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For whatever reason, Apple decided not to allow “landscape mode” on iPhone email. If you want to turn the phone when the web browser is open and get the larger keyboard that makes two thumb typing realistic, no problem. But the email app is portrait only.

Now a new iPhone application called TouchType (iTunes link) fixes the problem. Open the application and you get a landscape mode keypad. type an email, hit the send button and it auto-populates the email application. Type in the email addresses and you’re all set.

The application, which costs $.99, comes from the same developer, Mike Schneider, who created Direct Line (easy phone tree navigation) and Private-I (loJack for your iPhone). I like how this guy thinks.

I’m adding this to my must have iPhone apps list.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I came across an interesting app in the App Store today that’s worth a look. The app is called RulerPhone and its premise is simple: it will let you take a picture with your iPhone and allow you to measure the distances and dimensions between objects in that picture.

Here’s the deal: you can download RulerPhone for $2.99 in the App Store if you want to measure distances of up to 12 feet or you can pick up RulerPhone Lite for free if you don’t need distances longer than 1.5 feet.

Once you start RulerPhone up, it explains how to use the app. In order to start measuring, you need to place an object about the size of a credit card in the picture you’re about to take in order to derive accurate measurements between the objects in the image. After that, you snap the picture and move to the next screen, which asks you to align a blue card that’s displayed so it lines up perfectly with the credit card in the picture. As soon as the two cards are aligned, you click “Measure” and a ruler is displayed, which you can move around and extend to measure the distance between objects in the picture or their length. The actual measurements are displayed above the image.

As long as you use a credit card and align the blue card over it perfectly, you shouldn’t have too much trouble measuring accurately with RulerPhone. That said, the measurements are more accurate the closer the credit card is to the center of the image and if you’re looking to make three-dimensional measurements, you’re out of luck — it only supports two-dimensions.

I used RulerPhone for about 20 minutes, measuring things all over the house to see how well it performed. Generally speaking, it did well and came within a few centimeters as long as I followed the instructions perfectly. When I didn’t, RulerPhone would be off by as much as three feet in some cases and proved useless when I wanted to measure the dimensions of less linear objects like a chair.

So why only 20 minutes? Once that time elapsed, so did the novelty. RulerPhone is neat to use for a while, but once you’ve measured almost everything in the room with varying success, it quickly becomes another app in your list that you probably won’t use often.

RulerPhone is an interesting idea with some utility, but I just don’t see any reason to spend $2.99 on this app. Try out the free version instead.

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Earthscape (iTunes link), the incredible iPhone application that brings Google-earth to the iPhone, just discounted its $10 pricetag to…free. For a “limited time.”

The app, which we first wrote about in May, puts a little globe in your pocket that you can spin around and zoom in to specific locations. It shows where you are based on your GPS coordinates, highlights locations with Wikipedia entries (and lets you read those entries as well) and flickr photos. Users can also take their own photos and add them to the application’s database. They are then optionally displayed to other users with the geotag information (see if you can find the TechCrunch image I uploaded to Atherton, California).

We wrote about the application again last month. It’s worth the $10, and so it’s definitely worth it for free.

See the demo video below for more information:

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There may only be over 12 million iPhones in the wild, but that hasn’t stopped iTunes users from downloading more than twice as many apps as songs during the store’s first two months of availability, according to a report.

Steve Jobs said at Apple’s press event last week that users have now downloaded over 100 million apps. Assuming it maintains the same rate of 70 million app downloads it witnessed in August alone, it could hit 1 billion apps by the end of the store’s first year of availability, sometime in 2009. iTunes song downloads didn’t hit the 1 billion mark until its second year of availability.

But in reality, 1 billion downloaded apps could happen much sooner than the middle of next year. As apps become a key selling point for Apple going forward and more iPhones and iPods get out into the wild, more users will find reason to download apps and in turn, increase the download rate.

Apple has yet to comment on the possibility of hitting the 1 billion downloaded apps mark sooner than it sold 1 billion songs, but rest assured that the company’s hype machine will be in full swing as that time nears.

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iPhone use in the epicenter of the technology world is on the rise, according to research released by Meraki Thursday.

According to the company, which is creating Free the Net, a free wireless network in San Francisco, it has witnessed a significant uptick in iPhone usage as it continues to roll out its service. Of the 150,000 devices that have used Free the Net, the iPhone accounts for nearly 20 percent. At its lowest point months ago, the iPhone accounted for just 6 percent of all the devices connecting the network.

Obviously iPhone usage in San Francisco isn’t indicative of usage elsewhere in the world and it’s tough to gauge how popular it really is in different areas, but this is even more evidence proving the iPhone may be more popular than RIM and others want to admit.

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Symbian on Tuesday released its second quarter financial data. The Nokia-owned company said that it bested last year’s sales mark with 19.6 million units sold. That may seem high, but over the past six months, 159 different Symbian OS-based mobile devices hit store shelves, compared to just a handful from RIM and one from Apple.

The most glaring element of Symbian’s release was that it only grew 5 percent over the past year. Considering mobile phone sales grew 12 percent in the second quarter, according to Gartner, and considering Apple is selling 800,000 units each week, Symbian may be losing its grip on the market.

But to declare the Symbian OS irrelevant is premature. It still reigns supreme in OS market share and even with stiff competition from Apple, RIM, and soon, Google, few companies have the ability to catch Symbian anytime soon.

That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, though. Apple has already sold 6 million iPhone 3Gs in the past two months since launch and there’s no sign of it slowing down anytime soon.

In order to see exactly what would need to happen for the iPhone to overtake Symbian in sales, I considered three scenarios: an annual iPhone growth rate of 300 percent, 100 percent, and 50 percent. To put that into perspective, expected iPhone 3G sales for the quarter ending September 30 this year should be 900 percent higher than last year’s figures for first-generation iPhones, assuming Apple continues to sell 800,000 iPhone 3Gs per week through September.

Scenario 1: 300 percent sales growth

The 300 percent sales-growth scenario is our high estimate, but considering Apple’s growth is 900 percent over the past year, it still represents a substantial deceleration.  In order to derive a date for when iPhone sales might overtake Symbian sales, I assume Symbian OS will only grow at 5 percent each quarter, since it is a mature technology.  Then I apply the 300 percent growth rate to Apple’s previous-year sales for each quarter subsequent to Apple’s latest. Based on those calculations, the iPhone would be able to supplant Symbian as the leader in the space by October of next year when it sells almost 30 million iPhones compared to Symbian’s 26 million.

Scenario 2: 100 percent sales growth

For the second scenario, I used a 100 percent sales-growth estimate. Maintaining such growth would still be quite a challenge, but once again, it may not be as outlandish as some may think. In this estimate, I used the same growth rate for Symbian as in the first forecast. In this case, the iPhone wouldn’t supplant Symbian until the end of September 2010, when it would sell approximately 38 million iPhones compared to Symbian’s 31 million units.

Scenario 3: 50 percent sales growth

For the last scenario, 50 percent sales growth was used as the estimate to see when the iPhone could conceivably surpass Symbian OS. The same growth rate was used for Symbian, but this time 50 percent year-over-year growth was factored in for the iPhone. Under those assumptions, the iPhone wouldn’t outsell Symbian until the end of September 2012, when it would sell 48 million iPhones in the quarter, compared to Symbian’s 46 million.

Will the iPhone eventually beat Symbian-powered phones?  Nobody really knows. It might continue to sell at a fast clip and outstrip even the most aggressive estimates or it may slow down and match last year’s first-gen iPhone figures. But one thing is certain: the Symbian OS is simply not selling nearly as well as the rest of the industry and the iPhone 3G is outpacing every other smartphone on the market.  Although Apple is expected to sell at least 40 million iPhone 3Gs over the next year, even that may be an understatement.

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Add this to your list of must have iPhone applications. Direct Line (iTunes link) is a service that helps you automatically navigate phone trees to get right to an operator (exactly what companies don’t want you to do).

Install the application, browse of search the included companies, and select the one you want. Direct Line then calls the number and preselects the appropriate choices to get you to an actual person.

The service operates much like Bringo, which we wrote about in 2007, but since it works directly from your iPhone it saves you the extra steps. In my testing it mostly worked, although it failed to get me through to operators at two companies (Air Canada and AT&T). No worries, though. Just send creator Michael Schneider an email at support@thisistech.com and he’ll update the database.

It’s well worth the $0.99. Direct Line joins DataCase on my list of must have productivity apps for the iPhone.

Update: AppVee did a video review:

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iPhone application development house taptaptap has published sales figures for the first month of sales for their two AppStore applications, bringing further insight into overall sales volume and figures for the online store. The two applications developed by the company are WhereTo, an application that provides a more general GPS interface to the iPhone with location-based services, and Tipulator, a simple tip calculator.

WhereTo retails for $2.99 in the store and 24,094 copies were sold in the first month - netting the company just over $50,000 in revenue after Apple took their cut (it currently ranks #69 on the top paid application list). Tipulator retails for 99 cents, and sold 3,168 copies which resulted in just over $2,200 of revenue (it is currently unranked). The table below outlines overall sales volumes and revenues for each application:

taptaptap AppStore sales and revenue numbers for US sales, month 1

The resulting net profit and sales figures are good for a small company that has developed one application that is relatively sophisticated, and another that is very straight forward and simple but yet still brings in $2,000 a month. There is definitely great revenue potential for developers of iPhone applications, as users of the AppStore and the iPhone in general are more likely to pay for applications. Integrating with iTunes makes the process simple for the user, but for the developer poses a challenge as all applications must be submitted to Apple and must meet their approval.

We should also note that while both of these applications have done well, their download figures unsurprisingly pale in comparison to those of Facebook and Tap Tap Revenge, both of which have over 1 million users. The real money in the App Store may well lie in monetizing these free applications, be it through integrated advertising or downloadable content (though it remains to be seen what restrictions Apple will place on this kind of strategy).

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I’m getting the dirt on this right now but it seems that Pat Phelan of MaxRoam just unlocked his iPhone 3G and will be giving away the app shortly. He has his running on Vodafone right now.

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The dog days of August lend themselves to kicking back and letting the world slide by. Since the advent of the Web 2.0 ecosystem, they’ve also been the province of a tech company version of the summer shows the networks play off - failed pilots, reality programming being tried out for the Big Show or another writer’s strike, and ratings stinkers that can be buried outside of Sweeps months.

But the DVR has changed everything, in the process eliminating the notion of special sweeps periods and the upfronts where the new season is hawked. Instead, every day is Premiere Month, with the quality of the audience becoming a function of its trackability. The more that you can see the gestures of the audience in real time, the less you need to attract their attention and the more you can market it to the advertisers. In that context, a show played back is no longer a second class citizen; instead the metadata about when you played it back and what was going on at that time form a more powerful indicator of intent, and the common signature of like-minded users a highly valued target.

In fact, television and music content have become more like software than they are different, and the release of the iPhone App Store is a significant new platform for the intersection of what formerly were seen as two different products.

What kinds of programming will emerge? Perhaps a kind of reality show with mobile devices, where contestants roam the real world and use their phones as transaction wands to indicate their interest (or lack of it) in products, events, personalities, and so on. Team behavior is aggregated and mined by matching demographic profiles with reactions to produce “answers” to questions about news of the day, topic swarms on Twitter or other social networks, the race for the White House.

In effect, a new hyper reality show becomes possible, where the App Store is the gateway for an Adsense-like version of Big Brother that leaves the house and breaks out into the virtual community. The device and bandwidth is subsidized by the show, so that Apple can turn on the video aspects of the phone to produce footage, and the community could even be encouraged to provide production support for cataloging and editing the show together via the app and the phone.

Read the full rant on TechCrunchIT

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Medialets has posted the results of a recent Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research report that details the breakdown of the first 1 million iPhone 3Gs sold worldwide.

Earlier this month Apple announced that it had reached the milestone in only three days, compared to 74 days for the original iPhone. Of course, the two figures are hardly comparable, as the the 3G version launched simultaneously worldwide in 21 countries - the original iPhone was exclusive to the US for months after its release.

Unsurprisingly, the report says the United States accounts for 60% of all units sold during the three day period, with a total of 600,000. Trailing by a factor of nearly ten fold is Japan, with 70,000 units sold. Japan’s finish in second place may well be a result of pent up demand, as the original iPhone was never officially sold there (even unlocked phones wouldn’t work, as the original iPhone doesn’t support UMTS).

The results for carrier distribution aren’t particularly surprising, either. AT&T leads by a wide margin because of its US sales. Despite selling the second highest number of phones, Japan’s carrier Softbank ranks behind T-Mobile and Orange, which both have customers in multiple European countries.

Above all, the figures reflect the explosive demand for the iPhone seen worldwide, and are especially impressive given the difficulties Apple had with activation in a number of countries. In the United States, the iPhone is still selling out at many stores in a manner of minutes. What remains to be seen is how long the public’s obsession with the iPhone will hold, and if Apple can reach its goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.

For more details, check out the Medialets post.

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Macrumors reports that Apple’s App Store was selling a tethering app compatible with the iPhone (both 3G and EDGE) for a brief period earlier this evening. The $10 application, called NetShare, was developed by Nullriver software, and would be a godsend for many iPhone owners. After going up around 8PM EST to the elation of a lucky few, the application was pulled down around 20 minutes later.

Phone tethering allows users to access the internet from their laptop computers wherever they get service on their cellphone carrier’s data network. The feature is common on many phones with high speed (namely 3G) data access, and has been noticeably absent from iPhones. While 3G is typically slower than most Wi-Fi access points, having internet connectivity on the go is a huge plus for many people - enough so that many carriers charge on the order of $30 a month to enable it.

Users with jailbroken (hacked) iPhones have been able to enable tethering to their phones through a complicated process for some time, but such tethering is prohibited by AT&T’s terms of service. The release of NetShare seemed to indicate (albeit briefly) that AT&T had changed its mind on the matter.

Now, users who try to download the application are told that it is no longer available in their country. So what happened? The app may have snuck past Apple’s approval process - but with reported wait times of weeks (or months) it seems unlikely that anything appears there accidentally. Then again, Apple has been dealing with a massive influx of new applications - they may simply be overwhelmed and are getting sloppy.

It is also possible that the app was supposed to be limited to a few select countries, and was accidentally posted on the US store. Finally, AT&T may have really changed its mind, but it seems unlikely that they’d pass up the chance to tack one more fee on our data plans.

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