Best iPhone Applications, More Store Info

June 15, 2008 in Apple, Software & Apps

We’re getting some details, slowly but surely, about the composition of the iPhone App store including some of the top applications identified by Apple and some of the limits/restrictions that come with the territory. First - the exciting part - the applications:

Last week, Apple actually held an awards ceremony where they announced the top applications in various categories. For current iPhone owners and iPhone 3G hopefuls, you’ll want to jot these down and/or bookmark this page so when the iPhone app store launches, you can check these promising applications out first.

Best iPhone Game: Enigmo

In this puzzle game, the purpose is to get the water droplet into the bucket. Using the laws of physics with various tools, trinkets and objects put into motion and placed on each stage, you can get the drop in the bucket!

Here is the live announcement of Enigmo, featuring a demo of the game:

You’ll also see the caveman car racing game called cromag rally in the above video.

Best iPhone Health & Fitness App: MIM 1.0 from MIMVista

The mobile space promises to offer doctors and the healthcare field more immediate access to information that can help them save time… and in turn - lives. MIM 1.0 is a great example of this as it allows doctors to view MRI and CAT scan images directly on the iPhone. They can also manipulate the images for different views and data mining.

MIM 1.0 was demoed at Apple’s WWDC and we’ve got a sample video below. Another application, Modality, is shown first but the entire clip is under 3 minutes so be patient!

Best iPhone Social Networking App: Twiterrific 1.0 from the Iconfactory

Twitter is an uncommonly simple social networking application that allows “friends” to contact eachother through short notes of a little over 100 characters. Twiterrific takes Twitter and makes it available on your iPhone in a clean and concise application.

Twitter is so simple to begin with that, in reality, this doesn’t seem like any huge breakthrough. There is a free version that has ads embedded and a paid version that removes all the ads. Here is one person’s review of the app from a few months back:

Best iPhone Entertainment App: AOL Radio 1.0 from AOL

You can listen to 200 AOL radio stations and/or 150 CBS Radio Stations from around the United States with AOL Radio 1.0 from AOL. Even cooler, you can look at local radio stations based on your current location. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t listen to a station in San Diego if you’re sitting in New York City.

Here is a pretty stupid commercial for AOL Radio that isn’t iPhone specific. We figured we’d help you waste your time:

Best iPhone Productivity App: OmniFocus by the Omni Group

OmniFocus is a task management system that helps you organize your priorities, from business to personal and entertainment. It integrates with the desktop version and adds mobile features such as geo-picture tagging and location based services.

The following commercial is a branding commercial for the OmniGroup and really has nothing to do with OmniFocus. But, its freaking hilarious and we recommend you watch:

Best iPhone Optimized Web App: Remember The Milk for iPhone

This is a mobile version of “Remember the Milk” that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch. You can add tasks and lists such as grocery shopping lists - hence “Remember the Milk”- and be notified when you are nearby a task, share tasks with others, etc…

iPhone Application Limits

An interesting development in the iPhone Application world are apparent restrictions on the size and price for each application. Applications will be limited to 2GB each and the maximum price is $20. The size restriction isn’t surprising - if you get the 8GB iPhone 3G model, you’d be taking up 1/4th of the entire phone storage with a single application. But limiting the applications to $20 each seems somewhat odd.

When considering the scale of an application that would work in the medical industry for example, the $20 application price limit might turn off companies from developing fully integrated solutions that worth much more and cost much more to develop.

You could relate this to concept of the Research & Development of drugs for pharmaceutical companies. Would they want to put in the millions of dollars in R&D costs if when their drug is complete and proves effective, they could only sell prescriptions for $20 a pop? What if that $20 per prescription would prevent them from recovering the costs of developing the drug to begin with? Well, they would probably have known this before they started working on the drug, and thus never begun work on the drug to begin with. And if thats the case, the price maximum is stifling progress and development anyways.

Why not let the market determine what the fair price of a product is? If it’s overpriced and over $20 - people won’t buy it. If it’s over $20 and worth every penny, then people will buy it and the company deserves every penny they get for it.

We’ll see how long that holds up. It’s perceivable that medical software companies would bundle iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile versions of their products into larger packages, avoiding the application price maximum by selling the product as a bundle through different chanels.

We’ll see how it plays out… don’t forget that the application store will probably launch on July 11th, 2008 when the iPhone 3G is first made available for sale!

[Via MocoNews,

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