This is hypothetical, but if there is a building with known terrorist activities, it could automatically be pushed to the phone when the soldiers get near that area. If there was another platoon that was supposed to arrive, and they were delayed, or ahead of schedule, you could adapt your plan. If one of the units you are counting on is redirected, you know that in real time.

He points out that it can also be used for police, firemen, and emergency services too. The iPhone itself is being retrofitted for battlefield operation by Raytheon, which is adding a ruggedized case that includes a larger battery and a special scrambler that will secure communications with other military units. [NYT]

Ok, so it's not just for the nearsighted, with the Lou Zoom app promising to "bring style and clarity to your contacts." Cutting the rockstar hyperbole, it increases the size of the contact name, displaying it in a stark white-on-black effect. As it's only $2, why don't you go for a walk on the wild side, and download it? Oh, don't be so vicious. [Lou Zoom via Wired]

Resolution is 160×213. At three frames a second. Three. And you only record for one minute. But you can share your cruddy video lots of places real easy!

It's kind of a brilliant move, letting this fly, to muffle anybody complaining about video not making it to older iPhones, when it's even on the goddamn iPod nano. Who would want video this shitty on their phone? Nobody. (Never mind that Cycorder, a jailbreak app, somehow manages 15fps at a res of 384x288). [iTunes via TheAppleBlog]

The app features some of the hallmarks of Bing, like the endless image search, image of the day and voice control. Some key features:

* Daily image from Bing.com
* Easy to access voice search
* Tips and tricks on the home page
* "Locate Me" functionality
* Ability to add pushpins and save locations
* Show multiple locations on a single map

This app joins similar apps already available for WinMo, BlackBerry and Sidekick (though not Android: Wonder why!) and is available now, for free, here (link opens iTunes). [Bing]

Pastebot's core functionality is to act as a basic clipboard, collecting your various copied snippets and photos into a browsable archive. It can handle anything that the iPhone can natively, meaning text, photos and HTML content copy fine, while videos, audio, or browser plugin content don't. Once the data is collected, Pastebot can process it—photos can be run through filters, HTML can be parsed, text can be converted to uppercase or lowercase, etc. To put a clipping back onto the iPhone's main clipboard, you just select the item, and it's ready for pasting.

Pastebot's real victory is its free sync app, available for Mac. When this is running on a computer in the same wireless network as the iPhone, which is also running Pastebot, anything copied on the computer is immediately synced to the iPhone, and anything copied on the iPhone can be synced to the desktop, where it replaces whatever is currently in the OS X clipboard. Watching whatever you copy pour onto your iPhone is a joy, not least because the interface on this thing is beautiful.

My one gripe: Since apps can't run in the background, in order for Pastebot to collect what you've copy, it needs to be started. That's each time you copy something—if you couple more than one thing in a row and then open Pastebot, only the latest will show up. Still though, this is some tremendous utility for $2. [Pastebot]

Yeah, it's an Apple-dominated bunch of remainders. Maybe I'll make tomorrow's three-fourths Microsoft for some balance.

Kindle iPhone App Now Available for Over 60 Countries

If you live in one of the many countries previously ignored when it came to availability of the iPhone Kindle App, you can stop crying: The handy-dandy app can now be downloaded through the App Store in over 60 countries. If you're still somehow overlooked, then I'm very sorry and wish I could offer you a tissue. [App Store]

Apple Named Takes Best Brand, Best Ad, Best Marketer, Best Award Winner Titles

Adweek just wrapped up their "Best of the 2000s" Awards and Apple walked away with three shiny pretend trophies. One for the brand itself, one for marketing strategies, and one, oddly enough, for the "Get a Mac" ad campaign. Congrats to them, and while at it: Congrats to Gawker for taking the "Blog of the Decade" award in the same listing. Now are we done with these awards yet? [The Loop]

Google Brings Yet Another URL Shortener Into the World

As if we don't have enough URL shorteners, Google has decided to toss in one of their own making into the new versions of the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. I'll admit that http://goo.gl/ is kinda clever and that at least there's some assurance that links won't mysteriously disappear overnight as with some tiny websites, but I still groaned when I read about yet-another-damn-URL-shortener. [Google Blog]

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess that the Battleship concept would work great on the iPhone, and to be fair, Hasbro and EA at actually kind of late to their own party—a handful of Battleship-style games that aren't quite infringey enough to get zapped by Hasbro's lawyers are still lurking around the games section of the App Store, and some of them are pretty popular. None, though, are nearly as good as the official version, which went live today.

Hasbro teamed up with Electronic Arts for this one, and it shows: The app has the same feel as EA's other franchise conversions, which is to say it's well produced, if a little overdone. All they really had to do to make this work was give us a literal port of the board game; instead, we get six gameplay modes—three single-player and three multiplayer—3D cutscenes and gratuitous animations. It's a little excessive, yeah, but by giving you a option to tap through or totally turn off the cutscenes, EA makes sure it doesn't get in the way.

The basic gameplay mode is a direct adaptation of the traditional Battleship game, Salvo Mode speeds things up by letting you fire as many shots as you have ships left, and Superweapons adds new firing options, starting with Air Strike, Frag Bomb, Chain Gun, and shield, with about ten more you can unlock over time. The multiplayer modes are what makes the game: you can simply pass the same iPhone between people, play over Bluetooth, or connect with Wi-Fi. My only real complaint is that it doesn't support some kind of push-based over-the-air multiplayer, which would be fantastic—imagine playing these games over a period of days or weeks, like we do on Facebook? Scrabble and a few other games have a decent system worked out, and it would be perfect for Battleship.

Slow-mode multiplayer or no slow-mode multiplayer, it's easy to figure out if you should buy Battleship. Do you enjoy the board game? Yeah? Then you'll probably enjoy this a little more. Three dollars. [iTunes]

Or at least they were: Today, TomTom has lopped $30 clean off their original app's high (and increasingly high-seeming) price, bringing the price for the combined North American app down to $70. So actually no congratulations, Canada! Your TomTom still costs more than ours, and your maps are worth less. At least, until the end of the holiday season, when the prices of both apps should buoy back up to where they were before. This per-country pricing scheme is fascinating. [TomTom]

This Week's Apps

If you hate hate hate galleries, click here to view the apps as a single page.

Honorable Mentions

• Google Mobile: This update keeps the app from launching into Safari as much as it used to, and widens its voice capabilities. A minor but useful upgrade.

• My Name and Head Shoulders Knees & Toes: I suspect most of you don't reader these roundups to find ways to entertain your children. But if you do, My Name, which will teach your tot how to spell whatever is on his birth certificate, and Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes, which makes a simple touch game out of the children's song, will distract them long enough for you to gobble up enough Zoloft to keep the gears moving without anyone noticing.

• Wolfram Alpha: Once a comical $50, this mega calculator app is now a slightly less comical $20.

• Monkey Ball 2: Last week, I noted that this app seemed to have a widespread crashing problem, and therefore couldn't recommend it, despite the fact that it's a worthy—if not revolutionary—followup to one of the iPhone's best launch titles. The bug has been identified: If you have a jailbroken phone, avoid this one. If you don't, and you loved Monkey Ball numero uno, give it a shot.

• iClassic: Replaces your music interface with a faux-clickwheel. Jailbreak-only.

• Voltron: A name and a concept worth getting excited about, let down by mediocre execution.

• Aqua Forest 2: Same deal as above: A game with a pedigree and a soild concept, but on which the developers didn't quite follow through well enough.

This Week's iPhone News On Giz

• Mega-iPhone Dorks Who Idolise Rambo, Strap This On For Size

• Apple Countersues Nokia

• Analyst Claims iPhone Users Are Suffering From "Stockholm Syndrome"

• Apple Patent Shows Dock Made From 'Elastic Sponge-Like Substance' That Conforms To Shape of iPod/iPhone

• In Which a Telco Executive Makes Taking Sound Like Giving

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 our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

A lot of these apps will be familiar to anyone who's checked out our Essential iPhone Apps directory before, and yeah, there is a lot of overlap. What we've done, basically, is strip out the dollar signs from list, then fill in the gaps with more free.

With the new list, you can turn a fresh, untouched iPhone or iPod Touch into a decked-out powerhouse without spending a single dollar.

(To view the following gallery as a single page, click here.)

What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we've missed anything huge, or you've got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We'll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy!

Oh yes. [Twitter]

Site-specific browser apps are prone to shittiness, because at heart, they're really just websites. The key is to offer something more, or, if you're offering more or less the same thing you get on the regular website, to present it in a markedly better way. This app take the latter approach. You're not going to find any information in the IMDB app that isn't available on the full IMDB website—that would be kind of odd—but you will find a neatly-designed, easily navigable reference for just about every film or show, ever, as well as local showtimes, trailers, an TV listings.

It's just about everything you could ask for in an IMDB app, except that it doesn't support accounts, which means that regular users can't rate or review movies, and that Pro users (I assume) can't access all those agents' phone numbers, that raw box office data, those movie stars' secret Twitter handles or whatever else they're shelling out for.

Alas, she is excused of this grave offense, for she is free. [iTunes]

Do you find yourself resenting your iPhone for its complexity? Do you wish you could do away with pesky text messages and confusing navigation applications and all that augmented reality? Though it's currently only available through the Cydia store, with iClassic and a little tinkering can dumb your iPhone down into the iPod you never had. Or the one you once had and replaced with your iPhone. [MobilitySite]

The comic is called Paranormal Activity: The Search For Katie, A Case Study by Dr. Johann Averys DMN. And if you remember the end of the film, Katie has vanished and Micah is... well, gone as well, sadly. Apple paired up with IDW to continue the story. The comic app picks up right after that, with the demon expert Dr. Averys finally showing up to their home, and searching for Katie, and some answers. It was written by Scott Lobdell and drawn by Mark Badger. Here are the first set of exclusive stills from the beginning.

We emailed Lobdell asking why he thought the story must go on, since the ending seemed so definite, we didn't think there could be a sequel even in a comic book series. To which he responded:

I have to disagree! Even before I left the movie theater my mind was racing though a hundred different questions! Where did Katie go? How long had she been in thrall to the demon? Why did he do what he did to Micah... or have Katie do it? What about the mysterious Dr. Johann Averys — often mentioned but never seen? Could the case he was working on in Europe have anything to do with the case in San Diego? What would the investigation into the murder be like? One part cop forensics, one part study in demonology? The demon seemed like it had much larger fish to fry to scaring young women... could it have followers? A lot of this is set up in the first installment of the online comic book, and I can't wait for the opportunity to further explore the world of Paranormal Activity.

The application is available now at itunes, For 99 cents.

You get two game modes, but one is basically just an endless version of the other. Your task is to use the accelerometer to guide the water droplet from a leaf into a container around obstacles. That's it. Just like the marble games.

The water effect actually looks pretty realistic, don't get me wrong, but it's disappointing to see that they didn't come up with a better physics simulator game, and instead just made another move-the-marble-into-the-hole game. It's $5 in the App Store, but we prefer the original Aqua Forest for $8. [iTunes]

The screenshots also show the inherent problem of having a touchscreen be your screen and your control interface. It's much worse here, with the buttons taking up a good 1/4 or 1/3 of the real estate. But it is only $4, and if you're the kind of guy who enjoys games based on series that are more than 20 years old, boy has Sony Pictures got the app for you.

Seriously, how awesome would it be to have 5 person multiplayer over Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, using the iPhone 3.0 SDK, with one person piloting a piece of Voltron? Then you could join together and then do some crazy junk. Pew pew. [iTunes]

First, let's look at what Lala is. (Or was.) It's three things, really: A CD trading site (its original emphasis), a streaming site, where you can "upload" your own music and stream it anywhere (your collection is matched with what Lala's got, and anything they don't have is actually uploaded); and a streaming site that'll let you stream a song once for free, or pay 10 cents to stream it an unlimited number of times. In other words, It's a music service that's all about streaming and the cloud, both for the music you already own, and for finding and playing new music.

That obviously looks a lot different from iTunes—you pay for things, you download them, you have a library of stuff. It's kind of a dated, restrictive model, really. Only being able to listen to the small slice of music that's banked on my hard drive, it feels cramped and very 2004. Zune feels like a generation ahead with Zune Pass, which essentially expands my library ad infinitum, with full access to most of the service's 6 million songs (plus I get to keep 10 a month, so the pass just about pays for itself). iTunes needs to refresh itself.

Okay, so Lala obviously fits into that need. But what's Apple going to do with it specifically? Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill Lala and assimilate its features into iTunes? Keep Lala running? Well, there's actually some pretty good case studies when it comes to Apple buying up smaller companies, historically, especially when it comes to iPod and iTunes.

iTunes actually began life as an acquisition. In 2000, Apple was looking to buy MP3 software and wound up purchasing a little program called SoundJam MP, along with its lead developer, Jeff Robbin—it was re-engineered into what you now know as iTunes, and Robbin is now the VP for consumer applications at Apple. Cover Flow, which is now slathered on top of basically every app Apple makes, was originally an independent program developed by Steel Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, though not the company. The iPod itself was mostly developed by a company called PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the company (which was later picked up by Nvidia).

Finally, and most recently, Apple bought PA Semi, an entire chip company, likely so Apple can design its own chips for iPhones and iPods (we haven't seen the fruits of this venture yet, though we likely will soon). So, there's a couple different models here: Buy the tech, buy the brains behind it; buy the tech; buy the company, the tech and the brains. In each instance, though, the thing purchased became wholly an Apple thing, fully assimilated, as if its past life had never existed.

Looking at Lala, it's likely true, as the NYT says, that Apple is "buying Lala's engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services," as Apple did with iTunes so many years ago. But that's not all Apple was after, not if they paid $80 million (or whatever) to outbid at least two other competitors, as some reports say. It seems clear, looking at the history of Apple's iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its features are going to be integrated into iTunes in a very fundamental way.

After all, one of the central conceits of Lala—streaming your own music library anywhere—is something Apple's been looking at for a while, and it doesn't alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that's so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved.

And that's most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You'll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we'd buy music from iTunes, and if history's any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes' new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It'd be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano.

True, we won't know precisely what Apple's going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we've got some rough ideas.

Games

The bestseller list is populated by high-profile—either in name or in publisher—listings, none of which are too surprising. The list, it seems, it sorted by revenue, because there's a relatively poor showing for cheap casual games. The top six are all franchise titles that cost at least $5.

The top rated list, however, is more heartening. The fantastic Spider: The Secret of Bruce Manor tops the group, joined by a healthy selection of games from a mix of studios, large and small. Just one of the top ten is a big-name franchise title.

Apps

Again, the popularity list must be revenue-ranked, because this is some pricey stuff. Navigon and TomTom are $90 and $100 apps, respectively, and their success shows what a little name recognition, and early start, and a generally good app will get you. Free texting app TextFree, which I sorta though might be banned from the store by now, ranks high, as does QuickOffice, even though the barebones office suite costs a whole $10.

Where the top rated games were generally indie and/or iPhone-exclusive titles, the top rated apps are a bit more mainstream. You've got the requisite appearances from Smule, you've got ReelDirector—the only app that lets you do any serious video editing on your iPhone—and you've got a CBS sports app. Because people like sports, and anything associated with them! (Also: paying for them.) Oh, and, uh, Pocket God is a game.

All in all, the crowd's put together a nice little app roundup for us. I don't see any glaringly terrible apps here, and the top-rated apps even include some of our own Essential iPhone Apps. Which is vindicating! (For everyone else, obviously.)

Anyway, what about the free apps?

UPDATE: It's worth noting that these rankings only include app released in 2009. Some older apps will likely have outsold many, if not all, of the apps on these lists. —Thanks, Dave from Popcap! [iTunes Rewind]