Mossberg Picks iPhone Apps

Finally, an iPhone you can use ... as a phone

(NEWSER) - The iPhone 4 has finally arrived on Verizon , and what that means is … now you can actually make successful phone calls on your iPhone. Reviewers give it a thumbs-up:

• “The Verizon iPhone is nearly the same as AT&T’s iPhone 4—but it doesn’t drop calls. For several million Americans, that makes it the holy grail,” writes David Pogue in the New York Times . In five cities, including San Francisco and New York (“the two Bermuda Triangles of AT&T reception”), the Verizon version successfully held a call to a landline while the AT&T version dropped it, sometimes more than once. OK, the “holy grail” did drop one call, and AT&T has better coverage in some areas, but the bottom line is: “The Verizon iPhone has more bars in more places.”

Restrictions lifted, guidelines published

(NEWSER) - Apple has done a U-turn and scrapped restrictions introduced earlier this year on what tools developers can use to build applications for the iPhone and iPad. Developers will now be allowed to use tools based on Adobe's Flash, and restrictions on other programming languages have been lifted, the Wall Street Journal reports. Shares in Adobe jumped after the news, though iPhone and iPad users still won't be able to access Flash-based content on the Internet. More»

Fathers, lovers, etc. lost in omnipresent gratification of data

(NEWSER) - Once upon a time, a professor says, we “put up” with the piecemeal flow of information “because we had to,” but now that the world is at our fingertips, it’s hard to resist. Just ask the dad who let a bathtub holding his daughter overflow because he was playing chess on his iPhone. “Dude, this is not appropriate,” he recounts his interior monologue. He then entered a move with one hand and turned off the water with the other. More»

Evidence of systemwide effort to rid App Store of explicit material

(NEWSER) - Apple appears to be cracking down on sexually explicit applications for sale in its App Store as one and then another racy app becomes unavailable. TechCrunch has what a developer says is an email describing the decision to pull his program. “We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.” The company says it has received complaints and “changed our guidelines appropriately.” More»

RIM dominates in sales, but the iPhone has big advantages

(NEWSER) - The iPhone has become a cultural phenomenon, but RIM sells way more units than Apple does. Why, then, does the BlackBerry have such obvious flaws? Wired lists five improvements RIM needs to make:

1. Browser. The web looks much the same on an iPhone or Palm Pre as it does on a PC. But the BlackBerry presents a bare-bones mobile version of most websites—and is slow, to boot.
2. Touchscreen. The BlackBerry Storm's "clickable" screen was supposed to feel like a real keypad, but it just made typing slower.