apps

Shazam has been around for a few years now--CNET U.K. took note of the service back in 2006--but with today's launch of Apple's App Store, it could become a whole lot more popular. It has the potential to change how people discover and buy music.

The concept behind Shazam is simple: whenever you hear a song playing and can't identify it--on the car radio, at a friend's house, at a bar--you activate the Shazam application on your mobile phone. It "listens" to the song for about 30 seconds, then sends a text message … Read more

Dark and lustrous, Twitterrific for iPhone is one of the best-looking apps from the iTunes App Store I've seen all day. The application, originally built for Mac by software publisher Iconfactory, is a premium Twitter updater a free trial that sells for about $15. This iPhone app, however, comes as a free ad-serving version or as a premium version.

Twitterrific is also one of the more complex applications, and it takes its role as a Twitter service seriously, serving up a an environment, tweeting experience, and navigation--complete with hints!--all its own. Twitterrific has also maximized on the iPhone … Read more

We've been playing Super Monkey Ball for a few minutes--OK, hours--now, and it's every bit as fun as promised. If you're not familiar with this title, which has been made uber-popular on other gaming platforms, the gameplay is thus: you are one of four monkey characters who happens to reside in a clear sphere. Your goal is to roll around a series of precariously strung platforms into the goal portal. On the iPhone, control is accelerometer-based--simply tilting the device back and forth controls your momentum.

Our initial observations:

When the native eBay app for iPhone was demoed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June, Webware.com Editor Josh Lowensohn commended it for its slickness, storage capacity, and winning looks. The eBay for iPhone application is indeed easy on the eye and similar in look and feel to eBay Desktop that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux on the AIR platform. At least the home screen is.

After that, the application might as well be considered eBay Light. You can quickly take in an overview of your personal stats on the home screen to see … Read more

Microsoft hasn't committed to any iPhone apps. However, if I was a betting woman, I would put my money on something coming from Microsoft's Tellme unit.

Tellme is the speech recognition company that Microsoft bought last year. Among its many products is one that lets you speak a search term into a phone and get back a screen with information--say the location of the nearest gas station or pizza parlor.

Tellme CEO-turned-Microsoft executive Mike McCue has been spending a lot of time these days integrating his voice search technology with Windows Mobile. However, Tellme has also continued to … Read more

We've had a few minutes to play with the Remote App (download) for the iPhone. The (not surprising) verdict? It's an easy must-have for any iPhone or iPod Touch owner who enjoys listening to music at home.

Once you've upgraded your iPhone (or Touch) to version 2.0, just go to the App Store and search on "remote." (Amazingly, that--not "iRemote"--is the program's official name.) You can download it straight to the phone over a Wi-Fi connection (tap the word "free" on the upper right corner), and it auto-installs, adding a new icon to your home screen. … Read more

No longer need you hunt around for a "secret" way to access the iTunes App Store. About an hour or so ago, iTunes finally made it official by promoting the App Store right on the iTunes Store home screen. You might have to sit tight to get a new iPhone 3G, but those of you with existing iPhones can have at it. Which iPhone app are you most looking forward to?

We've swooned over Pandora's new iPhone application, LOL'd at the chat application from AIM, and poked our friends with the new Facebook application. But as we continue to dig deeper into the growing catalog of iPhone applications one thing is clear: there are some stinkers in the mix. Sure, they might we well-coded (or not), but who needs them? We've put together a list of 10 absolutely absurd new iPhone apps.

1. Birth Buddy. This app lets you track labor contractions--you know, like when you're about to have a baby. This $10 application does have … Read more

The release of a tool capable of unlocking first-generation iPhones for use on unofficial carriers as well as allowing full read/write access to the filesystem--thereby enabling installation of unofficial, "jailbreak" applications--is imminent.

The iPhone Dev team has posted a screenshot, seen below, of an iPhone running OS 2.0 with both the App Store (Apple's third-party application solution) and Installer.app (the unofficial third-party application solution) running side-by-side. The iPhone is also unlocked, per the MTS carrier logo -- MTS is an unsupported wireless carrier.

Another screenshot shows the tool "BootNeuter" loaded under iPhone … Read more