TiVo's approach here is direct and clear: This is a basic scheduling app, for searching for, reading about, and marking content for recording, in situations when you can't get to a computer—though a good mobile app can keep a lot of people away of TiVo's TV interface for good. It'll work with Series2 or Series3 standalone TiVos, and BlackBerrys running OS 4.2.0 or later, and should be available in App World starting this morning. [TiVo]

Given that Torch Mobile only makes one piece of software (currently unavailable), that they say their main contribution to the aforementioned "enhancement" will be "utilizing [their] WebKit-based mobile browser expertise," and that the iPhone, Android and Symbian have made WebKit the de facto standard for decent mobile web browsing, it's not hard to guess what's going on here. Also interesting: This comes just a week after rumors that BlackBerrys would soon(ishly) support Flash and Silverlight out of the box.

Now that we know RIM is serious about WebKit, the only questions left start with "when?" You know, like when will BlackBerry OS ship with its first WebKit browser? And when will everyone else finally just give up on doing anything else? [Torch Mobile via BGR]

BlackBerry Messenger 5.0: It's a leak and installing it is at your own risk, but if you've got a relatively recent BlackBerry—anything after the Curve 8300—it should be compatible with your device. Why take the risk? It integrates GPS location, has a proximity sensor, and other features and aesthetic niceties. Grab it here, if you dare.

Google Voice: We mentioned it before, but it's worthy of another shoutout—after all, we're talking about a native Google Voice app for your BlackBerry here. It's not quite as tightly integrated as the Android app (wonder why that could be), but it does make it easier to make calls from Google Voice number and manage your inbox from your BlackBerry. Download it here.

Camera to Go: Promise you won't use this to be creepy. CameraToGo lets you silence your BlackBerry's shutter sound and take timed shots. It won't work with CDMA BlackBerrys for some reason—maybe that's for the best. It's $5, but CrackBerry's got a free trial. Download is here.

Verizon FiOS Remote DVR: Storm only for now, with Curve (and presumably Tour) support "coming soon," this one's pretty self-explanatory: It lets you scope out TV listings and remotely program your FiOS set-top box to record TV shows. Yay synergy. Snag it here.

Slacker Radio on BlackBerry Storm: Whether you want it or not, Slacker Radio is getting pushed by Verizon to your BlackBerry Storm.

Pandora 1.1: The latest version of Pandora for BlackBerry now streams in stereo AAC+. Update here.

Tweeteev: Supposedly coming out any day now, tweetev is one of the flashier BlackBerry Twitter apps we've seen—up there with TweetGenius. It looks fairly full-featured too: Trends, search, multiple account support and plenty of pop. We'll have to wait and see if it's actually "disruptive," but you can sign up to be pinged when it's out here.

WordPress for BlackBerryI don't know who the smarmy European narrating their intro video is or who picked the ridiculous elevator music playing behind him, but it's only forgiveable since we've finally got an official WordPress for BlackBerry. It looks pretty hideous on older BlackBerrys (the 8700 version makes me want to barf) but feature-wise, it seems fairly solid in terms of actually putting crap up on your blog. It's a beta, so if it breaks on you, don't expect to wag your finger too hard. Grab it here.

Bolt Browser Beta 3: While we wait for Skyfire for BlackBerry to go all public, in the meantime we've got the WebKit-powered Bolt browser, which has hit beta 3. Besides adding in basics that were missing before, like copy and paste, direct text entry and the ability to kil images for faster loading, you can do stuff like upload to YouTube and Photobucket now. Oh, and it's faster. Download it here. (Image via BlackBerry Cool)

More BlackBerry App Coverage:

• BlackBerry OS 5.0 Gets Tabbed Browsing
• NYC Exit Strategy: The Other NYC Subway App You Need
• Google Voice on BlackBerry
• MyBlackBerry Social Network Gives BlackBerry, App World Users a Place to Whine About BlackBerry, App World
• BlackBerry's Getting a Music Store in September

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good week!

Just pick the line, your stop, and whether you're going uptown or downtown. (Yes, it works offline, since there's no AT&T in the subway, or anywhere in NYC it seems at times.) It shows which subway car is closest to which exit. Like say if you're going to Union Square and want to get off at the 16th St. end, not 14th by the carcass of the Virgin Megastore. Used every time you're on the subway for a year, the hour of time you save not wandering from one end of the subway station to another to get out where you need to easily adds up to $2.

Maybe best of all, it's available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and even Kindle. [Exit Strategy NYC via superfem!]

Stitcher: Formerly an iPhone/iPod touch app, Stitcher lets you cut together podcasts to stream them to your phone as virtual radio stations. Mostly news(ish) content, but it spans from the Wall Street Journal to Slate and we'll take free streaming audio wherever we can get it. Free at App World or OTA for Curve, Bold and Storm. (Image via Crackberry)

LEDReset: Simple, but great: Turns off your BlackBerry's LED light until the next alert. Grab it here OTA. Free.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.ScoreMobile BlackBerry: Real-time sports scores for MLB, NHL, NBA, and PGA from Canadia's theScore—so perhaps their Canadian numbers aren't to be trusted. Supposedly, more sports are coming this summer. I'm hoping for PBA scores, personally, since it's been way too long since I've bowled. Free at App World or OTA.

Slacker 2.0: With the latest version of Slacker Radio, song transitions and skip times are supposed to be damn near instant. All of the regular features are still there, obviously, with full stereo over any connection and offline caching being two of its biggest perks. Free in App World.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.SmrtGuard for BlackBerry: What makes SmrtGuard worth a look is that it rolls up a bunch of security features for the always-losing-their-damn-phone crowd into one tasty combo: Location tracking, remote data wipe and remote backup and restore. Oh, and stealth listening, so you can hear whoever picked up your phone gloating. I'm sorta surprised RIM doesn't actually bake all of this into the OS, but SmrtGuard delivers it for $4 a month or $45 for the year.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.ForceRadioOn: Do you hate it when your BlackBerry kills the phone because the battery is moments away from death? ForceRadioOn speeds your phone to its doom by turning the cellular radio on against its will, so you can gab for a few fleeting seconds. Free here and other app stores.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.BB: Robot Scheduler: The range of this robot schedule slave is pretty impressive. You can schedule emails, texts, audio recordings, GPS location sharing, or pretty much anything else you can do on BlackBerry, in simple or more complex arrangements. It's only available for the Bold and Storm at the moment. $6 OTA here.

BlackBerry App Coverage:

• BlackBerry Facebook 1.6 Is More Like Real Facebook
• New BlackBerry Messenger Is Much Better [BGR]
• RIM Acquires Dash Navigation (no app from this yet, but there totally will be!)
• Every Mobile Browser Should Just Give and Go WebKit

This list is in no way definitive (especially cause it's our first!). If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend everybody!

The first thing you'll notice about these efforts—coming from such traditionally competitive companies as Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft—is just how similar they all sound. App World? App Catalog? App Market? Mobile Marketplace? This outward likeness actually runs pretty deep—these stores are advertising uncannily similar feature sets, for both users and developers:

Although it might not evident in the feature-by-feature breakdown above, there are two distinct kinds of app store: The primary store, which is the first and only source of an OS's apps (see Apple), and the secondary store, which is built around an existing stock of third-party apps, and with preexisting developers in mind (see BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Nokia). It's a combination of these different lineages and divergent policy choices that make the smartphone app store experience so varied.

Apple's iPhone App Store
At least for now, the App Store is the standard by which all others are judged. Beyond that, it's given us a rough guide for what works. With a $99 dollar developer's fee and a novice-friendly SDK, the barriers of entry for an iPhone developer are fairly low. Distribution, payments and to a large extent marketing are managed by iTunes, which iPhone owners are necessarily familiar and comfortable with.

And, of course, there's the iPhone: This store may only serve one handset (and its very similar nonphone brother), but it's a wildly popular one. This makes the app store uniquely attractive to developers, because it provides access to the largest uniform app-buying market in the world. Microsoft can argue that Windows Mobile 6.5 will connect developers to x gajillion different customers through y zillion different handsets, but this variety is a curse: Handsets have different resolutions, processors, 3D hardware, input types and basic feature sets. A motion-sensing 3D game with a GPS social networking feature won't work on a lot of WinMo handsets, but a 2D, keypad-controlled Asteroids clone won't make a developer rich.

But the App Store is far from perfect. Apple, like all App Store owners, has the final say in what gets listed, delisted or banned, and they aren't afraid to remind us of this. Along with the typical risque/racist/infringing content prohibitions, Apple enforces strict and often limiting rules against apps that compete with the iPhone's native set—iTunes, Mail.app, Safari to name a few—and apps that their partnered carriers aren't too fond of, i.e video streaming and tethering apps. Now, all these rules are showing signs of loosening with OS 3.0, but as long as the App Store is the sole source of iPhone apps, any rules will seem like too many rules—especially if you're accustomed to a totally unregulated system like Windows Mobile 6.1's. Hence, the gray market.

Android App Market
This second major entrant into the app store race represents a consciously different approach than Apple's, but not in that many ways. Immediately, we see a lot to compare: A single-handset userbase (at least for now), low costs for developers and a presence as the primary—though not sole—source of apps from Day One.

But the App Market is a different breed than the App Store. Most importantly, it's not the only place you can get apps. Google has been much more lenient about what they allow in their store since the beginning but in the rare case that they don't approve of an app, as in the case of tethering apps earlier this month, you can just go download an .APK file and sideload it onto your G1 anyway. This is a healthy middle ground for everyone involved; Google doesn't alienate users by destroying entire categories of apps, but isn't forced to come into conflict with carriers because of overly liberal policies. Google has also made their Market more friendly to consumers, with a no-questions 24-hour return policy.

Great! Then why is the App Market so underwhelming? Well, the G1 wasn't exactly a runaway hit, and the store got off to a slow start. Paid apps weren't made available for months after launch, and when they arrived they didn't benefit from the convenience and familiarity of a storefront like iTunes. Moreover, there's no guarantee that things will change that much in the coming months—more handsets from more manufacturers will boost Android's user numbers, but will lead to the WinMo-style toxic fragmentation that Apple so adamantly avoids.

BlackBerry App World
Matt took a dive into the newest mobile app store, and found it agreeable, but not spectacular. RIM's is the beginning of this "secondary" app store concept, and it shows: You'll be hard-pressed to find anything here that wasn't previously available elsewhere. It is simply an aggregator for existing applications.

This was a given, as developers have been cranking out BlackBerry apps for years now. But App World was a great opportunity for RIM to give the lethargic dev community a shot in the arm. Instead of doing that, they've made the store almost hostile to would-be app writers.

Listing your wares in App World costs a hefty $200, which gives you the right to upload 10 apps, but doesn't come with any new SDKs or development tools. The payment system is PayPal, which is clumsy to use and a pain to set up. A minimum non-free price tier of $2.99, probably intended to filter out spammy apps and cover PayPal's transaction fees, discourages developers from even trying to make simple, useful apps, eliminating the $.99-to-$1.99 sweet spot that has been central to Apple's success. App World feels like an afterthought, and a reluctant one. UPDATE: It should be noted that the 70% dev revenue share figure in the chart is incorrect, and has been update to 80%—a marked advantage over the other stores.

Windows Mobile Marketplace
With Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft will introduce the Windows Mobile Marketplace. So far, their announcements have shown an awareness of the pitfalls of both Apple's and RIM's approaches: They're emphasizing non-exclusivity and app approval transparency, a 24-hour return policy and wide device support, but also making sure to get big-name app and game developers on board to ensure that users actually have something new to look forward to at launch.

On the developer side, it's a mixed bag. As in every other store, the dev take-home is 70% of each sale, but the listing fees aren't great. $99 gets you five apps a year, but anything beyond that will cost an additional $99. I'm sure this will help vaccinate the Marketplace against the fart app epidemic that Apple has proven so prone to, but it'll do so at the expense of potentially useful free and $0.99 apps—again, a crucial price range. One important factor that's still TBD is the payment system. Microsoft says they'll support both credit card payments and carrier charges, but hasn't yet said how that'll look. In both cases the process will need to be as seamless as possible.

Nokia Ovi Store
You probably haven't heard much about this store, set to debut within a month, but it's kind of a big deal for the 40m+ Symbian S40 and S60 users that it'll serve apps to. It's planned to shoehorn into Nokia's new Ovi app suite, which we were introduced to with the XpressMusic 5800, and provide a go-to source for not just apps, but ringtones, wallpapers, and basically everything else that you might have found in a 2001 vintage carrier WAP store.

There has been a decided lack of fanfare surrounding this launch, probably because there just aren't that many Nokia smartphones in the US. But its success or failure will be informative: It will be the most open of all the app stores. For the time being, there is no developer fee, and app listings are free and unlimited. You can easily publish tons of different kinds of content—Flash Lite apps, Java apps, Native S60 apps, multimedia uploads and others—which will be subject to a vetting process that Nokia has assured will be minimal. As Nokia-averse Americans, we can view the Ovi Store as an experiment in laissez-faire app-mongering—a multi-handset, mixed-media, unfiltered feed of Symbian content.

Palm App Catalog
And finally, we have Palm's App catalog. This is the store we know the least about, but that is already set for a different course than all the others. At launch, the only handset it'll serve will be the Pre—though Palm has indicated that other WebOS handsets are inevitable. It'll be the first—and likely exclusive—source of WebOS apps, and developers will be furnished with a solid, though fundamentally limited, SDK.

Palm's still-vague plan for the App Catalog will no doubt be central to the success or failure of the Pre, but we can make an educated guess at what to expect, assuming that Palm doesn't get taken over by idiots in the next couple months: Palm will vet the apps thoroughly, provide an in-house payment system, and make development simple and cheap (previewed Mojo SDK apps have shown great promise). The end result will probably look something like the iPhone App Store, but with one huge difference: there will be no local natively running apps—the Mojo SDK doesn't provide for that, just for what amount to turbocharged, locally-stored web apps. Granted, these web apps will have privileged access to some of WebOS's core functions, but it's doubtful that high-end gaming, as we've seen on the iPhone, will even be possible on the platform. These limitations (along with WebOS's multitasking advantages) will affect the nature and quality of the apps that are listed in the store much more than the Catalog's policies, though exactly how, we'll have to wait and see.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions about app stores, SDKs or the finest in fart-app technology to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Sure, you see people's numbers, but not their name, when they call you. What if it's a telemarketer? That's Privus's pitch. Also, they claim their app actually delivers the caller name "nearly twice as often" as the lame one you have on your landline.

You have to leave it running constantly, and it curiously says in the description "Privus Mobile delivers names after call completion or if you miss the call for BlackBerry (RIM) devices." Uh, doesn't that defeat the whole point of this pricey caller ID? To know whether or not I should miss the call and let it fall into the inescapable abyss of voicemail or pick it up?

Update: Privus explains that it's "due to BlackBerry's lack of support for simultaneous data voice. Although incoming calls use voice capabilities, the Privus Mobile application utilizes data capabilities to ping its database and deliver comprehensive caller information to the handheld. BlackBerries are the only Privus Mobile-compatible devices that receive the caller information post-call." It's real-time w/ Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Our attempts to run the free trial failed multiple times, and it asked me to pay to upgrade right off the bat. So maybe it's more like a "cheap trial." [Privus Mobile]

Currently, the selection in BerryStore is thin, consisting mostly of location based services, Google related apps and bookmark icons for news services, but they're accepting submissions for more apps. The service also plans to incorporate paid apps in the future, though everything available now is free. BerryStore uses a standalone client on the Blackberry to search and browse apps, then connects to the Blackberry browser when its time to download. BerryStore is available now. [BerryStore via TechCrunch]