iPhone Atlas

This Friday, commonly referred to as Black Friday, marks the beginning of the 2009 holiday shopping season in the U.S. Some people love braving the crowds for holiday deals. But if you don't and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, any of the free apps below will help you shop from wherever you happen to be.

Amazon Mobile

Shopping Amazon for Dachshund themed gifts

The Amazon Mobile app (iTunes link) lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to search, shop, compare prices, read reviews, and make purchases on Amazon.com. Existing Amazon customers get complete access to their existing shopping cart, wish list, payment and shipping options, order history, 1-Click settings, and Prime membership benefits.

One experimental feature, Amazon Remembers, lets you snap a photo of a product while you're out, so that you can refer to it later. In addition, the app will try to find the product in Amazon's catalog.

B&N Bookstore

B&N reserve in-store

The B&N Bookstore app (iTunes link) lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to search books, DVDs and Blu-ray, CDs, toys and games, home and gift items, video games, and practically anything that B&N sells. Locate retail stores and browse additional store features such as cafes, event schedules, children's story times, author appearances, and free Wi-Fi.

The app also makes interesting use of the iPhone's camera. Take a photo of the front cover on a book, DVD, or CD, and the app will find it for you. Once the item has been found, you can get information about it that includes editorial reviews, customer ratings, and a chance to reserve a copy for pickup at your local store. You can use the Discover section of the app to get ideas for gifts this holiday season.

Best Buy Weekly Deals

Best Buy weekly deals

The Best Buy Weekly Deals app (iTunes link) brings you the latest weekly deals from Best Buy and lets you browse or search its inventory. You can access product ratings, reviews, accessories, and large product images. The app also lets you manage your BestBuy.com shopping cart and complete the purchases on a mobile version of Best Buy's Web site. Like all the other apps we've written about, this one has its own tool (called IdeaGiftr) for finding gifts. This app is definitely worth a look if you want to catch the Black Friday bargain sales at Best Buy this year.

Best Buy - Gamers Club

If you know someone who's an avid gamer, you might consider the Best Buy - Gamers Club app (iTunes link) that offers a lot of what the Best Buy Weekly Deals app offers, but concentrates specifically on gaming.

eBay Mobile

eBay shopping for Apple iPhone

One of our favorite iPhone apps is eBay Mobile (iTunes link), released in 2008 and later seeing some nice improvements.

eBay's app gives you nearly 100 percent of the eBay experience on your iPhone. It's not as feature complete as the Web site, but it works well enough. You can search for items to purchase or bid on, place bids, watch items, and purchase items all from your iPhone. Once the sale or auction is complete, you can even pay for your purchase on your iPhone.

Target mobile app

Target mobile app - no wiener dog would be caught wearing this

Target's iPhone app (iTunes link) lets you search for products at your local store, check their availability, and even find out where the item is located inside of the store. Like the Best Buy app, this one lets you browse the weekly deals available at Target.

Additional features include referrals to other store locations if your store is out of stock on a particular item, plus gift suggestions based on gender, age, price, personality, or occasion.

Toys "R" Us Big Book Favorites

Toys "R" Us shopping deals

The Toys "R" Us Big Book of Favorites iPhone app (iTunes link) helps you to find toys by category and popularity. You can use the app to make a list of your favorites and share the lists you create via e-mail. Product details are readily available including images, descriptions, prices, and customer reviews.

The app includes features that help you to save money on your toy and electronic purchases at Toys "R" Us and includes the usual store location features that we are used to seeing in all apps of this type.

You might want to hide this one from your children, especially if you are keeping your toy shopping list on your iPhone.

Wal-Mart

The Wal-Mart mobile app (iTunes link) is by far the least useful of all the apps and a disappointment coming from a retailer as large as Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's app is disappointing lacking many basic shopping features that other retailers offer in their apps.

The app's sole focus is on the sale of Wal-Mart's electronics. If you want to see more, the app will refer you to Wal-Mart's full Web site that fortunately is available in a mobile edition. We were surprised to find that this app doesn't begin to touch the surface of the inventory available at Wal-Mart and doesn't offer a way a way to browse Wal-Mart's current weekly sales and specials. However, it does remind you how many days are left before Christmas and helps you locate stores.

Are you armed with your iPhone or iPod Touch and ready for the holiday shopping season? Do you have any other Apple mobile device shopping tips you would like to share? Tell us about them in the comments.

Another iPhone worm has been spotted in the wild.

Unlike the previous exploitation, which merely changed a jailbroken iPhone's wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley of "Rickrolling" fame, this new threat allows hackers to steal sensitive information.

According to security firm Sophos, which wrote about the exploitation after a Dutch ISP spotted it late last week, the worm attacks jailbroken iPhone and iPod Touch devices only.

The worm "uses command-and-control, like a traditional PC botnet," Sophos wrote in a blog post on Saturday to warn users about the exploit. "It configures two startup scripts, one to execute the worm on boot-up, and the other to create a connection to a Lithuanian server to upload stolen data and cede control to the bot master."

Jailbreaking, which has been around for about two years, is a hack that enables iPhone and iPod Touch users to download applications unavailable through Apple's App Store.

Sophos wrote that the worm attacks users on several ISPs, including UPC in the Netherlands, Optus in Australia, and T-Mobile in several countries worldwide. Worse, the worm spreads faster on a Wi-Fi connection than a 3G connection. Users with affected devices might notice extremely short battery life while on Wi-Fi. According to Sophos, that's mainly due to the worm engaging in "so much network activity."

When a device is infected, it's assigned a unique number so that the attackers can easily pinpoint a single device. It also looks for authentication systems that use SMS, better known as mTANs. mTANs are frequently used by banks that send an SMS message with a password to mobile phones, allowing people to log in to their online accounts, Sophos wrote.

In essence, this threat is serious.

Sophos recommends that people with infected iPhones and iPod Touch devices restore them back to Apple's most recent firmware update. For now, there is no other way to fix the problem.

(Credit: CNET)

With more than 100,000 apps in the iTunes App Store and huge success around the world with the iPhone, it would appear Apple has done just about everything right with the launch of its first mobile handset. But as any iPhone app developers will tell you, the app approval process is less than ideal, with some developers waiting well beyond Apple's 14-day waiting period and sometimes longer to get their apps approved. Though Apple has stated it is working on the app approval process, there has been little in the way of progress if you ask iPhone app developers.

Recently, Apple added an automated system for weeding out developers who use Apple's private APIs, a process that may be part of a larger plan to cut down on some of the wait time. Unfortunately, developers are still struggling to get their apps to the iTunes store, finding out at the end of the 14-day waiting period that it was the automated system that turned them down. Hopefully, as more time passes, Apple will be able to figure out a way to make the process more efficient while still being able to provide high-quality and secure apps for everyone. Happy iPhone app developers mean more and better apps, so it's in all of our best interests for Apple to make the process better.

This week's apps include a new (to iPhone) multiservice chat client and a stunt-racing game with beautiful 3D graphics.

Use the tabs at the top to switch conversations

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Trillian ($4.99) is a popular multiservice chat client on Windows machines that you can now use on your iPhone. Multiservice chat clients are ideal for those who have accounts across several services like Yahoo, Google, ICQ/AIM, and MSN, and want to use just one client to access them all. The interface is fairly intuitive, letting you add your user names and passwords for each service, and then letting you log on to all or specific services with only a few taps on your touch screen. Trillian does not support landscape mode for typing yet, but the developers say it is coming soon.

Once you're logged in, the Trillian interface looks a lot like it does in the Windows client, complete with your buddies' avatars, contact categories (friends, coworkers, etc.), and color-coded icons to indicate which service your friends are using. The way Trillian handles multiple chat sessions on the iPhone client is excellent, with a touch-scrollable tabbed interface, making it easy to switch conversations quickly. Also especially useful (and clever) is the push notification system, that sends you the first message of a chain so you know someone is trying to reach you, but doesn't send a huge list of messages when you don't want them. At this time, you can only stay logged-in (with the app suspended) for a maximum of 24 hours, but the folks at Trillian say it will be lengthened to seven days in future updates. Though the price is a little steep in my opinion, Trillian is a high-quality chat client that will appeal to those who use multiple services.

The screenshot doesn't do it justice, but this game looks and plays great

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

Jet Car Stunts is a stunt-racing game that runs surprisingly smoothly on first gen iPhones on up to the 3GS. Beyond the beautiful graphics, the driving control system is excellent, using the accelerometer for steering and onscreen controls for gas and brakes. What makes the game unique from other racing games are the controls for your rocket boost to complete big jumps, and the braking system that works both on the ground and in the air.

You can choose from two different game types including Time Trial and Platforming. In Time Trial, you race five laps around a track with corkscrew twists, tight turns, and huge jumps, to qualify for bronze-, silver-, or gold-medal times. Platforming has no time limit, but instead records the number of tries it takes you to complete difficult tracks--and they get very difficult in both game types. Time Trial has three skill levels, with four tracks to complete in each to move on the next skill level. Platforming has five difficulty levels, with five tracks in each to pass before moving on. Overall, Jet Car Stunts is one of the more unique racing games and features excellent graphics, extremely smooth controls, and plenty of replay value, with increasingly challenging tracks. I've had the game for a week and I still can't get over both how good it looks and how smooth it plays.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Were you waiting for a big-name multiservice chat client like Trillian before spending your money? Is Jet Car Stunts hard or am I just not good enough? Let me know in the comments!

Amidio makes some heavy-duty musical apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch; I was particularly impressed with StarGuitar, which gives you a virtual guitar with a bunch of preset rhythms, letting songwriters create quick sketches of ideas when they're nowhere near a guitar.

I created a nice vocal loop from the new Beach House single, then dropped it into Pink Floyd's "Astronomy Domine." It took me about five minutes.

On Tuesday, Apple approved a new Amidio app, called TouchDJ, for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and it's both very impressive from a technical standpoint and a heck of a lot of fun. The iPhone can only play one audio track at a time, but TouchDJ essentially fools it into placing two MP3s side by side for simultaneous, real-time manipulation and playback. It's like a two-track digital DJ setup right on your iPhone.

You get a crossfader to control the balance between the two tracks, plus individual controls for each track's volume, pitch/speed (which aren't independent from one another, unfortunately), equalization (three bands), and effects (the built-in real-time effect sounds like a kind of flanger, and there are several lame samples of a low-pitched robot voice, but you can upload your own). Each track is represented by simple waveform images that use a different color for the bass, which helps you match beats more effectively. A tempobend effect, which lets you quickly bend the speed up or down on either track, also helps you get in sync.

The looping functions were most impressive--you can create a cue and loop mark at any point in either track, then return to the cue with the rewind button, move to the loop mark with the fast forward button, or create an endless loop between the two points. All of this is in real time. If you've got an audio splitter, you can even create a separate cue track for your headphones--for example, to set up a loop in your second track while the first one is playing, without exposing your experimentation to your audience--although this requires some serious processing power, and is recommended only for an iPhone 3GS.

There are a couple caveats.... Read more

This week, MacRumors published a report regarding rumors that Apple is about to launch a "Concierge" iPhone app for Apple's retail store customers.

The app will supposedly provide the same functionality available via the company's online retail store reservations system, where customers can schedule appointments for Personal Shopping, the Genius Bar, learning Workshops, Business consulting, Youth Programs, and One to One. The app may also allow these customers to keep track of any Apple retail store premium program memberships.

A "Concierge" iPhone app makes sense and we are surprised that we have not seen this idea already. Clearly once the app is released it will be available for free since customers can currently register for free at any Apple Store or online via their favorite stores Web site.

We attempted to reach Apple public relations for comment, but at press time we had not received a response.

The Apple Store at Baybrook Mall in Friendswood, Texas, offers a variety of reservations that you can sign up for on Apple's Web site--a new Concierge app would let you sign up from your iPhone.

(Credit: Apple Inc.)

Gizmodo reported early this week that Apple may be using software to perform additional automated checks on all new App Store submissions during the app review process.

Google Mobile lets you search the Web using your voice in a way that is technically off-limits to iPhone developers, according to a report.

(Credit: Apple (App Store))

A series of tweets on Twitter from John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory claimed that Apple is using an automated software tool that checks for private API calls in all new App Store submissions.

Hockenberry stated, "It wouldn't surprise me if the [App Store] review process now includes a step where they pass your binary through something that checks framework use."

Gruber responded saying, "Yup: Apple recently started running apps through a static analysis tool to look for private API calls."

Later, Gruber followed up with "I honestly don't know exactly what it flags. I have reason to believe that it is a serious tool, not simplistic."

The use of private APIs have always been prohibited by the iPhone SDK Developer Agreement because APIs may change or give third-party developers access to features that Apple does not want made publicly available. If this system exists, Apple might have found a way to quickly identify apps that use private APIs and reject them.

This also means that Apple may have the ability to check existing apps in the App Store that are known violators of Apple's policies such as Google Mobile for iPhone.

Trillian IM is finally available to iPhone users.

(Credit: Trillian)

It took a few months, but finally, Trillian IM is available to iPhone and iPod Touch users through Apple's App Store. The application costs $4.99.

Cerulean Studios, the company that created Trillian, said that Trillian for iPhone sports several features users will already find on the company's desktop software. The app displays contacts, grouped and sorted by their respective categories. Users can also view multiple chat windows in a tabbed display. Thanks to updates Apple has made to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Trillian for iPhone also supports copy and paste. As with Trillian for the desktop, users can set their status, choose an avatar, and set up different status messages.

Because the app is always connected to Cerulean Studios' Astra server, users can synchronize content across multiple IM clients. In other words, any changes made on the iPhone version of the app will immediately be reflected on the company's Windows client and the user's Astra profile. Any contacts users add will also be synchronized with their other clients.

According to Cerulean Studios, all chats are maintained on the server, so they are kept in case of a lost connection. The app will also alert users when they receive an instant message, regardless of whether Trillian for iPhone is open or not. When an IM is received, users will see a dialog box, hear the Trillian IM-notification sound, and be able to start Trillian and reply to the person.

Those interested in using Trillian for iPhone will first need a Trillian Astra account. Luckily, the iPhone app allows users to sign up for Astra from within the app.

Recently, I removed my iPhone e-mail accounts so I could troubleshoot a problem with the Mail app. But when I reinstalled the accounts, I found that I wasn't able to delete messages from one account's in-box.

The account in question was a POP3 account used to retrieve messages from my spam e-mail filtering service. It was sending and receiving e-mail just fine, but whenever I tried to delete a message from the in-box, my iPhone would present the following error:

Unable to move message to folder "Trash" because the folder does not exist.

Luckily, I was able to locate a fix on Apple's support site that solved the problem. Here are the steps you should take to resolve this issue:

Trash folder is not configured

1. Launch Settings app on your iPhone or iPod Touch
2. Tap settings, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars
3. Tap the affected account
4. Tap Advanced
5. Tap Deleted Mailbox
6. If "On the Server" is an option, select the Trash folder or its equivalent below that. Go to step 8.
7. Select Trash under "On My iPhone"
8. Tap Advanced
9. Press the Home button

Trash folder is already configured

1. Tap another folder under the "On the Server" section to temporarily move the Trash folder.
2. Tap Advanced
3. Tap Deleted Mailbox, then set it to Trash located under On My iPhone.
4. Tap Advanced
5. Press the Home button

Now you should be able to delete messages from your e-mail account in-box.

(Credit: CNET)

Like I've mentioned here several times before, I'm one of the people who is still using the iPhone 3G. Like many, I'm waiting for my two-year contract to be up so I can get whatever the next-gen iPhone is. It doesn't bother me too much (aside from a few app features that require 3GS), but I do long for the faster processing power and extra features found in the latest iPhone. Especially when it comes to (surprise!) games.

To give you an idea of the difference between the two iPhone processors and how they effect game performance, fellow CNET editor, Josh Lowensohn, put the two iPhone models to the test. In Josh's article, he offers up several side-by-side comparisons of many of the top iPhone games with analysis. If you're an iPhone-gaming fan or just want to see how the processing power matches up between the two models, check out his article.

This week's apps are both games, with the first complete basketball game for the iPhone and a fun sequel to one of the more unique games in the iTunes App Store.

I hope Ellis doesn't pass it to the guy with the green square around him

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

NBA Live ($9.99) is the first fully licensed and complete basketball game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can play as any of the 30 NBA teams featuring the actual players and stats. You can play a quick exhibition game, play through an entire season, or just play through the playoffs up to the NBA Championship. The control system includes an onscreen joystick for movement and two buttons that take care of most basketball action (shooting, passing, etc.), but with a clever system for pulling off more advanced moves. The graphics are not on par with what you'll find in the current basketball games on consoles, but for an iPhone game, it looks fairly good and plays well enough to satisfy basketball game fans.

NBA Live packs a lot of features into the game using only a couple of buttons. Advanced moves like cross-over dribbles and hardcore dunks require you touch a button then flick in a direction. Holding down on the pass button brings up icons you can touch to pass to specific players. If you want to go deeper than just running and gunning, you can touch the clipboard icon to call a play and set up an open man for an easy shot. While I'm happy with NBA Live as an iPhone basketball game, I may be spoiled by the smooth experience on console versions. The graphics are pretty good, but not great and the movement can be a bit jerky. Overall, I think it's a pretty good basketball game, but it might be worth waiting a little while to see if it goes on sale. Hardcore fans should get this game.

The simple, hand-drawn graphics are part of what makes this game charming.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)

JellyCar 2 is the sequel to the unique squishy driving-puzzle game, JellyCar. JellyCar 2 expands on the hand-drawn, cartoon puzzle game with several more levels, new game types, and the capability to customize your car and create your own levels. The controls involve touching the screen on either side to go forward and backward and you can tilt your iPhone to right your car when it flips over. Play the game in the Classic Mode to navigate your car through a level to the goal in the least amount of time. You have three skill levels in classic mode with a number of tracks for each level. Long Jump mode lets you drive down a long ramp and use obstacles in the level to project your car the longest distance. The third mode adds a new game entirely, requiring you to direct Tetris-like puzzle pieces to their associated bins--strange sounding, but it's pretty fun with the JellyCar physics in play. Adding to your options for solving puzzles, you can touch the car to "go big" like the original JellyCar. You also get two extra skills you can grab while driving: a balloon that lets you take to the air and one that makes your wheels sticky--each of which you will use at different times to pass levels.

JellyCar 2 also adds a few other features to play with and will amount to a lot of replay value. You can customize your vehicle and wheels with different colors, but you can also choose different vehicles, each with their own physical properties to change how you attack various levels. A new editing mode even lets you create and save your own levels from the ground up. Overall, I think JellyCar 2 is in a class by itself, with a fun, stylistic feel to the game and plenty of challenging levels that are very enjoyable to play.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Do you think NBA Live is worth the price to play? Is JellyCar 2 a worthy sequel to JellyCar? Let me know in the comments!