Right, so bearwith me here: this week our apps are all about learning new things,understanding the world around you, meeting new people, playingextremely silly games in large groups. Sort of like being a kidagain! No? Ok.
Pocket Universe: It’s a pinchy, zoomy, 3D star map for theiPhone and iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3GS, for which the new PocketUniverse is designed, you get full-on astronomical augmentedreality. Using location services, accelerometer data and the 3GS’scompass, Pocket Universe pseudo-overlays information about yourstars, planets, constellations and general space things accordingto whatever you’re pointing at. Three dollars.
Loopt for iPod Touch: The Loopt iPhone app has been around aslong as, well,iPhone apps. Since 2008,it’s earned its keep as one of the only useful friend-locatingapps. Just about every mobile platform has a client, with onenotable exception: the iPod Touch. That, along with Of course,Loopt isn’t quite the same without GPS, but Wi-Fi location will getyou by in a bind. Still waiting for a proper 3.0 version though.Free.
Seek ‘n Spell: iPhone games tend to be a lot like games for anyother portable device, and rarely leverage some of thetraditionally non-gaming capabilities of the handset. Part of thisis because, until recently, the developer SDK was sorting oflimited. Most of it, I think, is because developers just haven’tbeen thinking hard enough.
Take this clever, if obvious, idea for a game: A map of whereveryou are is overlaid with letters, which you and you teammates cancollect by physically running to their icons. Your goal is to comeup with words for points, Scrabble-style. It’s a very, very coolidea, and decidedly sweatier than your typical iPhone game. Abuck.
MSNBC: Hey, look, another news organization has a content app!Let’s talk about it! This one’s less about news than about cateringto fans of the network, with an emphasis on video content as wellas Twitter feeds from MSNBC personalities. It’s a bit hard on theeyes, and occasionally goes stuttery on you, but it works fine. Funfact: according to the iTunes description, this iPhone app, beingan MSNBC product, uses “Microsoft’s Advanced Technologies.” Whatthis means, I have no idea. Free.
Fluent News: If you could sense a lack of excitement about thatMSNBC app, that was because of apps variety Fluent. It’s far fromthe first multi-source news aggregator, but it’s one of the betterones. It behave like Google News, more or less, collectingimportant news from loads of sources and grouping it in a sensibleway Why not just use Google News then, you might rudely interject?Well, for one, Fluent can cache news for offline reading, forplans, subways, caves, or wherever. It also prefetches longerarticles, though I couldn’t really tell in my brief testing.Anyway, it’s free, so why not?
Skype: Another incremental update to another extremely popularapp. This one gets an interface lift, but most importantly, twouseful features for people who use Skype’s pay services: textmessaging with SkypeOut credit (good for cheap international texts;bad for having no reply go), and Skype Voicemail support. Voicemailsupport is a bigger deal than it sounds: since receiving calls whenyou’re out is still pretty much out of the questioning, thevoicemail access makes being out of touch a little less irritating.Still free.
Air Sharing Pro: We’ve always been impressed with AirSharing—it’s a solid file storage/viewing solution in itsbasic form. The Pro version, though, is a different animalentirely. First of all, it’s expensive: $10, to be exact. It’s alsogot expanded support for file storage services like, MobileMe,MyDisk, and Drop.io.
The main draw is that there are tons of new file functions:emailing, which is a huge help; direct printing, via OS X printersharing; archiving abilities, including viewing archive contentswithout extracting. It’s a bit like a walled-in version of Finder,and the closest to a proper file browser you’re going to get on anon-jailbroken iPhone.
This Week’s App News on Giz:
“Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push(Yet)
“Apple’s Nudie App Headaches Now Involve Underage Girls
“iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Better Video Editing, Voice Control OverBluetooth, And More
“Remarkable Speech-to-Speech Voice Translator Coming to iPhone andBlackberry
“Birdfeed Twitter App Review: Lean, Fast and Pretty
“Doom Resurrection for iPhone Hits the App Store, Costs $10
“A Whole Lotta Quake Will Be Blowing Up Your iPhone
This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a greatapp that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, betteryet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even moreapps: see ourprevious weeklyroundups here, and check out ourFavorite iPhone AppsDirectoryand our originaliPhoneApp Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.
Tags: apple, apps, cache, childhood, clear, gizmodo, iphone, itunes, mzstore, webobjects, woa
On-board all of our equipment is stateof the art. We’ll 
