The iPhone will be available in South Korea for the first time ever later this month. If the overall success is comparable to early pre-order reaction, it seems as though the iPhone will be in just about every hand that carries a cell phone in South Korea. One company has already reported that over 15,000 units have been pre-ordered within the first day of availability.

As the phones themselves will not be available in stores until Saturday (at least they hope so), many consumers are taking advantage of Internet sites that are allowing them to pre-order the phones. This has been a much anticipated release as it is been delayed several times, but this finally seems like it will be the real deal. With this new market opening up, the iPhone will only solidify its position as the number one smart phone being used by consumers today.

As AT&T has exclusivity (at least for now) on the iPhone in the United States,

KT has the exclusive contract in South Korea. Initially, they will have both the 16GB and the 32GB models available in their stores. This is a big move for Apple as the two primary companies that dominate the market in South Korea are Samsung and LG. Both of these companies rely on this market heavily and have every reason to be worried now that the iPhone will be readily available.

It will be interesting to watch and see how this develops over the next few months. If Apple manages to get a stranglehold on the Asian market as it is already done in its other markets, this company will clearly be the dominant force in smart phone development (as if they already don’t hold that title). Once again, the consumer will be the primary beneficiary as every other cell phone company will have to step up to create better phones that can compete with the iPhone or they will risk losing their market share altogether.

This may be one of the best free apps that is available on the iPhone. We have all been in strange cities and have had to hunt down wifi spots in order to send out a quick email or send off a report.

It is almost embarrassing asking people where to go if you don’t have an aircard, this can be a major problem. The free workplace app WorkSnug does the hunting for you and lands a quite place to do whatever you need.

After starting the app up, all that is needed is to hold the iPhone up in front of you and the iPhone starts to list the various locations that have been scouted the by the WorkSnug team. It will give directions and ratings as to what the team and other users think about that spot. If directions are needed, they are right there as well.

While there are plenty of apps that are fun to have or great games to play, this is one of the most useful and practical ones that we have seen come out in a while. Best of all, it’s FREE. No more worry about where to go when you get to town or relying on the kindness of a stranger. Anyone who travels with their laptop in tow is going to appreciate this app.

Another feature that many will enjoy is that they can add their own information about the sites and share it with their friends once they have visited it. For the most part, the sites that were checked had a very accurate review and each one of them was laptop friendly. Oh yeah, the bonus feature is that if they serve coffee, the quality of the Joe is listed as well. Not too bad for a free app.

The much anticipated release of the Amidio Touch DJ application has finally been approved by Apple for sale in the App Store and it is sure to be a top seller in no time at all.
The app enables users to mix two tracks without ever hearing one second of the song and has some special features that are pretty incredible for being use on a phone.

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DJ app’s have apparently been blocked for the iPhone for quite some time and nobody is really sure why. There has been a multitude of applications and every one of them has been turned down to this point. Whether Apple is scared that the applications will hurt their iPod sales or not is unclear as they have been pretty tight lipped about everything so far. However, users have been sending letters and petitions about approval for some type of app and Apple has finally given in.

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The Amidio Touch DJ app will retail for $19.99 in the app store and is pretty amazing. Two separate tracks can be pulled up and compared via the sound waves that

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are generated. Mixers should be able to combine the tracks by visually matching the waves. At least that is the theory behind the whole thing.

While there is a lot of upside to this app, there are also some small roadblocks that Apple has in mind for its users. For instance, if the user wants to pre listen to the songs before they have been mixed, they must buy a splitting adapter to do so. They also cannot access their current library. Any songs that they want to use in the app must re-imported through another utility on the iPhone.

Even though there are some limitations, there are also a lot of special effects that can be used within the app itself that make this well worth the money. The fact that it is the only true DJ application that is usable on the iPhone doesn’t really give us a choice though if we want to use the iPhone as mixer for our iTunes library. However, Amidio did a great job with the obvious restrictions that Apple put on them to get this approved.

While it may be hard to imagine, you may actually have to suffer through commercials in the very near future when using certain apps on the iPhone. It is tough to gauge how well this one is going to go over with users, but what choice do they really have? AdMob, a mobile phone advertising company, is set to launch advertising that will appear in certain applications that are featured in the App store.
This is kind of a unique approach to advertising, but do iPhone users really want to have to watch or listen to an ad once they have opened up an application that they have already paid for? While the app will have a fast forward feature that will allow the user the ability to end the ad and move onto the application, it seems like it would be more of an annoyance than anything else. Of course, Google is in on the action as they have recently announced that they will be acquiring AdMob with an offer of about $750,000,000 in stock. The curious thing here is that this app may directly affect the sales of iPhone applications and Google is in cahoots with other developers that are selling their phones that feature Google as a primary driving force.

The first phone that comes to mind is of course the Droid. The free GPS app that is on the phone is powered by Google maps and is one of the features that is being touted over the iPhone’s features. In order to get something comparable, the iPhone user would have to purchase the TomTom feature (which has recently been upgraded to compete with the Google Maps GPS) for $99. Is anyone questioning this or are we just thinking conspiracy theory on our own here?

There has been a recent push of developers that have not been so secretive about their unhappiness with the whole vetting process that Apple uses to decide who can have an app in the store and who cannot. While it is generally believed that the denials are not supposed to be disclosed, these things have a way of leaking out and Apple has been getting put under the microscope.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been in the press quite a lot lately for various reasons and it is no wonder that all of this is coming back out again. In the eyes of many developers, the App Store is a contradiction in itself. Apple does not have its own developers working on these applications, but suggests that they have an open policy.

It all seems very welcoming until you hear the number of people that have been refused for one reason or another. It is not

to the point that many major developers of applications are pulling their teams off of iPhone apps and working on other systems such as Blackberry and Droid. While there will be enough start-up companies that will fill the void and there will be no shortage of new apps, it could mean more competition for the iPhone.

Many of these larger companies are set up to literally pump out app after app if need be. While I have no idea what the actual number of apps that have been developed by major tech companies is one would have to imagine that it is pretty significant. How hard can it be to create a similar app for other phones when the programming is basically done? Could these mean a sudden rush of apps that are available for the direct competition? Only time is going to tell on this one but Apple seems to making a few more enemies that friends lately.

As odd as it sounds, the iPhone is doing its share to alleviate some of the unemployment by putting people to work making apps.

While Apple may not be directly employing the latest wave of tech entrepreneurs, the iPhone is responsible for quite a few startup companies that are seeing college whiz kids cash in on the iPhone craze.

Finding a job out of college has never been harder, but because of the iPhone boom, many kids that have the tech savvy are jumping in with both feet and starting up their own businesses. More developers than ever are looking to get in on the action because of the very generous revenue share plan that Apple has in place. If these companies can come up with one or two successful apps, they can be well on their way to becoming millionaires.

Stanford University has decided to cash

in on this as well as they now offer an app building course. They have landed a couple of Apple engineers to teach the course and it is already becoming quite popular. While most of these new businesses are small in staff, a little success could lead to a larger work force. Regardless, people are being put to work in a niche that was not even there a few years ago.

It is no wonder that Palm, Google and RIM are putting serious efforts into creating the same type of App Store for their phones. Apple has big jump on them with well over 100,000 apps already in circulation and that number continues to grow every day. The other companies are going to have to loosen their purse strings though, as Apple currently has the best deal around. As long as they do, this is where the developers will end up

At the end of October, a Priceline application was released for the iPhone and the reviews are finally in, it is a slam dunk. As soon as this app hit the market it quickly became one of the most downloaded travel apps available and after using it, we can see why. Instead of having to sit by the computer, iPhone users can now hit the bidding up late and get the discount hotel rooms that they are looking for.

Imagine attending a wedding and enjoying the reception just a little bit too much and needing to stay over. Instead of having to make call after call, the iPhone user only needs to open the app and let the program do the rest. Plug in the normal information and Priceline finds the best room rate that fall within the parameters that have been set.

While the app will automatically display average

bids, it is best to lowball the bids to try and get a better deal. The average bid is average for a reason as there are lower bids that are stealing rates well below that price. Play it smart and go low and rebid if you have to. The app takes bids for the day of until 11:00pm EST, so there is plenty of time to get that last second room request in.

If this app is not on your iPhone yet, make sure it gets downloaded in the very near future. You just never know when the time is going to come that a hotel room is going to be needed on short notice. Having this little security blanket in place will come in handy sooner or later and paying $59 is a lot better than walking into the area lodging and getting smacked with a rack rate of $199.

Over the last few months, Apple seems to be denying more apps than it is accepting. The latest to fall by the wayside for an iPhone app was Tom Richmond. MAD fans will recognize the name as they were looking forward to the app that he has been touting on his personal blog. Unfortunately, the time is not now for its release and Mr. Richmond is none too happy about it.

The official no thank you reads, “Thank you for submitting Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Bobble Rep – 111th Congress Edition and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.”

Depending upon how you interpret the rule, their decision to turn down this app is extremely questionable. For those that have seen the actual app, it does not appear

to be very demeaning or to make fun of anyone. The images are similar to what can be seen in any editorial page in papers across the company. There is no dialogue that makes fun of or gives the impression that any of these politicians are being disrespected.

Mr. Richmond claims that the application “is a informational database.” It merely gives people the contact stats for the chosen representative. It actually does seem pretty harmless, but it is proof positive that Apple has no intentions of creating muddled waters with the political world.

There have been several other app’s that have not cut the mustard recently that have made a splash in the media and the common rebuke from their designers is that Apple has a very broad structure as to what they will accept and what they won’t and designers would just like to have things a little clearer so that they know what the actual boundaries are. Let’s see if Apple has an app for that!

It is not taking long for reviewers to pick apart the Droid and they only have themselves to blame. Starting a campaign by stating that this phone is everything that the iPhone is not sets a pretty high bar.

They set themselves up for failure in that everyone was expecting some super phone and what they are really getting is an iPhone copycat with not as many applications.

As has been stated before, there are features on the Droid that are very good and some of them may even be better than the iPhone, but it is simply not enough to warrant changing providers or doubling your cell phone bill. Most people that already have an iPhone are looking at a monthly service bill of at least $150 a month and some are up around the $200 level. That would be an extra $1,800-$2,400 a year to have both phones and it is simply not worth it.

This is

just one man’s opinion, but before the Droid took on a giant like the iPhone, they should have had a deeper library of apps to stand behind. While the iPhone had a similar amount when it was first launched, it was a one-of-a-kind and was only competing with the Blackberry as a smart phone. This is the one point that is hammered home time and time again by people that are trying out the Droid. Why change phones to a product that only offers 10% of the apps that the Apple iPhone does?

Droid may one day be a true threat to the success of the iPhone, but that time is not now. If anything, they are further convincing Verizon customers to switch over to AT&T to have a phone that can do anything from translate a baby’s crying picking a good spot to put in a wind turbine as an alternative energy source. Right now, the Droid is simply out of its league.

I thought I had seen it all and then I read that the iPhone can understand what a baby is trying to say when they are crying. How can you not look into an app like this?

One of the latest iPhone applications to be launched is the Cry Translator. This is an app that was developed by BiLoop Technologic, S.L., and that uses sound analysis technology to figure out exactly what the baby is trying to say.

The analysis is based off of 5 basic emotions that a child will try and express: annoyance, boredom, fatigue, hunger and stress. All you have to do is put your iPhone up the wailing child and within a few seconds the phone should be able to decipher what they are trying to tell you through their crying.

The app is based on years of research and takes the crying and analyzes it to decide what the problem is. Once it has been deciphered, the iPhone will then give the parents some

ideas as to what they can do the calm the child down. For those fathers that try and shove a bottle in the mouth of the child every time they start to cry, this can be an invaluable resource. While you can raise your eyebrows at the idea of a phone being able to decipher crying, BiLoop Technologic says that there app has a 96% rate of success in determining the actual cause of the crying.

If you think this app is for you, you better hurry up because the price is about to move. From launch through November 11, they are selling it for the bargain basement price of $9.99 and after that, it is going to cost you $29.99 to be able to figure out what your baby is saying through the phone. While it may sound like a lot of money, it is a bargain for those fathers that are trying to figure out how to calm down their child around 4:00pm on Sunday afternoon during football season.