications within the store.

The on-device store allows users to easily and quickly browse and search applications that are compatible with their specific phone, viewing by best-sellers, new, updated, free, and discounted categories. Once users have registered, they can purchase applications with a single click and have them delivered over-the-air within seconds. Users can install the OnlyAndroid on-device store by visiting http://onlyandroid.mobihand.com/appstore/.

“Unlike the closed Apple iPhone platform, Android has been positioned as an open environment. Forcing developers to sell, and consumers to buy, apps from a single, tightly-controlled store is unhealthy for the mobile economy,” said Steve Howard, President and CEO of MobiHand. “There is no reason for a developer to work hard creating a great app and to then have it arbitrarily blocked from the consumer. Developers should be free to achieve maximum reach and sales through the most effective channels. We welcome all quality Android applications and we expect to rapidly grow our catalog for Android as we have on all the other smartphone platforms”.

Applications appearing in the launch of the store include “Freecell” from Odesys (game), “Par 72 Golf II” from RESETgame (game), “GoogHelper for Android” from iambic (search utility), “Business Professional Ringtones” from ExecTones (ringtones), and “FotMob” from ScoreService (sports scores).

About MobiHand

MobiHand, Inc. is a leading distributor of software and content for a wide range of mobile devices, including BlackBerryÒ, Windows MobileÒ, PalmÒ, SymbianÒ, and AndroidÒ. With a catalog of over 10,000 mobile applications, media products, and subscription services from over 600 content providers, MobiHand powers hundreds of co-branded app stores worldwide. The company delivers end-to-end services for the aggregation, marketing, purchasing, and provisioning of mobile content. MobiHand’s best-in-class management platform, MobiReach, provides comprehensive tools for catalog management, localization, store design and administration, marketing and ad campaigns, and reporting. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information about MobiHand, please visit corporate.mobihand.com.

• The store payment method will be PayPal. Good.
• Companies will be able to control what applications are downloaded by users. Good for companies, bad for users.
• Storefront will allow any price.
• Developers will retain 80% of the revenue.
• Carriers will be able to distribute software themselves.

[Intomobile]

Hey all,

Looks like an update to the Andoid Market is coming on the 20th. I'm not aware of the changes exactly, but it will require that you re-download any applications you may have downloaded before that point. Remember, the applications are free for the time being so there's no risk of being charged for the downloads. I just wanted you to be aware.
===
Will
Admin, T-Mobile Forums

No reasons yet, though. For now, only these apps are available:

• AccuWeather.com
• Plusmo College Football Live
• Myspace Mobile
• imeem for Android
• Plusmo Pro Football Live
• BlueBrush
• Maverick
• MyCloset
• Cab4ME Light
• e-ventr
• TuneWiki
• The Weather Channel
• BreadCrumbz
• Buzzd

[Android Community—thanks krztov for the update]

To inspire developers, Sony's holding a competition for the best application. For your troubles, you could win either a Bravia 40-inch LCD TV, a Vaio TypeC laptop, or a Blu-Ray player, a Cybershot DSC-T77 or one of their new Walkman music players. Just get your app in before January 8th, 2009. [Sony Insider]

The political applications, sadly, tend to swing pretty far to the side of app absurdity:

Obama/McCain Inauguration Countdown: Tick down the days to January 20 for the candidate of your choice, complete with rotating quotations and photos. Also useful for reminding yourself that the one and a half years of inane campaign coverage on TV will soon be over. Sadly, they're a buck.

BAC Calc: Ahh, but here's some utility for the weekend. A blood-alcohol-level calculator to quantify exactly how hammered you've gotten while getting riled up by McCain and Obama quotes with your buddies. Just enter your consumption, alochol volume of your booze, your weight and your gender. But remember kids, the law won't care if your iPhone says you're under the limit once you find yourself in the drunk tank. Free

Beer Bounce: And once all your friends go home on Monday night, there's no sense in stopping the party when you've got Beer Bounce, the first virtual quarters game for the iPhone. As you progress through the rounds, difficulty is increased by adding blurriness and staggering to the game. Nice touch! $3

Blofeld: While it has nothing to do with anything, really, Bond fans will have to love the concept behind Blofeld. It places an image of a feline pelt on your phone, and purrs when you stroke it, evil genius style. I can't believe this costs a dollar, but again, hats off to the concept, especially the icon.

Earthscape: And just when you thought the App Store was only filled with meaningless pap, there's Earthscape, which brings a great-looking Google Earth-style satellite image browser to your phone. It's a little laggy at times, and the image quality isn't as high as GMaps, but a great way to kill a few minutes if you're stuck in line somewhere. $5

This week's app coverage on Giz:

• Tris, the free Tetris game, was pulled from the store (voluntarily) for copyright violations. Infinite sadness.
• Our Question of the Day found that a typical Giz reader has spent between $1 and $10 on apps, but with many bigger spenders also responding. Go vote if you haven't yet.
• A fairly harmless comic app Murderdrome was rejected from the store, and its creators want a rating system for apps to avoid censorship, which is a great idea.
• A quasi-hologram app looked awesome, but later turned out to be just a proof-of-concept simulation, although its creator wants to make it into reality.
• And the Android Market, Google's answer to the App Store, was officially announced and does not require an approval process to get listed.

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see what you missed last week and check our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good long weekend everybody.

Android Market builds in all of the similar functionalities found in Apple's version: providing the infrastructure to host apps in a centralized place, versioning and update control, and support for free and paid apps (although the pay apps will not be ready for version 1.0). Apple's model of a single, all-in-one app repository definitely makes sense over a Symbian or Blackberry approach, with apps scattered across the web. But where Apple has two phones to deal with, Android will eventually have hundreds, so the system will need to be all the more robust to not allow incompatible code that doesn't require prior approval to crash people's handsets. Still, iPhone developers have not been overly thrilled with Apple's development process, so this should be a relief for them. [Android Developers Blog]

[Apple]

I Am Rich app ported to WM devices

I made this one. Nobody can delete this application now. WM users could be richer than iPhone users :)

Just a joke app. I promise there is no virus.

Thank you, Julien, but that said, use at your own risk. [Clie]

There's supposedly some unwritten rule among app developers that you're not supposed to use the phone's vibration feature for anything but alerts, not game enhancements. That's right. No force feedback when your race car hits a wall or when your avatar takes a blow to the face. Seems quite arbitrary to us, seeing as most people should be able to figure out that a vibration in a game comes from the game itself, not from an SMS message that didn't also pop up a visual notification.

The second was from another developer who didn't follow Apple's design conventions and put a toolbar at the top of the screen instead of the bottom (yeah, notice how all your apps have the toolbar at the bottom?). Not only that, they didn't change the shade or color or icon of any of the entries on the toolbar to allow the user to see which one was selected, which is a bad design decision if we've ever seen one. Not too bad that this one's rejected.

We're sure there are a few more unwritten rules of iPhone development that we don't know about, so if you're a developer that's been rejected for some reason, drop us a note at tips@gizmodo.com. [TUAW]

Update: Jonathan points out that the force feedback rule could be to avoid paying the patent on rumbling controllers that all the major console makers had to dish out on. Most recently (and notably) seen on Sony's PS3.

And in a slightly unusual candid comment, for Steve anyway, he's admitted that the apps won't be making Apple much profit—instead future sales hopes are pinned on the applications tempting people to buy more iPhones and iPod touches. "Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that," he argues, suggesting that now the differentiation is about software.

Clearly the app store has been a success so far for Apple and the developers: The top 10 made close to $9 million in one month. What about the infamous "I Am Rich" app? Apple decided to pull it as the result of a "judgment call."

Steve also confirmed the existence of the kill switch for malicious apps, despite last week's news to the contrary. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull." And you can't argue with that logic. [WSJ]

I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it—but currently can't do so. I have no idea why they [Apple] did it [retire the application] and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store. The App is a work of Art and included a "secret mantra"—that's all.

The fact is that he's right. If there are people wanting to buy a piece of useless software for $999, why not let them do it? After all, people buy even more expensive crap that is completely useless, from paintings to collectibles to other commercial software. The market decides if a product is worth its price tag or not. And at least eight people got this, even if one is claiming that it was an accident. Accident or not, the fact is that Heinrich has pocketed $5,600 and Apple received $2,400 in 24 hours.

Not bad for a bad graphic and a silly phrase. [LA Times]

• Remote: Control your iTunes or Apple TV over the network from anywhere inside your house. I've got a great setup for this that basically broadcasts music to every room of my home, which I will detail in a review next week.

• AIM: It's no iChat and it's not multi-service capable, but it is AIM and it does exactly what you think it does. We covered its shortcomings in the App Marathon, it's still quite a good product.

• Pageonce: The personal assistant that keeps all your online accounts synced to one place for easy reference.

• Twinkle: The Twitter app that we loved on Installer.app makes its way to the iPhone. Why do we like Twitter? Because we're Twitter Shitters.

• Facebook: It's like regular Facebook, but with less functionality! It's fast though, and you can see what that guy who randomly added you is up to.

• Fulpower Motionx-Poker: The realistic dice game gives you something to do when you really, really need to shake things.

• Yelp: Its current location-based search helped us find some good eats when we were down in LA for E3, and should be a good go-to tool if you're visiting a new city.

• Midomi: The free song recognition app can tell you what tune that is on the radio or blaring out of the speakers down at A&F. Beats having to call in to ask.

• Pandora: It's Pandora (the smart radio station) on the iPhone. Makes up for only having 16GB of your music at once.

• NYTimes: Read the NYTimes from the comfort of your iPhone, because Safari isn't quite good enough.

• EverNote: The note-taking app that makes it super easy to jot down or record random thoughts you want to remember later.

• Zenbe: A to-do list that you can sync to a webapp online or share with others. Great way to make collaborative shopping lists that both you and your wife can check off while in the supermarket. Divide and conquer makes grocery time twice as fast.

• MooCowMusic Band: You can fake play instruments.

• CityTransit: A guide to the NYC subway. Obviously, only useful for some of us.

• UrbanSpoon: Its like Yelp, but has a random slot-machine feature that can pick a restaurant for you to eat at. Pretty neat if you want to vary up your dining experience.

• BoxOffice: Look up show times for movies in theaters that are within X distance of your current location.

Developers can’t touch or enhance iTunes or iPod functionality in any way, shape or form—they can’t even access your music directory, meaning you better like the way the iPod button works just the way it is. Don't expect any apps to use your wonderfully curated music library either.

Casualties: Instinctiv Shuffle, a smart shuffle application that learns your skipping behavior to figure what you actually wanna hear next. Tap Tap Revolution became the watered-down Tap Tap Revenge.

No processes can run in the background—apps have to completely quit when exited, completely contained in their little sandbox.

Casualties: IM is a popular example, but Apple’s upcoming push notifications will probably make them a moot rallying point. It also means that third-party copy-and-paste solutions won’t work, since you can’t move the text to another application. Also impossible is a fantasy app of ours, TrippWire, that would record phone conversations (all legal considerations aside).

Devs can't integrate apps or functions into the OS. Third-party apps will always be second-class citizens, and can't significantly alter iPhone functions, including accessing the calendar or SMS messaging or adding any content to the otherwise useless lock screen that appears when you wake up the phone.

Casualites: Intelliborn’s Mario Ciabarra lamented to us that the SDK actually doesn’t give you all the same APIs and tools as Apple, and is missing a whole bunch of critical ones that’d let you add content to the lock screen, access calendar events or mail, or change the way the iPhone responds to events, meaning there’s no way for him to build his app Intelliscreen (above) using the SDK. Instinctiv CEO Justin Smithline also told us that you simply "can't create a well-integrated app," like Instinctiv Shuffle. This set of restrictions "flies in the face" of Apple's own philosophy of the creating beautiful software with the best possible user experience, says Smithline.

Pirated games, movies or whatever are a no-no in the App Store, obviously.

Casualties: NES.app, or any emulator, really, dooming us to bloated, over-priced renditions of Tetris by videogame mega-publishers. Also off limits, a dedicated video streaming app for something like the old Stage6 or QuickSilverScreen, which traffics in content that’s, um, not legally spotless, to say the least.

A bit different than the piracy concern, apps using copyrights, trademarks or intellectual property of a major company are sticky, and the App Store will steer clear of them if they're not developed by the company itself.

Casualties: Apps like TiVoRemote would have to be developed by TiVo or else they'd have dicey prospects, at best. Basically anything involving a company’s intellectual property or trademarks from anyone but the company themselves. An app that'll stream movies from your Netflix "Watch Instantly" account by anybody but Netflix would be another obvious foul.

Devs don't have deep access to the hardware. Jonathan Zdziarski, creator of NES.app and author of a few iPhone books, told us "much of the lower-level functionality has been hidden" in the SDK so "if your application is going to meet the necessarily political requirements, these more powerful features are off-limits."

Casualties: Stuff like Camera Pro, which gives you a ridiculous amount of control over the camera, would have a hard time complying with SDK rules. More than that, Zdziarski says, Apple has "privatized" the CoreSurface framework, which is "making it very difficult for developers to write their own movie players, 2D games, and similar kinds of renderings," especially with performance approaching passable.

Apple's app review process is a complete mystery to developers and takes forever, which can affect app quality and horribly delays app updates.

Casualties: Aurora Feint's developers revealed to us, "How the whole review process [for applications] goes is unknown to us," and that Apple doesn't even tell developers how many times their app is downloaded—they’ve gotta figure it out by the size of the check or have the app report back. NetNewsWire's Brent Simmons related the cloak-and-dagger headaches to Wired, telling them that developers are "not supposed to discuss actually programming on the iPhone with anybody—even though that would raise the quality of the apps." Between July 11 and July 17, Simmons pumped out five updates to its application and none of them had showed up by the 17th.

Apple limits app testing to five devices, so there is basically is no beta testing.

Casualties: Us. We’re the beta testers. Aurora Feint’s developers told us that for app testing, “Apple requires special signing to be done that binds each app to a specific device for debugging purposes,” and it’s limited to five, so they "definitely had some people camping out in our offices" to test. Twitterific creator Craig Hockenberry notes that the iPhone app's crash report come to a dev in a form barely more comprehensible than Swahili, on top of lacking info about what's going on in the phone outside their app. And then, if you do have a fix, there's no way to test it, other than to release it out into the wild through the App Store, "the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette."

On the upside, Apple appears to be launching a beta testing program soon that'll let devs test apps on up to 100 devices, which jibes with what Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem alluded to in a conversation with us. Hopefully it does roll out in the next couple days, as expected. But even then, putting beta software on a device will require the iPhone or iPod serial number, and will still have to snagged through the App Store.

Apple's number one priority is Apple.

Casualties: Basically anything that threatens any of the iPhone’s core functions or key profit centers. Opera told us they aren't developing for the iPhone because the SDK doesn't allow apps "that interpret code, which is essentially what the browser does." Mozilla CEO John Lilly is more acidic in this month’s Wired saying, “Apple makes it too hard” but they’re using “a business argument masquerading as a technological” one. Any formats not supported by Apple essentially don’t exist. AT&T has implied to us that it’s Apple that’s not allowing laptop tethering, though there’s obviously network considerations for the carrier, so we're reasonably, but not totally, sure. The NY Times makes it clear that distributors of free music or video will have it tough too, so don’t expect a MyWaves or a Hulu app until the rules get clearer. Steve Jobs told the NYT that this does represent a competitive threat. "We will compete” with developers’ apps, he said blatantly.

As anyone running the 2.0 software knows, there are definite stability issues, lending a lot of credence to Apple's sandbox for applications—could you imagine it being more unstable? On the other hand, the massive anticipation for the Pwnage 2.0 tool, the vast universe of applications we’re missing out on—not just pirated goodies, but honest-to-God mission-critical wares—shows the SDK clearly doesn't provide everything we need it to. And it might never. But the black market app economy can and does fill the void. Apple might seek to shut it down, but the iPhone's two-class app economy may prove to be its greatest strength.

Related: Gizmodo's Essential Iphone Apps

Twitterific: Works just like the desktop version of Twitterific (it gives you access to Twitter), and also uses the iPhone's location-aware features to geotag your tweets. What it doesn't do, like Twinkle, is give you a feed of Twitter users from around you. It does, however, let you attach photos to pics and let you know if your friends Tweet from a nearby location. Overall, pretty good. Ad-supported version is Free; Ad-free version is $10.

PhoneSaber: Lightsaber application similar to the one on Installer.app. Five choices of iPhone colors and slightly better accelerometer detection for better lightsaber sounds. Free.

Midomi: Song Recognition App that actually works well enough to know when it's being Rickrolled. Free

iTunes Remote: Remote control your iTunes and iTV. It's very, very good, and can even rate songs directly from the phone. Pretty much the perfect iTunes remote. Free.

NetNewsWire: Similar to the RSS Reader on the desktop, which we use daily, NNW on the iPhone lets you read RSS feeds. It doesn't scale images like the web-based Mac RSS reader, so you're going to have to do a bit of panning and scrolling. Other than that, no real complaints. It even syncs with your NNW online account so you can keep your desktop feeds and iPhone feeds the same (in terms of knowing what you already read). Free.

Google Mobile: Location aware searching with auto-suggest, contacts searching as well as local business search (typing in pizza gives you an option to search for pizza near you). Unfortunately, as Lifehacker pointed out, it only searches your contacts, not your calendar or email. One step at a time. Free.

Yelp: Pretty much exactly the same features as the online yelp.com portal, but in a readable format for your iPhone. Search for pizza places, coffee shops, bars or gas stations and you'll be able to check out its hours, the location, the phone number and read reviews. You can drill down from the home screen to Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea, Banks, Gas & Service Stations or Drugstores, or just type in whatever you want. Everyone should download it just to have. Free.

Facebook: Just like the iPhone-customized Facebook webpage, except crashier (crashed when I tried to view the friends list the first time). You can search your friends, do Facebook chat (nice), view your messages and do everything else you could do on the web-based portal. It just crashed when I tried to view my profile too. Free.

Pandora: Your standard internet radio—you pick an artist you like, it recommends similar songs which you then rate to hone its selections. Like always it's better for well-known artists, but its explanation for why certain tracks were picked ("intricate melodic phrasing, a clear focus on recoding studio production, heartbreaking lyrics") are priceless. Pandora claims CD-quality but several tracks sounded compressed. A plus is that streaming works well with very little lag even over EDGE. Album art comes in with that nice page effect; good thing, because that's all you'll be seeing since the app can't play in the background. Free. – John Mahoney

IGN Reviews: Easily get IGN game reviews on the go, either by searching for the game title or browsing a list of recent reviews. If you don't trust IGN for reviews, it's not a huge help, but it does give you a decent idea of what's good and what's not if you're at the game section of Best Buy looking for something to take home. Free.

Save Benjis: Think Pricegrabber or Google Products for the iPhone. Search for a particular product you want and it will throw up a list of prices from various retailers. Useful for going shopping and not knowing whether the TV you're buying will be cheaper online (it usually will be).

Mixmeister: Allows users to perform scratches over the music in their playlist using one of ten available vinyl scratch sounds. I'm not a DJ, but it was easy to pick up and get a decent scratch going right away. Bottom line: it's fun. Free. – Sean Fallon

MotionX-Poker: An addictive dice and poker game that shakes virtual dice by actually sampling your shake of the iPhone and simulating the roll. It's the best original game for the iPhone yet. $5 – Brian Lam

Weight Track A weight log of how much you weigh every day that syncs w/ the website, but also gives you a history of your weight loss. Pretty much just a fancy alternative for a pen and pencil, but not bad if you're trying to lose some weight. Comes with sluggish graphics and animations. Free.

AIM: It's as solid as you'd expect, supporting away statuses, marking contacts as favorites so you can easily find them, groups, away messages and saved messages while you're away from the app. Because background IM notifications won't be here until September, you'll have to go into the app to check whether or not you have new messages. Still, it's good that you don't lose any. Oh, and that really annoying traditional AIM sound is still here and is still super freaking annoying. Don't see a way to turn that off. But there is a system option to sign off when you exit. Free.

MySpace Mobile: I have never used MySpace Mobile on another platform, but I can say that the version for the iPhone is very solid. It ran smooth and provided easy access to every option you could find on the regular site. It sure as hell won't make me want to use MySpace again, but addicts who have an iPhone will undoubtedly be thrilled. Free. – Sean Fallon

Whrrl: Think Yelp, but more-map based and social networking-like. Go to your current location and you can see markers signifying places of restaurants or stores. Click on them to see reviews, write reviews, or place markers saying that you've been there, wanted to go there or that you're there now. This could be cool if you have enough friends using it, but otherwise you're playing around with strangers. Free.

Tiny Violin: A virtual "world's smallest violin" to play to whiners. It plays two tunes which get old fast. Much like the idea itself. $1. – Brian Lam

Bejeweled 2:If you're a fan of the Bejeweled game, you will love this iPhone version. There are two different game modes, Classic and Action. The only difference in between the two is Action mode has a time limit. Game play works as it should, you touch a jewel you want to move then touch the surrounding spot you want it to move to. There's a Hint feature that will advise you to the best jewel to move. The game uses full use of the iPhone's accelerometer, allowing play at any angle. The graphics and sound FX are great, and overall gameplay is smooth without any problems. $10. -Chris Mascari

Box Office: Very simple, incredibly useful—gives you a full list of movie showtimes sorted by name, your location (manual zipcode entry or GPS/celltower reading) or Rotten Tomato rating and kicks you to Fandango to buy tickets. So much better than hitting Google for showtimes in Safari. Free. -John Mahoney

Dial 0: A directory of service 800 numbers with instructions on how to reach a real person for each one, all of them I tried being some variation on "press 0 over and over again." Kind of handy to have all the numbers you might need in one place, but not fantastic. Free. -John Mahoney

Band: Holy Crap this app is fun. There are five different instruments that all play in landscape mode: Rock Kit, Funky Drummer, Bassist, Grand Piano, and 12 Bar Blues. It's able to record every instrument one track at a time, and each time a new instrument is recorded it replays what's already been recorded. Basically you can make a complete musical masterpiece one instrument at a time. There's even audience sounds for added ambiance. While it has the ability to save all your recordings, sadly there is no way to get those recordings off the iPhone. $10. -Chris Mascari

World 9: Start the app and put it in your pocket. As you run and jump it makes Super Mario brothers noises. Free and awesome. -Brian Lam

Shazam: Will also identify songs through the iPhone's mic—doesn't handle humming and singing as well as Midomi, but is tops at picking up ambient background music. -John Mahoney

AOL Radio: Features over 200 stations spanning more than 25 genres of music and over 150 local radio stations from across the US. You can bookmark favorite stations, artists and even link up to iTunes or AOL music when you find a song you like. All-in-all it works well. The sound quality is good, its easy to navigate and you can control the volume right in the app. It also stops playing when you remove your headphones. You can't run it in the background, however. Free. -Sean Fallon

Sketches: The best drawing and photo mockery tool for the iPhone. You can choose different photo or solid or map backgrounds and drop various icons or draw on images and export them out. No text tool. A little slow but worth $8.-Brian Lam>

Comic Touch: Overlay text bubbles on images, and warp faces. Unlike the Sketches app, it has a text tool, but that's it. $5.-Brian Lam>

Crazy Eye: Yeah, this is a program with 10 animations of different eyeballs (dragon, pirate, etc) that switch and move around. You're supposed to hold it up to your face and it's supposed to make you look like a monster or something. It gets old in about 1 minute and costs a buck. -Brian Lam

AP Mobile News Network: A great way to browse the wires for news, photos and videos (really reminds me in a way of the presentation on the Wii, sans the spinning globe sadly). Videos kick you to YouTube. But am I the only one that still remembers AP promising some kind of game-changing user-submitted news submission process at WWDC? That seems to be missing in this version, at least. Free. -John Mahoney

Mosquito: This is an audio/motion game, where you listen to a mosquito buzzing and when it gets close, you swat it by swinging your iPhone. Clever, but for $2, there isn't enough pay off. -Brian Lam

Urbanspoon: If you're hungry but don't know where you want to eat, Urbanspoon makes finding a restaurant pretty fun. It's like a slot machine, listing neighborhoods, cuisines and price ranges in the three columns. When you shake the iPhone, it spins the wheels, delivering a random restaurant to you. You can lock on any or all three of the columns to get something more specific if you want, and clicking the restaurant name brings you to more info about it. Could be fun if you aren't the pre-planning type. Free. -Adam Frucci

Etch-a-Sketch: The Etch-a-Sketch game is essentially a doodling app, allowing you to draw free-form with your fingers on the touchscreen, changing the colors and other such things using the controls at the bottom. If you're a purist, you can use the knobs, but that's just as annoying as it is when you're using the real thing. As you can see by my masterpiece above, doing it freehand lets you use separate lines and you can really make great stuff that you can then send to your friends/boss. Just like with a real Etch-a-Sketch, you erase simply by shaking. $4.99. -Adam Frucci

NY Times Viewer: Basically the same as the AP viewer—but seems a little more clunkily implemented (it's slow, images don't always load, crashed a few times during test). Not as much video. But still a nice way to grab news for reading offline. Free. -John Mahoney

Telegram: This is the only app I didn't buy before writing a review. The $10 app promises to send voice messages between people on your friend list or email. I call it expensive visual email. -Brian Lam

iZen Garden: Ok, I lied, I didn't review this either. Here's a Zen rock garden game for $8. Last time I checked rocks and dirt were free, so fake rocks and dirt should also be free. -Brian Lam

Graffitio: This is supposedly a location aware app that allows you to leave virtual message boards according to your location. You can go to a restaurant and say, "the eggs are great!" and the next user. It's free but I wasn't impressed yet. -Brian Lam

South Park Imaginationland: Help Butters through Imaginationland by making him jump on mushrooms, collect rainbows, and fly. It's even worse than it sounds; the controls suck and by the time I figured out how to play, I was already bored. Still, the sound effects are great and I love South Park, so let me know when there's a Fingerbang game. $10. -Benny Goldman

Battle of Waterloo: This is a choose your own adventure text game. About the battle of Waterloo. "Join the Infantry!" or "Lie Down and Take Cover!" Either way, "Save Your $4 Bucks!" $4 -John Mahoney

Routsey San Francisco: Basically a Next Muni app for your iPhone. You select the SF Muni line you are interested in, and based off your location it will show you the closest stop with arrival times. For some reason the app displays the schedule for the closest stop only. So there is no way to check info for a stop you are not near. $3. -Chris Mascari

LifeGame: Based on Conway's Game of Life, this must be the easiest game ever; simply press play, and it runs itself. Watch and be mesmerized as patterns of black dots form into... something. We're still not quite sure what we're watching, but it looks sweet, like a binary iTunes visualizer. Make and play your own patterns for extra fun. Free. -Benny Goldman

MPG: MPG lets you keep track of how often you fill up your tank and how much you're spending on gas, just in case you somehow forgot. It's slow as hell on the phone we're testing it on, even though it's a pretty simple, but that might just be because we've overloaded this poor iPhone with apps. When it does work, it lets you keep track of your MPG from tank to tank. If you're working on hypermiling, you can find out just how efficient you've been since the last fillup and see how much you've cut back on your driving. $0.99 -Adam Frucci

Zen Pinball: Rollercoaster is a pretty straightforward pinball game. The graphics are nice, and it's pretty smooth. Essentially, you tap the right side of the screen for the right bumper, the left side for the left bumper, and flick on the ball release to fire another ball. You can nudge the table by shaking the phone as well. It's fun enough, but you'd be hard pressed to find this exciting for more than a few minutes. $4.99 -Adam Frucci

Bomberman Touch: The Legend of Mystic Bomb: The developers who totally nail traditional d-pad-plus-two-buttons controls for iPhone games will do everyone a favor—sadly, Bomberman hasn't. Your thumb blocks your Bomberman more than it should. Plus after the first level anyway, gameplay is too slow—not nearly frantic enough to rival the classics. $8. -John Mahoney

Aqua Forest: This water moving game uses both the touchscreen and accelerometer of the iPhone for controls. With five different categories, Tilting, Touch, Drawing, Warm/Cold, and All Functions there are 50 different puzzles that require either tilting, touching or both. There is even a Free mode, where you can create your own little atmosphere of stuff like water, fire and ice, and then by tilting/shaking the iPhone you can mix it all up. -Chris Mascari

Mobile Flickr: Full-featured Flickr app, you can browse your photos by sets, tags, and more. Photo browsing is comparable to the iPhone's built in browser, and you can even assign a picture to a contact. It was slow to take pics and save them, but uploading to Flickr over Wi-Fi was fast. The only problem? The picture was upside down on Flickr! $3. -Benny Goldman

Exposure: This app is just designed for looking at Flickr pics, and has no upload feature. It shows recent pictures taken by others near your location which is cool, but browsing was slow and it only shows one picture per line. Skip this app, it's worth shelling out the $3 for Mobile Flickr, especially when Exposure Premium costs $10 and only removes an ad banner. Free. -Benny Goldman

CityTransit: The undisputed king of the NYC subway map apps. It's the only one with the officially licensed maps, it'll plot your nearest subway stations on a Google Map for easier navigation, includes service advisories, includes LIRR and Metro North as well as an antique map, looks beautiful—does it all. And at $2.99 it's the cheapest—don't touch the other two, especially the $15 one. $3. -John Mahoney

Alarm Free: Alarm Free is a pretty simple, and pretty stupid, app. Basically, it's a picture of an alarm. If you shake your phone, the alarm goes off and makes an annoying noise. Touch the screen to make it stop. Apparently,

it's designed as a self-defense program, and you're supposed to hold it up to an attacker to scare them off. If you hold this up to an attacker, they will steal your iPhone, then probably give you an extra hard beating for assuming they were dumb enough to be scared by flashing lights on your phone. Free. -Adam Frucci

GuitarToolKit: A companion app for your guitar that has many different tuning pre-sets (it detects sound via your iPhone's mic), standard tone generation, a metronome and chords. Tuning my bass guitar that I've been too lazy to tune for a year and a half was fast and easy, and the tone generation was useful to remember which note each string was supposed to be. Chords and metronome will be great when I get around to playing it again. $9.99 is about the price of a cheap tuner, but this is even better since you have your iPhone with you always.

Sudoku (The EA Version): There are an infinite amount of ways to make a Sudoku game, some of which are fast and easy, some of which are good and well thought out. This is definitely the latter. EA shows off its decades of game experience with slick menus, smooth animations, good touch sensitivity and even an opening intro. There's even Japanesey background music to help you concentrate. The game itself has intuitive controls as well—intuitive for entering numbers that is. $7.99. Not too steep.

Scrabble: EA's version of Scrabble supports playing against the computer or multiplayer, but only in the sense that you take your turn and pass the phone around. No wireless gaming, which is something we would have liked. Otherwise, there's quite a bit of polish, including a slightly over-long intro movie and the ability to drag letters from your tray into the correct slot. You can play with a grand total of four friends, which is great since each one will be able to chip in $2.50 for this somewhat steep price. $9.99.

Bank of America Mobile Banking: Lets you access your account information to see recent statements, transfer money or find BoA locations. This sounds like it has great potential if it were developed al in the iPhone's UI, but only the login procedure is. The bulk of the application is just their mobile banking web page, which looks really ugly, and doesn't fit in with the iPhone's UI style at all. It's free, but we wouldn't use this unless you really needed to see if some transfer came through while you're outdoors. BoA needs to go back and re-do everything correctly.

YPMobile: Free Yellow Pages access app that can use your current location to find whatever it is you're usually looking for in the Yellow Pages. Each entry has a star rating and its distance from you. You can also look up events, make a custom list of your own "plans", or add a business to your favorites. It's free and should be quite useful.

Enigmo: It's the same physics-based game where you used various objects to deflect water and lasers from a starting point to an ending point that people have been playing on the Mac for years. The graphics aren't great for the Mac, but they're perfect for the iPhone. Everything runs smoothly and dragging objects around feels natural. You'll have to do a bit of scrolling around because the screen isn't quite as big as you'd like, but it's definitely a fun game. $9.99.

Jared: A stupid yellow face that sings at you. Good thing this is free, because it gets old fast.

WeatherBug: It's like the default Weather app, but trades slick brevity for ugliness. However, with that ugliness comes a whole lot more information, like the heat index, humidity, dew point, rain amount, wind speeds and wind direction. There's also radar, which didn't actually work for us for some reason, and cameras, which you can use to spy on the high schools and elementary schools that have weather cameras installed. Wait, this sounds kinda pervy. Do you really need all that information? Probably not. It's free though, so if you're some kind of curious monkey, here you go.

Currency: A quick currency converter that shows how much one amount (default s dollars) is in 9 other currencies of your choice. Easy to use and useful when either traveling or when you have to convert money for some reason. Free!

RotaryDialer: The idea is good—an old school rotary dialer that you use via touch—but the execution sucks. Where's the noise that a rotary dialer makes??! Seriously? You're going to make this app without that noise? Go back and do this again. Free, but disappointing.

Trism: A sliding puzzle game that's slightly similar to Bejweled, but actually uses the iPhone's acclerometer to detect which direction is down. This affects gameplay by changing which direction triangles fall when you've made a match. For $4.99, it's a pretty sweet game.

Jott: It records voice memos and converts them into text notes. Swipe a task after you complete it, and it strikes through the words. I'm more likely to keep track of tasks now that I can speak them instead of tapping them in on the keyboard, but for Jott to be consistently useful they must improve speech recognition and recording length, add more of the features offered in their phone-based service, and send crossed out notes to the trash. Free. – Benny Goldman

GoLearn Fitness Plus: This fitness app combines trainer videos that gives you tips about exercising at the gym, running, hiking or cycling. Each workout comes with a demonstration so you know you're doing it right, plus has a log tracker so you can enter in your reps or your miles/time for running and hiking. At $19.99, the "Plus" version incorporates all the other workouts of the four individual versions at half the total price. An hour with an actual fitness trainer like our Sean Fallon costs more than $19.99, and they won't even show you what to do all the time or remember every set you've ever done. There's also a home workout if you're not really the gym-going type. Seriously, $19.99 is cheap for getting in shape and not dying early.

eBay: A basic looking but extremely well rounded eBay app for the iPhone. By signing in you have the usually My eBay options of displaying what is being watched, sold, etc. What makes this app amazing is its iPhone specific eBay item / page browser. Scrolling through listings is easy and loads fast. Once at an item age, the iPhone displays the most important information with links to bidding, buying, watching, description, and pictures. The pictures page has a gallery style display, which is very nice. Free. – Chris Mascari

PayPal: This app is pretty limited and doesn't feel like a finished product. With only two real features, ability to check your PayPal balance or send money, this app is kinda useless. Free. – Chris Mascari

Expenses: Expenses by Nexonia is a free download, but it actually isn't free. Super lame. You have to pay $10 a month to their subscription service, which isn't worth it unless you're really heavy into expenses for your company and they don't already have a system in place, you can easily keep track of your expenses with the default notes application. $10 a month = no thanks.

Cro-Mag Rally: This game is pretty fun but definitely takes some time to get used to. It's basically Mario Kart for the iPhone with a caveman theme. Steering uses the iPhone accelerometer and actually works well once you get the hang of it. There are 9 different race tracks and 11 different vehicles to drive, which combined with the superb graphics, makes this game a good time. $10.

CowToss: The self-proclaimed worst iPhone app ever, CowToss lets you bounce a static animation of a cow up and down on your screen. That's it. Shamefully overpriced at $0.99, unless electronic irony is your thing. - Dan Nosowitz

iMilk: This little app uses the iPhone's motion sensor to tell when the phone is being tipped, like a glass. So if you tip the phone forward, the "milk" inside will drain out pretty realistically. If you shake the phone, it'll foam up like milk. A fun show off app but pricey at $2.99. - Dan NosowitziPint: Just like iMilk, only with a more "mature" substance, a 3.5-inch tall glass of beer. Definitely worth the free download, though you must be 17 to order. - Dan NosowitzCrazy Mouth: Similar to Crazy Eye, but with animations of mouths like a robot and a cheerful whistler. The animations are a little more elaborate than Crazy Eye and a little more entertaining. Worth the $1 if you've got it to toss around. - Dan Nosowitz

Banner Free: Turns your phone into a scrolling LED-style banner. I can see this becoming annoying pretty quickly, when someone downloads it and only communicates with the outside world via scrolling banner. Still, it's fun for now, and free. -Benny Goldman

Shakespeare: The complete works of Shakespeare condensed into a ~3MB app. Adjustable font size and easy to navigate menus are good, but I'd like to see search and highlighting capabilities. It's free, which is a refreshing change from so many other public domain books that are going for $1 in the app store. -Benny Goldman

G-Park: G-Park uses the A-GPS to mark where your car is parked. When you want to return to the spot, press a button for turn-by-turn directions. If you constantly get lost in the parking lot, it's worth the $1. -Benny Goldman

Mindwarp: "Duuude! Stare at this trippy swirly picture for 30 seconds and then, like, check out your hand! It's insane!" Sorry, I ran out of whatever drug I needed for this a long time ago. $1 -Benny Goldman

Scribble: A simple drawing application with four colors and one brush size. Pictures can be saved to your photo library, but can't be edited once you leave the app. Not the best sketching app we've seen, but it's the most free. -Benny Goldman

Frisbee Golf: This game takes the only good part of playing disc golf—going outside, maybe drinking a beer—and ditches it. Too hard to aim, too much unnecessary 3D and not very fun. To the hippies that would buy this: You're better off saving your money for what you normally spend it on. $3. -Benny Goldman

Loopt: A location based social network app that will display what your friends are doing and where they're at. There are a slew of features like uploading pictures to show what you are doing and even integrated Yelp! reviews on the map. Overall the app works great and is pretty fun but will drain your battery like a motherfucker. Free. -Chris Mascari

Cube Runner: Cube runner follows the Monkey Ball style of using the accelerometer for tilt-based controls to navigate your...um...arrow through a drab-looking mess of cubes. It's intuitive and fun, but once you get tired of chasing the high score, there's little reason to go back to it. Free. -Adrian Covert

Tetris:Let's be honest - Tetris isn't exactly the most ambitious project for a company like EA Games. That's probably why the company's iPhone port is a little overdone. The basic gameplay functions are well thought out and the touch-focused controls are completely intuitive, though we'd be pretty disappointed to find any kind of learning curve for a Tetris game. EA obviously wanted to use a bit of the iPhone's rendering capability, but the graphics are gaudy to the point of distraction. Anyone looking for a simple, clean port like Tris (from the jailbreak days. See you soon, Tris...) should probably pass, but if you need a fix now I guess you don't have much of a choice. At $9.99 you can expect a decent competitor to pop up at a lower price point, if not for free. -John Herrman

Twitterific: Great implementation of the service - smooth menus, fast updates, can embed photos and locations in your tweets natively. And it looks great. Free with ads, $10 without. -John Mahoney



Twittelator: Gets the job done, but it's buggy. Occasionally can't connect to the server, and the interface is not nearly as polished as Twitterific. Free. -John Mahoney



Twittervision: Cool visualization of tweets from around the world in real time that matches the website of the same name. Also lets you track location-tagged tweets that are in your area and provides very basic updating. Fun, but use it with Twitterific, not instead of. Free. -John Mahoney

Mocha VNC Lite: Mocha is a VNC client that supports full QWERTY and safari-like zooming as well as landscape mode. Double click works, but right click doesn't, but there is no official App store equivalent so this is your desktop remote client of choice. -Brian Lam

Twinkle: This Twitter app oneups Twitteriffic by not only showing who's twittering, but where they're doing it. Paired with a great UI, Twinkle is a winner. Free. -Matt Buchanan

Aurora Feint: Aurora Feint is a bastard mix of Bejewled, tilt controls and an RPG (laying the groundwork for an MMO). Sounds weird, but it's pretty damn fun. -Benny Goldman

MealSplitter: MealSplitter is a tip and check splitting app to help you figure out who owes what at the end of a meal. Unfortunately, it evidently does a lousy job, unable to calculate separate meal prices correctly: one person's expensive item will be split evenly among everybody. - submitted by Kenny Crochet

iRetrophone: Rotary phone UI for the iPhone. You enter numbers and hit call. Funny, great sound effects, but not worth $3.

NetSketch: Cool Bonjour-like collaborative drawing app for passing notes and crude anatomical sketches over Wi-Fi. See our video review here. $8

Where: Yet another geo device, this one linked to yelp, starbucks, zipcar, skymap and gasbuddy locations, each on different maps. It even has buddy beaconing, but I'd rather just use yelp and loopt for buddies. Bad news: Doesn't always work. Good news: It's free.

Crash Bandicoot: Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D is a Mario Kart-like 3D racer with Crash Bandicoot at the wheel instead of the chubby Brooklyn plumber. For $9.99, we expect better.

MLB's At Bat: If you like baseball, buy MLB's At Bat. It's worth $5. Every game today, yesterday and tomorrow with a full inning-by-inning rundown and video highlights in a slick interface. On Wi-Fi, they load fast, and you can make out the back of a player's jersey while it chugs at a solid framerate. On 3G, you'll wish a pop fly knocked your eyes out. - Matt Buchanan

All reviews written by Jason Chen, unless otherwise noted.