Apple says the App Store has passed the 10 billion downloads mark.

The success of the iPhone and iPad have led to an explosion in downloadable programs. That success appears to be increasing with the addition of the Verizon iPhone next month

Apple announced the news on its website Saturday.

What a day for open source loving, torrent-downloading computer hippies.

VLC Media Player, the software that can play nearly any video file, has come to the App Store, with iPod/iPhone and iPad versions now available for free.

Running all your video files on your Apple device has been problematic forever. The built-in player only supports certain formats, but this will no longer be an issue with VLC, which has long been a mega-popular cross-platform desktop computer choice.

The app is being put out by Applidium, a French company that also offers a Google Analytics app and a language translator.

Apple’s highly popular App Store, now allows its users to gift and receive purchases of games and apps.

The process is simple; click on whatever goodie you’d like and use the drop-down to get to ‘gift.’ From here you enter the recipient’s e-mail and can even add a personal message too. And of course, you still have to pay for it.

New gifting option

I can’t vouch for how the process works on the iPhone or iPod Touch, but in the iTunes store it couldn’t be easier.

Tapulous, makers of the mighty Tap Tap iPhone and iPod Touch music games, announced and released “Kings of Leon Revenge” today, the latest band-specific game in the growing series.

It’ll run you $4.99, comes with 10 Kings of Leon tunes (all the ones you want) and has a wireless battle-mode and and a new exclusive “Kings of Leon chat room.”

After announcing the game this morning, Tapulous head of business development Tim O’Brien said the wonderful success the band has enjoyed recently was cause for signing them to the digital creation.

“Having won three Grammy awards including the marquee Record of the Year and Best Rock Song, it has truly been an incredible year for Kings of Leon. The band defies traditional labels and we are thrilled to add these inventive, talented and raw artists to the growing Revenge family. Tap Tap Revenge lovers have been asking for this game and will be delighted.”

Oh man oh man. I’ll pick this up in a heartbeat. Also, did you know they’re all brothers? Crazy.

Below are the songs you’ll enjoy in the game and a trailer for it.

• -Use Somebody
• - Sex On Fire
• - The Bucket
• - Crawl
• - Be Somebody
• - McFearless
• - Notion
• - On Call
• - Black Thumbnail
• - True Love Way

Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies arrived in the App store today for iPhone/iPod Touch portables, and at a heavily discounted $2.99, every second you wait to buy it a kitten cries.

The unique tower-defense game came to PC and Mac earlier this year and won high praise. And that was at a $19.99 price point.

The premise is wacky, but the execution is masterful.

Picking up this game, with new touch-based controls that apparently work pretty well, should feel like legal thievery.

Had I not gotten rid of my iPod Touch in favor of a Motorola Droid, I’d be all over this.

Just as promised, Rockstar Games today unleashed the wrath of Grand Theft Auto onto Apple’s App Store in the form of Chinatown Wars.

On your iPhone/iPod Touch

It’s the same open-world game, with the hours and hours of gameplay, top-down presentation, and killing, driving, and shooting galore, as is on the PSP and DS, but the best part?

It’s only $9.99, which makes it a very alluring endeavor, or at least it would seem.

Me? My iPod Touch is gone in favor of this sexy beast.

Source: Destructoid

Composers. Radio Djs. Record Storeowners. Producers. Musicians. People with musical knowledge. These are the types of people you would go to for musical advice and recommendations, right? ‚ On October 8^th, a new relationship between music and technology was launched. Darius Fong was inspired by his experiences growing up in Hong Kong and discovering new artists and genres in record stores, and founded Panel to provide that experience to other music lovers.

Panel, a new iPhone app, founded by Darius Fong, is aiming to bring back the record store experience of yesteryear, when music industry professionals and music buffs were present at your point of purchase to give you insight on what you might like or look forward to for the next addition to your record collection.

Panel is different than other music applications or online players. While many online music sites can match a playlist to your liking very well, like the engine at Last.fm, nothing is strictly personal, like press releases or ads. It’s by music lovers, for music lovers. Each Panelist can explain their choice and their influences to help users find out more about the album.

The Panel App streams two full albums each week in various categories, including rock, pop, indie, jazz and more. Curators of the Panel App will be featured panelists that are composers, radio DJs, record storeowners, producers, musicians, and others with a musical background, every month to feature music that they love.

The iPhone application will also feature interviews with the Panelists, album descriptions, and a one-touch process will be made available to users in order to purchase albums they like. In addition, these users may then comment on selections and invite friends to join, listen, and create a fan-supported community.

To find out more, go to WearePANEL.com for images of panelists and photo journals of each week’s content, interviews, “Panel Blog”, videos, podcasts, and links from featured albums to iTunes and Amazon.

The mobile division of Electronic Arts recently launched a Rock Band for iPhone/iPod Touch App without much fanfare. We thought we’d be treated to a host of pre-release hype, but no, none of that.

Now that it’s here though, we’re ready to believe it’ll quickly surge to the top of next week’s highest-grossing App chart.

It’s not a knock-off, and is much more advanced than its main competitor Tap Tap Revenge, allowing users to rock out however they see fit with up to four players jamming at the same time.

The game supports guitar, bass, drums, and singing, though for the singing component, there is no vocal recognition, only beat-matching, a la every other instrument.

The game cannot be played online, but with its Bluetooth support, up to four players, on both iPhones and iPod Touches, can jam out to the same tune at the same time.

Rock Band for iPhone/iPod Touch comes with 20 songs from such artists as The Beastie Boys, Blink 182, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Additionally, an in-App music store will allow enthusiats to purchase additional tunes playable in the game.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the App will run you $10, and requires the 3.0 update, which is also $10.

Check out the App in action at our original story.

I’m a hoarder of free games on my iPod Touch, but if you prefer to actually pay for them and want to know what’s most popular, well then, here’s a top ten list.

These are the highest-grossing games in the App Store and on Itunes for the week ending yesterday. And as you’ll notice, last week’s top-spot holder “Tap Tap Revenge 3,” quickly dropped to the five spot. Ouch.

1. Bejeweled 2 ($2.99)

2. Shrek Kart ($4.99)

3. Madden NFL ’10 ($9.99)

4. Need For Speed Undercover ($4.99)

5. Tap Tap Revenge 3 ($.99)

6. FIFA ’10 ($9.99)

7. Bloons Tower Defense ($2.99)

8. Tetris ($4.99)

9. The Sims 3 ($6.99)

10. Scrabble ($4.99)

Source: Kotaku

Apple’s just-updated official numbers for its App Store are out, and iPhone and iPod touch users currently have over 85,000 apps to choose from. Better yet, users have chosen more than two billion of them. McDonalds, by contrast, has only served billions and billions at this point; Apple seems to be right behind.

Obviously though, wading through all those apps can be rather daunting. While a new App Store earlier this month certainly helped, Yappler wants to take it one step further and has launched Yappler Sync, a discovery tool for Windows and OS X that allows iPhone users to share a list of their favorite apps with their friends. The tool scans a users App Store library, and sends that list to the Yappler website, where a user can share it anonymously or post it for others.

Yappler.com Sync also creates a list of the apps used by all of its users and updates the list when new apps are downloaded or old ones are deleted, generating their own Top Apps list. Users can share their own list of apps on Twitter and Facebook, or even embed the list as a widget on personal blogs and webpages, like below. We noticed that Yappler doesn’t not which apps you personally don’t sync to your phone though. We don’t actually keep multiple fart apps on our phone. Honest.

Check Yappler out, and share your app lists in the comments.

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are more than capable of handling great portable games. With the rise of the App store and the massive influx of games rushing to the service, we’re left questioning; which ones are the most popular?

Apple recently launched a “top grossing” list for the App store and with it comes our examination of the games department.

These are your top-10 highest grossing App store games for the week with developer in parentheses.

1. Madden NFL ’10 $9.99 (Electronic Arts)

2. Modern Combat Sandstorm‚  $6.99 (GameLoft)

3. Uno $4.99 (GameLoft)

4. Scrabble $4.99 (Electronic Arts)

5. Tetris $4.99 (Electronic Arts)

6. The Sims 3 $6.99 (Electronic Arts)

7. Bejeweled 2 $2.99 (PopCap Games)

8. Need For Speed Undercover $4.99 (Electronic Arts)

9. Dexter: The Game $5.99 (Marc Ecko Entertainment)

10. Frogger $.99 (Konami Digital Entertainment)

Anything stand out? Besides EA owning 5 of the 10?

Vonage for the win!

Talk about a victory. Apple has approved a Vonage App while Google Voice can’t even get near the App Store with its own software.

“Vonage is currently conducting a beta test and general availability will be announced at a later date,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “This new service, along with the recent launch of the Vonage World unlimited calling plan, continues Vonage’s heritage of using innovative technology to create significant value for its current and future customers.”

Vonage’s stock (NYSE: VG) soared almost 20 percent on App news.

There are many things I love about my iPhone 3GS, but something that so often gets overlooked is the fact that it has a nice, roomy hard drive. I know some people who carry around all 30 GB of their music collections with them, but for the rest of us who don’t hoard all of our music, that means there’s a good bit of free hard drive space, and we should put that to good use, no?

Well, there’s an app for that. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Air Sharing Pro (iTunes link), from Avatron Software, is an amazingly featured and tight package that essentially turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a wi-fi thumb drive and file explorer. As long as your computer and your iPhone are logged into the same wi-fi network, you can easily move files between the two devices without installing any extra software (well, with one minor caveat), unzip folders, print and email the files, all from within the app. The software handles a huge range of documents from .pdf, .txt, .doc, .xls, and all the usual image formats. You can also add any WebDAV enabled server, such as your MobileMe iDisk. Even better, you can do that over your iPhone’s data connection.

I tested Air Sharing Pro on my Mac and iPhone 3GS, but everything I say applies to all iPhones and the iPod Touch (substituting wi-fi for data connection where necessary). Like I mentioned earlier, no extra software is required if you’re running OS X or Windows Vista. Those running XP are highly encouraged to download the free NetDrive to fill in the gaps in XP’s networking protocols, which is a minor annoyance, but hardly a deal breaker, and especially not once you see what you can do with this app.

Setup was indeed ridiculously easy, and works exactly like the app’s help page tell you to. On OS X, all you have to do was “Add a server”¦” via Finder, and enter the IP address your phone tells you to. This mounts your iPhone as an external server, and from there, everything is a matter of moving files between folders, which I’m sure you learned to do around the third grade.

The main interface for the app is a list of the servers you can access (defaulting to your computer) followed by a list of the folders and files that you transferred to the phone. From here, you can open any of the files you want to, move them around, copy, paste, or delete them, all to your hearts content. The app flawlessly handled any file format I threw at it, which isn’t that much of a surprise considering that the iPhone is pretty good at handing most formats. Still, it was nice to see my .pdf with all of the images rendered correctly, and be able to skip around the many pages using the intuitive arrowed interface, as well as open up my .xls chart and graph. Folders of images can be viewed individually or as a slideshow.

Sharing is just as intuitive. Once you’ve selected the file or files you want to share, you have the choice to upload the file to a drop.io account so you can share them on the web, or just move the file over to the email app and send it as an attachment. You can also print any of the documents from inside the app, which is still something that blows my mind a little bit every time I do it. Accessing my iDisk was also just as easy, and the app updated itself on the fly, even as I changed and uploaded files while it was navigating them.

Although I don’t know anyone else using the software so I couldn’t test this, the app can detect other users on the same wi-fi network and allow you to connect to them and share files, which is certainly nifty and very iPhone 3.0. Security wise, the app allows you to lock access with a four digit PIN, and will transfer files on any encrypted wi-fi network. If you end up storing your iDisk credentials in the app, it’s likely a good idea to use a pin.

Air Sharing Pro is $9.99 in the app store, and while I have no problem spending $5 on a cup of coffee, I’m not easily convinced to spend as much on an app for my phone. That being said I feel is actually worth every penny considering how many features they managed to cram inside it.

Think about it: while you could always attach a file you want to an email, email it to yourself, open the email, and then download it again every time you need to view it. Or you could just move it to your iPhone once, and have permanent and quick access to it, with or without a data connection.

Should you still be unconvinced (which I find hard to believe), the basic features of the app like file moving, storing, and viewing are available in the Air Sharing App for $4.99. While you won’t have access to remote servers, be able to share the files, or print, all the other basic “thumb drive” and file-viewing features are still available. Overall, Air Sharing is one sterling app, and definitely one worth a space on your home screen.

Air Sharing Pro (iTunes link)
Air Sharing (iTunes link)

And now for the part you’ve all been waiting for:‚  without further ado, here are the new iPhone announcements which have had everyone salivating for months now.

Available June 19, the iPhone 3GS is Apple’s new iPhone hardware. Apple claims that everything on the phone is “twice as fast” at loading apps, sites, and everything else. The device will also feature a faster 3G antenna (7.2Mbps HSDPA, for those who like details), the rumored 3MP auto-focus camera, complete with an API for developers, and a 30 FPS video camera with an associated app to allow for video and photo editing. Another rumor to come true is an internal compass that will orient the maps app depending on which direction you’re facing.

The iPhone also features a new voice control UI, allowing users to make vocal commands such as “Call Mom” or “What song is playing?” all in a live transcripted interface. Snazzy? Sure. Necessary? Probably not. ‚ The phone also features hardware encryption and an improved battery life which should come as a relief to iPhone users everywhere.

The form factor for the iPhone 3GS is staying exactly the same, available in black and white (sorry, no flaming orange iPhones). Storage will also increase–$299 for the 32GB model or $199 for the 16GB model. Still too pricey for you? Pick up the older iPhone 3G for just $99 (yay recessionomics!).

The iPhone OS 3.0, which will ship June 17 to other iPhone users contains many new improvements, most of which have been announced before, but we’ll summarize them anyway: the iPhone is finally getting copy/paste, MMS messaging, system-wide Spotlight that will index your email, contacts, and apps, and a landscape oriented keyboard.

A cool new feature will allow users with MobileMe to locate their phones should they go missing and you’re not in enough hysterics from losing your iPhone to be able to use a computer. Apple announced support for data tethering, but AT&T was notably missing from the list, most likely indicating that iPhone users in the US will be SOL. Safari will be updated to run faster and will auto-fill contact and stored login info.

Push notifications (including text, sound, and “badge”) will finally go live in this release, after much delay. Apps will also be able to access the dock connector, allowing you to use you iPhone with external gadgets, such as TomTom’s new GPS driving device. Peer-to-peer interfacing will allow you to connect to other users to play games or send information such as contacts.

Overall, only Apple could drum up so much publicity for something that is ostensibly just an evolutionary change rather than a revolutionary change. Nevertheless, these developments are still exciting, even if they’re overdue. We’ll let you know what we think when we get our hands on a new iPhone 3GS in just a couple weeks.