App Store

Want to watch your own mouth speak a foreign language? If it sounds strange, that's because iLingual is not your typical iPhone phrasebook. First take a photo of the lips you'd like to see in action.

Once the photo is taken, you can select from a list of 400 phrases. The application will proceed to animate your mouth as it speaks the phrase in the foreign language. To "speak" to another person you hold the back of the iPhone up to your face.

Looking to get in and out of your local mall as quickly as possible this holiday season? A new iPhone app from Medl Mobile will give you the tools to buy the goods and plan your escape. No more wandering, window shopping or searching for a map.

Mall Maps is worth $2.99 if you're looking for an efficient shopping experience. The Mall Maps database contains over 1,000 shopping centers in 50 states across the US. If you can't find the mall itself, this app will let you know where the closest malls are using GPS and give you directions.

Now with the Timelapser app your iPhone will easily record time lapse movies. The only problem might be keeping the iPhone still from frame to frame.

The app is on sale at half price for a limited time so it's currently selling for 99 cents. Firmware 3.1 is required, however the app will work on any generation iPhone. Frames can be captured more frequently on the iPhone 3GS.

Would you buy a song if you could stream it an unlimited number of times from your iPhone or a web browser? Maybe not. What if the cost was only 10 cents? Not only does this free up your disk space, it's light on your wallet.

Lulu is counting on these two things to make them lots of money. They currently have 8.5 million songs in their library. Instead of having a music collection of files, everything you paid to play resides on remote servers until you demand a listen.

40 live pro basketball games streaming directly to your iPhone every week? If you're a fan, NBA League Pass Mobile may be the ultimate basketball app.

All of this streaming NBA action over 3G and Wi-Fi does come at a price. Total for the 2009-10 basketball season excluding tax is $39.99 in the App Store. Current NBA League Pass television subscribers don't get a break.

The App Store has only been online for five quarters, yet it continues to impress with a staggering number of offerings and purchases. Apple has announced there are now 85,000 iPhone and iPod Touch applications available via iTunes.

50 million people own a compatible Apple device and 125,000 software developers are participating in the Apple iPhone Developer Program. 1.5 billion individual downloads were clocked on the App Store within the first year of its operation.

Now that the number of iPhone applications is quickly approaching six digits, finding useful software seems to get more difficult every day. You may have heard that Apple is working on ways to improve the search for iPhone apps in the App Store and iTunes.

Now Microsoft is getting into the game with their Bing search engine. They've added a visual search gallery for top iPhone apps based on the company's Silverlight technology.

Vonage is looking for a boost from iPhone users amid sagging sales of its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. The company has submitted an iPhone application to Apple for approval.

The first version Apple reviewed came back due to a technical issue involving an icon label. The app was resubmitted by Vonage after correcting the problem and is currently under review.

Now iPhone users can get even more free apps. There's a new way to keep track of developers that run promotions. Many companies will temporarily drop the price of an app for a limited time, or even offer the application for free.

FreeAppAlert organizes all of these deals into a central location. Every day tens of paid iPhone apps are listed that have dropped their price to FREE for a limited time.

Maybe the conflict between two giants was brewing in the background the whole time. The partnership between Apple and Google looks to be on edge ever since Google decided to get into the mobile phone business, launching the open source platform Android.

Apple, as we know from countless reports of application bans, rescinded approvals, and the rejection of Google Voice, keeps strict and inconsistent control of their iPhone OS. In fact, previous Google apps appearing in the App Store have had the privilege of using tools hidden from the average developer.