As Apple gears up for the launch of its 3G iPhone, outside developers and startups are finally going to get to sell or give away their own applications that run natively on the phone (as opposed to being optimized for the Safari browser, as are most legal, third-party apps today). These apps, which are built on the iPhone SDK announced last March, will be distributed through the upcoming iPhone App Store (which apparently won’t launch for a few weeks). These apps will have some limitations (you can only run one app at a time and VOIP services only work via WiFi, for instance), but they will also bring a lot of innovation to the iPhone.

We’ve been tracking some of these announcements as companies prepare to unveil their new iPhone apps. They are listed below. There is a good chance more will be announced on stage during Steve Jobs’ keynote today. We will update as we learn more. Please let us know which ones we missed in comments.

Zenbe Lists: Webmail service Zenbe (reviewed here) is testing the iPhone development environment with a to-do list application that can be used to keep track of your chores and collaborate with friends and coworkers. Create task lists, check off items, and sync them with your contacts. Lists can be sent to your friends via email and accessed through the browser when sitting at a desktop computer. The Lists application won’t be integrated with Zenbe’s main email app, at least to start.

Super Monkey Ball: It took Sega two weeks to create a version of its popular video game for the iPhone. It will cost $9.99 at the iPhone App Store. Players use the built-in accelerometer to move the character.

The Associated Press: New app will retrieve local news based on your location. Also links every iPhone with the app to the AP so citizen journalists can send in photos taken on their iPhones of breaking events, as well as text commentary.

Six Apart (TypePad): Blogging from you iPhone? An iPhone announcement from Six Apart is expected today. More details as we get them. Update: Six Apart’s iPhone app lets you blog from your iPhone and add photos taken with the phone’s camera. It makes it easy to create micro-blog posts around a photo by adding a title, category and text. This app will be free for Typepad users. See how Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tried valiantly not to answer Mike’s questions on video when he was cornered right before the Apple keynote:

Pangea Software (Enigmo and Croman Rally): Two games for the iPhone that will cost $9.99 each. Enigmo is a touch-based puzzle game where you move drops of water around with your finger. Croman Rally is a race game with Flinstone-style cars that players control with the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Cow Music: Built by a single developer, Mark terry, in his time, the app is called Band. It lets you play virtual instruments on the iphone and create music. Instruments include piano, drums, guitars. You play the instruments by banging (lightly) on the iPhone.

MLB.com’s At Bat: Shows stats and video highlights of baseball games.

Modality: An anatomy app for medical students. The app is filled with anatomy drawings and images linked to Google and Wikipedia for more detailed information.

MIMvista: Another tool for doctors to view CT scans and PET scans on their iPhones.

Digital Legends Entertainment: Another game that took two days to port to the iPhone. Will be available in September.

SlingPlayer Mobile: You will soon be able to watch TV on your iPhone. Just like a Slingbox that let’s you access your TV from anywhere around the world, Sling Media is creating a version of its SlingPlayer Mobile app for the iPhone. That means theoretically you could watch all the channels you have at home on your iPhone, as long as the Internet connection is strong enough to stream the video.

Loopt: The social mobile network is expected to announce an iPhone version of its app. Loopt shows you where your friends are based on GPS and other location-tracking technologies. Loopt is already available on many Sprint and Verizon phones. With the iPhone, it will add AT&T to its roster.

Phanfare: Take pictures on your iPhone, add captions, and share them as slideshows on the Web. Phanfare is launching its iPhone version today.

Whrrl: Another mobile social network geared at sharing opinions and reviews of local establishments with your friends. The company behind Whrrl, Pelago, was is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund. (Read our review here).

Citysense: Nightlife tracker. Let’s you see the city’s hot spots by showing heat maps of where people are via their cell phones and other signal-emitting mobile devices. Only available in San Francisco for now. A demo app for Sense Networks.

iCall: VOIP on your iPhone. We covered it here.

Glide 3.0: It’s your desktop on your iPhone.

eBay: We’re not sure what eBay has up its sleeve either, but Mike caught up with an eBay executive at the Moscone center who sounded like had something to hide:

Update: Turns out eBay developed an auctions app for the iPhone. From Mike’s liveblog notes: “They’re showing home screen with search, avatar and a number of navigation items.”

Kooaba: Point your iPhone camera at a movie poster and get movie details and show times Cool visual-recognition app

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With LiMo’s recent announcement that Verizon had hopped onto their Board of Directors, things are starting to heat up between the LiMo platform and Google’s competing product, Android. Both are open-source Linux-based platforms, and both are aiming to rock the handset market sometime in the next year or so.

LiMo is Linux-based. Android is Linux-based. But they’re far from the same. Below, I’ll try to explain some of the key differences without going too heavy on the tech jargon. (Fiiine. It gets a bit heavy for a paragraph or two. But I’ll avoid it where possible.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Introducing yourself is always kind of awkward, isn’t it? It’s tough to try to explain who you are without coming off as cocky or arrogant. I usually tend to go straight from my name to how incredible I am at skee-ball, which for some reason turns people away.

My name’s Greg Kumparak, and I’m the new editor for MobileCrunch. I hail from San Luis Obispo, land of tri-tip sandwiches and drunken frat guys. I run an independent blog/community about Helio over at Heliocity.net, and have done some freelance IT consulting for Helio in the past.

I’m a geek to my very core. Gadgets, games, whatever - I’m completely fascinated with anything that has buttons to press. My credit score is beginning to feel the burn from my love for gadgets

Need to holler at me? Shoot me a message at greg at crunchgear dot com

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