Fortunately, the official IMDb app looks great. On the main screen, you can view movie showtimes, see what films are coming soon, view current box office results and also look at the MOVIEmeter and the Top 250 movies according to IMDb users.

You can also view U.S. TV listings and U.S. TV recaps, as well as the STARmeter and which celebrities were born on a given day.

We wager that most people will be using the search bar at the top, which works very well. After you search for an actor or movie title and select the desired result, the app brings up a nicely formatted page of information.

You can browse details like cast and crew lists or filmographies (if it is a person), view photos and trailers, and read external reviews, user reviews, trivia, and other information.

You can also view the item on IMDb in Mobile Safari or search for it on Amazon.com (which also opens up a new window). All in all, the way information is displayed is wonderful. One of the problems with third-party apps like MovieStar and Movie Genie (as great as those apps have been in lieu of a permanent solution) is that viewing information is often unwieldy. Pictures aren’t correctly formatted for the mobile screen, viewing specific TV show details is extremely difficult and access to other IMDb features is largely missing.

For instance, there is no way to log in and rate for movies on the go or add a comment. Furthermore, the app is only available in the U.S. right now. IMDb says it hopes to roll out an international version soon. We also wish that IMDb had some sort of offline mode. As it stands, you have to be connected to the Internet to use the app.

Between 60,000 and 65,000 iPhone 3GS were reportedly pre-ordered in the first week. This is pretty impressive in a country, which is as over-saturated with high-quality domestic phones as Japan (where the iPhone sells pretty well, too) and where the percentage of smartphone users is said to stand at the one percent level. In fact, media reports suggest KT Corporation was totally overwhelmed by the interest and couldn’t handle the pre-orders properly.

Koreans have to pay $340 for the 32GB iPhone 3GS, provided they agree to the $39 fee for the cheapest monthly plan KT Corporation offers for it. The 8GB model costs $115 under the same condition and can be free when users sign for more expensive monthly rates. Every Korean iPhone customer will be able to use KT Corporation’s 13,000 Wi-Fi spots all over the country for no cost.

"We're calling these businesses the 'Favorite Places on Google' and you'll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR code that you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business's Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you'll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop."

For iPhones Google found the $1.99 QuickMark app to work best and has partnering with QuickMark to offer the first 40,000 downloads for free.

You can explore a sample of the Favorite Places in 20 of the largest U.S. cities at google.com/favoriteplaces or check out a demo video below to see how this works. [QuickMark]

At one point, Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president for iTunes, compares the App Store to rocket ship and notes, "We've been able to leverage a lot of our iTunes Technology for the App Store."

That speaks to what is an obvious, but largely overlooked part of the success of the App Store. While Apple's two sexy devices (the iPhone and the iPod Touch), make apps very simple to use, it's the iTunes experience that makes them easy to obtain. Without the latter, the former simply wouldn't matter.

We've spoken previously about how Apple's tight control of its ecosystem and its competitors lack of such structure has helped build the App Store into what it is, and insured that it continues to outpace its rivals. But at its core, the App Store works so well because it was built upon a foundation that was proven: iTunes.

Since Apple was able to grow iTunes into the biggest force in online music (and actually, the biggest force now in retail music overall), it conditioned its customers with something very important: The idea of paying for digital goods with one click through a piece of software. Customers had already bought billions of songs through iTunes by the time the App Store was born. And the App Store offered the same exact process, using the same method of payment already stored in iTunes.

This is crucial. Imagine if someone else had tried to launch an app store as its own entity, do we really think it would have exploded in the same way? That seems unlikely, and actually, others had tried similar ideas before, but they never took off. As the blog Webomatica pointed out today, we live in an online world now where many of us expect apps connected to the web to be free. That's really all iPhone apps are too (though yes, some are more involved and take longer to develop), yet people're okay with paying for many of them. Read Full Article

They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars.

“Apple changed the view of what you can do with that small phone in your back pocket,” says Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst. “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.”

...“The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior,” she says. “The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.” ...Read Full Article