Most Wanted Top Ten Cydia Apps 2011

Most Wanted Top Ten Cydia Apps 2011 As in case of iPhone apps available at the official App Store, some Cydia applications come free of cost, while other can cost you anything starting from US$0.99. In fact, Most Wanted Ten Cydia Apps are costlier than their App Store counterparts. While they do cost you a few bucks, there is no doubt about the fact that it is worth spending for these essential Cydia apps for iPhone (and other devices with iOS as their default operating system.) Given below is a list of Most Wanted Ten Cydia Apps 2011 which you can’t afford to miss out on.

The Top of the Best

We covered your favorite Cydia applications in 2009, then we made some changes for 2010, but finally, in 2011, we refresh everything. New pictures, new descriptions, and new Cydia apps for your perusing pleasure. In 2011, iOS is scheduled to hit the iPad 2, iPhone 5, and next-gen iPod Touch, and for that we have you covered on what jailbreak apps to use. Now's the perfect time to jailbreak with the new GreenPois0n RL5 Beta, so get that iOS 4.2.1 device jailbroken and read on, we've got the Cydia apps you've been craving.

For returning fans, we've removed four apps from our list because of redundancy with the iOS4 update - no longer do you need "Categories" to create folders or "Cycorder" to record video, and the old "Firewall iP" app has been replaced with a more useful Grooveshark app, the same was done to the "SwirlyMMS" app.

Installous

Installous is a one-of-a-kind app for iPhone and iPad, it provides unparalleled opportunity to download old apps and apps that the real app store wouldn't allow. New for 2011 is a better search engine built into the app that doesn't rely on the old, slow Appulo.us repository of apps (as a matter of fact, Appulo shut its doors not too long ago). On the iPad particularly, multitasking with the Installous app works incredibly well to search, download and find the IPA files that you know and love. The new Installous works off of a surprisingly fast engine on either iPhone or iPad and manages to bring a cohesive "App Store"-like experience to your hacked apps. Installous is definitely one of the best Cydia apps available.

Note: The install process remains the same, you need to add the hackulo.us repository to Cydia. Simply go into Cydia, navigate over to Manage, then click on Sources, and click Edit in the top right hand corner, then Add on the top left corner, once you’ve clicked add, type in “Cydia.hackulo.us” into the http repository screen. Then tap on Add Source and it’ll give you a message about piracy. Click OK on the message and download Installous through this new repo!

Grooveshark

Grooveshark, need I say more? One of the most popular music streaming sites online brings its wares to the iPhone exclusively through jailbreaking. For those who need a primer on Grooveshark, the online service that's totally free for desktop users brings iTunes-like music search to the cloud. Users upload songs to the web server and then you can search through them for practically any song imaginable, even obscure ones.

When it comes to the mobile service though, it really boils down to how you feel about the $9 monthly fee for using the app. Because of the 3G connection, it's possible to stream any and all songs to the iPhone while you're out on the road. This could mean that you could queue up all the songs you'd normally keep on your iPhone/iPod from the cloud directly to your phone. The subscription is a high price to pay for many, but try it out, see if it works for you, I enjoyed it quite a bit and keep a subscription going for queuing up songs at parties and during long car rides. NOTE: To Install the Grooveshark app, just search in the normal Cydia Repository for "Grooveshark".

XBMC

After many long years of waiting and anticipation, XBMC finally brought their amazing Media Center app to the iPhone and iPad, and it works quite well. Rather than bringing a skimpy mobile version of XBMC, their dev team decided to bring the full experience to the iOS devices. The app loads in a reasonable amount of time and has all the add-ons and skins found in the original.

On the front end, the app looks great and plays videos like VLC media player would on your iOS device. It's nice to be able to enable scrapers and information for all your movies and TV shows right there on your iPhone/Pad. TV Shows, Movies, Photos, and Music all streaming to your iDevice also work well and attach to your existing network infrastructure.

The install process is rather simple, just follow the instructions posted at this link and you'll be ready to go.

iRealSMS 3.0

Unlike SwirlyMMS from last years' top ten Cydia apps list, iRealSMS comes with a hefty price tag of around $12, but is worth it when you consider the amount of features iRealSMS brings to the table. Android features come to the iPhone with this update, in particular pictures for contacts on your phone and QuickReply.

Quickly replying to text messages is something that you don't realize you need until you have the app in place and working. No longer will pop-ups intrude your apps only to have you switch back to the texting app in order to respond. But much more than that, iReal provides much needed SMS privacy settings, searching, forwarding, and folders for your texts.

If QuickReply is all you need, however, there is a much cheaper (~$3) app in the store that has solely this feature. This way, you get the best feature of iRealSMS without needing to pay full price for it.

iFile OpenSSH

OpenSSH is a must have extension for your jailbroken iPhone/iPad that's totally free. It allows you to open an SSH connection to your phone in order to play around with the internal file structure and remove/add files. This allows you to move IPA files around, transfer photos and shuffle any files around through your PC.

If PC connections aren't your cup of tea, iFile for the iPhone/iPad manages to provide the equivalent of Android Root Explorer for the iPhone. If you want to check through your file structure right there on your phone, it's possible to do so with this Cydia app.

Wi-Fi Sync

Maybe iOS 5 will bring Wi-Fi Syncing to the iPhone and iPad, but until then, this app provides a perfectly reasonable alternative. All it requires is that both your iPhone and PC with Apple installed be on the same network together. Once you have the app downloaded and the required program running on your PC (with either Mac OSX or Windows 7), the software interfaces with your iPhone a single time and pairs it with your PC - much the way a Bluetooth device would be paired with its counterpart.

Once both devices are paired and ready, the software on the PC tricks your computer into thinking your iPhone is hooked up to it via USB. Then it proceeds to sync wirelessly through your network. The retail price for the app is $9.99, which may seem a bit steep, but considering that many of the iPhone users I've met don't ever hook up their iPhones to their PCs, but rather to chargers, this idea of wirelessly syncing your files, photos, videos, and music is something quite extraordinary, that Apple might want to look into in their next iOS update. Total Transparency: I ran the app using my new iPhone 4 and it ran quite well and fast - your mileage may vary when it comes to earlier iOS devices.

Cylay 4.2

Cylay 4.2 brings together form and function for a powerhouse of an app that is a must-have for older generations of iPhone devices. Where "Find My iPhone" has taken the place of this app on newer gen iPhones (3GS and 4), there is still no acceptable alternative for this functionality on the older iPhones.

Cylay functions as essentially an all-in-one security app to ensure your phone is safe and in your possession at all times. Cylay doesn’t really bring new features to the table, but it is an incredible Cydia app that no one should be walking around without. Finding your phone on their intuitive new website makes retrieving your device easier than ever.

SBSettings

SBSettings is an essential (and totally free) applications. Right after you jailbreak, after OpenSSH, this should be the second app you download off Cydia. SBSettings overlays a menu that contains the basic functions of the system “options” menus. This overlay menu is easily accessed by swiping the bar at the top of the screen with the time and contains things like Brightness, 3G, Wi-Fi, and other switches to turn things on and off.

Bar none, this app is the most useful thing inside Cydia for your daily use of the phone. Especially being able to control brightness inside ANY application will show you that your jailbreak was not in vain.

MCleaner

MCleaner is basically the iBlacklist app for the iPhone, but a bit more sophisticated. Unfortunately, unlike last year when a vast majority of the Cydia apps on the store were free, MCleaner too is not free. However, you can give it a 15 day trial and see if it is for you. What it basically does is MCleaner creates blacklists and whitelists of callers that you can decide upon. Then, you can even choose how the phone will ignore a blacklisted caller for instance.

Several other security features make this an incredible app as well, even though it is a bit on the pricey side ($11.99). You can fake data instead of showing the network you typed in a wrong password, SMS previews on the lockscreen can be disabled as well, and even SMS can be filtered to prevent annoying people from contacting you.

3G Unrestrictor

Other paid Cydia apps are cool to have if you need them, but 3G Unrestrictor is a relatively cheap ($3) app that is vital if you’re ever going to take your iPhone into the “Unlimited” plan you actually purchased it for. In 2009, I advised you to get VOIPover3G, that app has been discontinued and has been replaced by a bevy of 3G restriction-lifting apps. 3G Unrestrictor continues to be the cheapest and best of the best.

What this app does is it enables you to access the 3G network for things the iPhone would normally block by tricking it into thinking that it is operating over Wi-Fi. This means that you can make Skype calls out on the middle of the highway, or watch videos over Slingbox while waiting in the doctor’s office that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. Personally, lifting the 10 Mb limits on the App Store and iTunes respectively is awesome – because now larger podcast downloads are just clicks away. Further information for 3g Unrestrictor you can find it here.

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How To Track Your iPad/iPhone/iPod’s Location?

GadgetTrak provides proven theft recovery solutions for a wide range of portable devices including cell phones, PDAs, removable media devices iPodS. ActiveTrak has announced the release of GadgetTrak 2.5, a new version of its theft recovery software for iOS. The update is available for download from the App Store, and the app costs 99 cents. Tracking data is transmitted over a secure SSL connection and you can even use  GadgetTrak to protect your Mac and Windows laptops visit Trak.me from your device or use the in-app button to setup the tracking.

The GadgetTrak iOS application has been updated and released in to the iTunes Store and allows you to track the location of your iOS devices. GadgetTrak silently reports its location and senses when your iPhone or iPad has significantly changed its location and the GadgetTrak server keeps track of where your phone has been.

With all of the photos, contacts, apps and music on your iPhone, losing it would be a massive pain. Unfortunately, that pain is felt by thousands of smartphone users every day. Ask them—they wish they'd had GadgetTrak installed.

When your device is missing, log into your account using any web browser and enable tracking immediately. GadgetTrak will spring to life and generate location reports, including map points, longitude & latitude and IP address to help you pinpoint your lost device. It can even snap photos of the thief!
For extra security, enable the "Deleting Apps" restriction in Settings App->General->Restrictions. This will keep the thief from deleting GadgetTrak (and any other apps).

But dont forget the application has to be activated before it can start tracking your iPhone or iPad and when it is activated your battery will use more juice than normal.

 

Features

Location Tracking

If your device has GPS capability it will be used by GadgetTrak to get the most accurate location possible. Even without GPS, GadgetTrak can use cell towers and/or advanced Wi-Fi positioning technology to pinpoint the location of your device usually within a few meters.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Continued use of GPS can dramatically decrease battery life. For better battery performance, deactivate tracking until the device is lost. The GadgetTrak app does not use GPS and will not impact battery life when tracking is disabled (even if the Navigation icon appears).

Push Notifications

GadgetTrak automatically sends a discrete message to your device, enticing the thief to initiate a tracking report.

Camera Reports

Snap a photo with the built in camera(s) to collect crucial evidence to help Police catch the thief. (available for iOS devices with at least one built-in camera, additional in-app purchase required)

GadgetTrak for iOS is part of a suite of products available for a variety of platforms including Mac OS X and iOS. The software enables you to track and recover devices that hve been lost or stolen. New to the 2.5 release of GadgetTrak for iOS is support for cameras. If your iOS device has a built-in camera – such as an iPhone or iPod touch – GadgetTrak will snap photos to help you ad the police identify the thief and location where the device is. The photo can now be attached to an e-mail; the e-mail also includes location information.

Additional Features

• Locate your device using GPS, cell tower triangulation, and/or WiFi positioning
• Location reports posted to the web control panel at http://trak.me
• Location history to know where your phone has been
• Automatic push notifications
• Camera support for the front and rear-facing camera (in-app purchase required)
• Secure SSL connection for transmitting location data & photos
• Cross Platform: GadgetTrak has apps to protect your laptop (Mac & Windows) as well as Android and BlackBerry phones and tablets.

Need Help?

Download the GadgetTrak iOS Installation & Usage Manual here: http://www.gadgettrak.com/support/downloads

http://www.gadgettrak.com/products/iphone/

We take pride in providing great support for all of our products. If you have questions, concerns, or feedback let us know and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible: http://www.gadgettrak.com/support

What's new

• Remotely capture a photo with all built-in cameras, then email it to yourself to help catch the thief! (via a one-time In-App Purchase)
• Push notifications – Send a discrete message to your device enticing the the person who has it to initiate a tracking event.
• Various Bug Fixes.

GadgetTrak now being offered with select warranty plans ActiveTrak has announced that its GadgetTrak Laptop 3 software is now being bundled We contacted GadgetTrak and they sent us all the information we needed to recover the iPod. Luckily it was not necessary to go to the police.

System Requirement

• Requires iOS 4 or higher
• Background processing only supported on iPad, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 3rd generation or newer

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Best Top Ten Most Expensive iPad Apps in The World

Looking for the Best Top Ten Most Expensive iPad Apps in The World? We have all in the list here for you to find the Best Most Expensive Apps for iPad rated by experienced users! Searching for the best Most Expensive iPad apps? We weed out the fluff to uncover the best applications, including games, utilities, next-generation. Post image for DIRECTV App for iPad – Your favorite. Check out our site daily for the Best Top Ten Most Expensive iPad Apps in The World.

To spend a lot of time iPad Apps provide you a best time to utilize by getting this expensive iPad Apps. This includes a lot of things that improve your thought and communication skill. You make the difference in all over the world.

1. Crestron Mobile Pro G- $99.99

By using this device you can easily controlled home automation, controlling environment, through remotes and from touch panels. Wi-Fi or 3G communication you keep in touch with your home, office. Cestron Mobile Pro G is a great invention to view all that you want to see.

2. Fine Luxury Wallpapers by Gatsby-$99.99

Everybody likes wallpapers for your iPad. But especially peoples like those wallpapers who different from others wallpapers. So this a magnificent collection to see Fine Luxury Wallpapers by Gatsby on your iPad. Download the luxury wallpapers for make your iPad attractive.

3. Marine: skagerrak&kattegat HD- $59.99

This application provides great experience for those persons who want to see whole worlds map. There you get chance to see Marine maps for Scandinavia.

4. iProc Pro-$59.99

By using this application you can easily search and look up any procedure code. Any type of description you can find out by iProc Pro. Just you type the words with the range and you search ant text within the procedure code.

5. OmniGraffle- $49.99

Omnigraffle is made for art & drawing people. This help to make diagrams, charts and different kind of graphics for superior application. You can communicate all over the world by using omnigraffle  on your iPad and easily organize your thought.

6. Zeptopad Planner Note- $49.99

Zeptopad planner note is made for those persons who really want to convey their ideas to others. This application supported in businesses to make business chart and SWOT analysis chart for different organization. You can freely draw lines for expose your ideas.

7. SLP Field Kit HD – Consonants- $49.99

SLP field kit is to provide awareness about testing of language pathologist and speech therapist. This application covers all the modules of consonants. SLP field kit provides 8 powerful interactive activities to add dynamic training experiences.

8. ProCamPlus HD– $46.99

This enable to you to record live video and audio streaming. ProCamPlus HD is provide great experience for your iPad. This is a solid offer for all. This provide to you unlimited number of cameras to stream from multiple PCs and laptops.

9. StudioTrack- $39.99

Studio track provide extra features to your music gallery. You can capture musical ideas and can record interesting songs on your iPad. Studios track have the ability to accurate monitor the record level. Multitrack recording is an advance features of studio track.

10. Aurora Sound Studio HD- $39.99

Don’t worry if you want great musician experience then you get aurora software. In which you can make great music on your iPad. You have the full control on your sound in real time. Aurora is a recording base software and provide live performance. Touch and play great music with your friends and share a lot of music.

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Top 10 Best Business iPhone Games Must Have

Best iPhone Games for Business. See video games that has great graphics and great gameplay bundled up for the iPhone. Games iPhone Apps- Top Games iPhone Apps Reviewed, 2011. Top Ten Best iPod Touch / iPhone Games interactive top ten list at The Top Tens. Vote, add to, or comment on the Top Ten Best iPod Touch / iPhone Games Playing iPhone games are good way to spend boring time, here we list top 10 iPhone games of 2011  you must have. Top 10 Best Business iPhone Games for 2011.

There aren’t too many business strategy games out there for the iPhone, so it’s nice that games developer launched a new business sim game called A Business Tycoon. A Business Tycoon features classic open-ended gameplay: you start off with $10,000,000 starting funds, which you then use to buy commodities in different regions of the world and then resell them for a profit (the same goes for company shares).

1. Idle Hands

This nifty little app is perfect if you’re a mobile businessman who relies heavily on your iPhone. The annoying virtual keyboard will become your trusted friend after a few games of Idle Hands, which tests your typing and makes you noticeably quicker in just a week or so. It makes emailing a breeze, and will save valuable time in the long run.

2. iGolf

Nothing gets you more ‘in’ with a company CEO than a jolly game of golf, and with this Wii Sports-style app you can practice your swing and get ready to impress for the real thing. Choose from a range of courses around the world and the iPhone will use it’s accelerometer to detect how good your shots are. Just make sure you don’t let go. Another good game that mimics the real thing is Tiger Woods PGA Tour.

3. Trivia Burst

This award-winning quiz game will make sure you’re never stuck for something to say around the water cooler. With over 18,000 trivia questions, which is by far the most in any iPhone game currently available, this little app is an education at your fingertips. You can even add your own questions to the mix, and the more you play the more Amazon.com points you earn to spend online.

Read the full review by Rob

4. Easy Relax Ultimate

OK, so a little less on the game side, and more of a straightforward app, but this little gem is a must for unwinding after a tough day at the office, or for helping you concentrate on a complex report. Experts say keeping a clear mind is essential for optimum productivity, so 5 to 10 minutes using this app could actually be time well spent. Binaural beats help you concentrate, relax or fall asleep by inducing the brain to perceive different brainwave states. Play around and see what happens with this hypnotic app.

Read the full review by Rob

5. SimCity Deluxe

Read the full review by Sam

A complex strategy game where your actions (or inaction) affect the whole of your made-up iPhone world. At $2.99, you get a lot for your money. Build industry and commerce, project manage your metropolis, transform starter locations into prosperous cities… It’s all here. And why is it good for business, you ask? Well, this is life simulation: you can set your Sims’ career-orientated goals, plan out their lives and watch as you build an empire. It’s perfect for anyone who’s in human resources or management, as each Sim needs attention. Neglect them and your city could die. The perfect trial run for your own ambitions.

With a new year 2011, we're bringing back our monthly best game listings. Our ratings for games we Best iPhone Games for 2011 Here you can find top 5 best iPhone games for 2011, these games are the best iPhone games for game lovers, so enjoy best iPhone The 20 Best Free iPhone Games. by Ryan Rigney February, 2011. Just bought yourself a shiny new Verizon iPhone and want some games.

6. Lemonade Stand

Cheap and cheerful – this easy-to-use business game is exactly what it sounds like: you run a lemonade stand. Originally designed for the Mac over 20 years ago, it’s a simple game that taught children back then the basics of economics. Wannabe business tycoons have to deal with variables like bad weather, traffic jams and lemon price inflation; just like the real life struggles of running a successful business.

Read the full review by Rob

7. Civilization Revolution

Similar to the SimCity franchise, Civilization Revolution lends itself to the iPhone very well. However, rather than building cities, this one is more about building world-spanning empires. As your power grows you’ll learn to handle all the stresses that come with it – including industrial action and health issues. The game feels very natural, and although it’s 74mb and a whopping $12.99, it’s well worth the download. Learn to be the next Donald Trump and build an empire on your phone. Bad decisions will come back to punish you and you’ll soon learn that being good in business doesn’t come easy.

Read the full review by Rob

8. Brain Challenge

This is a mind sharpening game, which is designed to get your brain up and fighting fit for the day. There’s a whole host of brain tests to take, from improving memory skills to honing your reflexes. The makers claim it’s like having a morning coffee – and will kickstart your day. Perfect if you’re feeling sluggish, tired and uninspired for the coming hours at the office.

Read the full review by Rob

9. Hotel Dash

Learn to build a successful business with Hotel Dash. The drama and chaos of running your own virtual hotel is addictive, and it takes true business acumen and ambition to make it thrive. Soon you’ll be renovating and rescuing hotels all over DinerTown, and through good customer relations achieving 5-star service. The vivid Retina Display artwork makes Hotel Dash an added pleasure to play.

Read the full review by Rob

10. A Business Tycoon

Buy low, sell high… that’s the basic premise of this game – and actually the basic premise of most successful business models, meaning valuable lessons can be learned from this app. You fill the shoes of the next big business tycoon – think Donald Trump, or the UK’s Alan Sugar – and as well as loads of hot business deals, there are also loads of hot luxuries to buy with your well earned cash. This sophisticated app teaches you about stocks and shares, selling assets, taking loans, lending money and how to read charts and complex data. All invaluable skills if you want to become better at business.

We've taken the thousands of awesome iPhone games released in 2011 and narrowed them it's hard to imagine what 2011 will hold for iPhone gaming. Post Tags: best games of 2011, best iPhone games,We've sifted through the thousands of games  and have settled on these 36 titles to enthusiastically recommend Best iPhone Games 2011.

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Most Wanted Smartphone Mobile App Stores

Discuss ‘bout Smartphone Mobile App Stores, it's been less than a year since Apple launched the iPhone App Store, but now virtually every mobile OS is showcasing its own take on the mobile application storefront. How do they all stack up? Here the top list of Most Wanted Smartphone Mobile App Stores.

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, 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.

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