If you are one of the millions of people who own an iPhone and are on the hunt for an interesting iPhone app, how would you go about doing that? One answer, I hope, is that you frequent this blog since it has a thing or two about iPhones on any given day. Or, you might visit one of the many sites that focus specifically on the iPhone or even just iPhone apps.

But, how many of you knew that Microsoft has a great new tool to help you find iPhone apps? They launched Bing's Visual Search feature last week. And, to my surprise, one of its categories is...

Bing Visual Search: Top iPhone Apps

It lets you search for iPhone apps by popularity, price (lowest to highest or highest to lowest), release date and name. If you hover over an app's thumbnail image, you will see its name, price, rank (in free or paid apps list), and release date.

I've found it especially useful for quickly finding recently released iPhone apps.

Who would have thought one of the best iPhone app finding tools would come from Microsoft?

YouTube video courtesy of seesmic

I'm a big fan of Seesmic's twhirl. I don't like Seesmic Desktop at all. If you have a BlackBerry or Android phone, you can try out yet another Seesmic Twitter app...

Seesmic for Blackberry and Android

...for your tweeting needs. I don't own a BlackBerry device but I do have a Droid and installed Seesmic on it. Seesmic for Android seems unfinished. Here's why:

1. It doesn't seem to have a way to exit the the app. This is important on a multi-tasking platform. I want to be able to cleanly exit it without having to perform a Force Stop from Android's app management window. The alternative Twidroid Twitter app is able to perform a clean exit from the app.

2. If I sign out of the app, it doesn't remember my Twitter name forcing me to type in everything again for a second session.

3. The app doesn't seem to support more than a single Twitter account. This is important to me since I would like to be able to work with both my personal Twitter account (@toddogasawara) as well as the Twitter account for this blog (@mobilecontent)

There are other app issues too like requring a long press on a tweet to retweet it (this is not intuitive).

Seesmic Mobile (product page)

I've owned my Motorola Droid for a bit over two weeks now. I considered noting weekly Android app updates like I do with iPhone apps here. I'm not quite sure this makes sense yet since I haven't installed a tremendous number of apps on the Droid yet. Another issue is that the Android Market doesn't provide information about app updates. So, I will need to scribble down feature changes and additions from the Droid's screen as update come in. But, here's the start of what may evolve into a full weekly Android app updates feature in the future.

Five of the Android apps on my Droid were updated over the past week. And, here's what I found interesting: Three of those apps were each updated twice! This is something you don't see in the iPhone world with Apple playing the role of a very slow gatekeeper.

1. wpToGo (WordPress client app) 1.8.9 and 1.9.0

2. Google Places Directory 1.0.19

3. Twidroid 2.7.5 & 2.7.6

4. RealCalc Scientific Calculator 1.3.0

5. ASTRO File Manager 2.1.1 & 2.1.2

Speaking of apps, look for an Android app-focused podcast discussion with Frank McPherson and me right here on MobileContentToday later this week.

Celio's Redfly terminal for Windows Mobile (and now BlackBerry) smartphones is one of those products that I really want to like. I even bought one in late 2008 and have been trying to use it since then. Despite repeated bad experiences with it (like the most recent experience with my Touch Pro2 linked below)...

Celio Redfly + HTC Touch Pro2 = Bad Experience

...I reached out to Celio and spoke with its Marketing Manager (Colin Kelly Jr.) in...

Podcast 27: Celio Redfly Terminal Device for Windows Mobile Smartphones

Celio recently branched out to let BlackBerry phone users have a terminal option too. PCMag.com's Jamie Lendino took at a look at this...

Celio Redfly C8N (for BlackBerry)

...and gave it a big one star rating (out of a possible five). Ouch. The surprise for me is that Jamie gave it this rating even though the Redfly actually provided the basic functions it promises unlike my experience of partial functionality or even no connectivity.

So, based on an interview with a single disappointed Android development firm, Reuters reported...

Gameloft says it, others reining in Android plans

BusinessWeek, on the other hand, reported that Software programmers are designing apps for the Google-backed Android operating system, fired by frustration with Apple's rejections and delays in this article...

Developers Look Past Apple's Jammed iPhone App Store

...that quotes a single disgruntled iPhone development firm. Well, at least they used the same sample size = 1 firm. The other amusing aspect of the BusinessWeek article is this prediction based on some Gartner Research report: By 2012, Android is expected to become the second-most popular smartphone operating system after Symbian, leapfrogging BlackBerry, Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Mobile, and the iPhone, according to Gartner (IT).

You might recall this item I wrote last week...

Another 2012 End of the World Scenario? Bye Bye Nokia N-Series Smartphones in 2012

So, if Nokia really drops Symbian S60 from their smartphone line by 2012 (I suspect they may keep it around a bit longer), does this make Android the default most popular smartphone platform by 2012 (of course, it may not have any app developers left by then if we believe the Reuters report).

What do you do when you are in a distant 4th place in the U.S. wireless carrier race? Electronista reports...

T-Mobile looking to team up with other US carrier?

The idea of T-Mobile's parent company (telecom giant Deutsche Telekom) buying Sprint came up a few months ago. I don't know how people could have taken that rumor seriously. T-Mobile uses GSM for voice (like AT&T) while Sprint uses CDMA (like Verizon). Sprint still can't figure out how to get the oddball Nextel network integrated into their network. What chance would their be of combining T-Mobile and Sprint?

T-Mobile merged with Orange (owned by France Telecom) in the UK. But, who is there in the US for T-Mobile to partner with? AT&T? Probably not. Electronista suggests MetroPCS. But, MetroPCS is CDMA based too. And, while it is #5, it only has 6.3 million U.S. customers. T-Mobile USA has about 34 million US customers. Is an 18.5% customer bump significant? Probably not.

GigaOm's Kevin Kelleher wrote about exactly what I've been wondering about recently...

Why Are Tech Layoffs Rising in a Recovery?

Earlier this month, I commented about...

Sprint Reportedly Shedding 4.5% (up to 2500) Workers

Microsoft cut 800 jobs earlier this month too (see TechFlash). And, here's another high profile firm with their own bad news...

Nokia to lay off up to 330 R&D staffers

Nokia has 17,000 workers in the research and development area. So, 330 jobs is not a huge number or percentage relatively speaking. FYI, Nokia currently has 123,347 employees according to Yahoo! Finance. This means that 13.8% of its workforce is in R&D (roughly 1 out of every 8 employees).

The one potential bright spot is that my observation is that large companies are slow moving and take longer to turn things around during an economic recovery (assuming we are in such a recovery right now). Growth will come from smaller and more nimble firms.

12 of my iPhone apps were updated in the past week. Updates 1MB or larger are noted in parentheses. You may note that some of the apps listed were on one of my booted apps list. They are shown as updated because they were unsynced with my iPhone rather that completely removed from my iTunes app library.

Apps that do not have comments in the list below indicates that the update is simply a bug fix release or an iPhone OS 3.x compatibility update with, perhaps, some bug fixes.

1. AAA Discounts 1.2 (2.1m). Canadian addresses

2. Civilization Revolution Lite 1.5 (80.6m) Localized for additional languages

3. Cube Runner 1.5 (3.6m)

4. Echofon for Twitter 2.5 (1.4m)

5. Food Network Nighttime 1.1 Link to recipe library. New shows added

6. FourTrack 3.0 (4.6m) Autopaste. MasterFX. WifiSync individual tracks.

7. Google Earth 2.0.0 (11m) Google Maps created on desktop can be used. Visual feedback when selecting photos and other icons.

8. iHusky 3D Pet Lite 4.2 (15m)

9. Remote 1.3.3 (1.6m)

10. Tumblr 1.1 Video posts (3GS only). Native editing. Search across Tumblr. Built-in web browser. Post upload status. Post geotagging.

11. Tweet Trends 1.2 New name: Was Twitter Trend

12. Visible Vote Mobile 1.4 State tallies for votes. Legislator Twitter accounts. Call legislator from iPhone

If you have a Droid, iPhone or Pre (the "cool" phones these days), tech news aggregator Techmeme has an updated mobile friendly web view for you...

Droid, iPhone, and Pre: meet the new Techmeme Mobile

Fortunately for me, the new Techmeme Mobile web view supplements the older and still available Techmeme Mini web view. The newer Techmeme Mobile view has a slicker look and lets you read the first bits of text associated with a tech news item. However, the older Techmeme Mini view lets you see more news headlines on a single screen and even provides the age (in minutes) of some of the newer items. Both views have the problem of leading you to news items with non-mobile friendly web pages. But, the Droid, iPhone and Pre all do a good job of rendering non-mobile friendly websites.

I'm still trying to decide which views to use. You can find Techmeme Mini at...

http://techmeme.com/mini

And, Techmeme Mobile is found at:

http://techmeme.com/m/

The simplest ideas are often the best and most useful. Case in point: American Airlines' WiFi Widget web page found at...

http://www.aawifiwidget.com/

...that helps you find American Airlines flights with in-flight WiFi service. All you have to do is enter a flight number or identify a departure airport and tap the Find WiFi button. You are then shown a list of flights with WiFi service departing from that airport. What could be easier? Nice...

Via the Dallas News Airline Biz Blog: American offers tool to find if your flight will have Wi-Fi

We got inklings of Google's master plan to rule the universe. The first volley was the Google Chrome browser so they could deal with web services their way. Next came Android because they wanted to deal with mobile devices their way. Google also made a tiny detour to try to fix Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser by providing a plugin to embed a Chrome browser in IE when IE wasn't up to the task of doing what they wanted. Google showed its full hand (I think) yesterday by formally announcing and showing Google Chrome OS.

This super-focus on web pages will, I think, become a problem for Google shortly. The interesting, but somewhat oddball update...

New Google News for mobile

You know the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?" Well, if all you have is a web browser, everything looks like a web page. And, this just ain't gonna work in the long run. The situation we're in now is similar to what we saw in the early 1990s when the computer world was in a painful in-between stage between single tasking MS-DOS and the fully GUI (or mostly so) multi-tasking (kind of sort of) Windows 95. There were some really wild attempts in between DOS and Windows to shoehorn character-based windows and memory managers that simulated multitasking or at least trying to allow multiple applications to be loaded at the same time in DOS. The tiny UNIX/Linux/X11 world had mostly figured this out even then. But, the vast majority of people struggled without looking to that solution.

We're going to muddle through all this confusion for the next few years. Hang on for a rough ride.

Image courtesy of TomTom

When TomTom pre-announced its iPhone turn-by-turn app and cradle accessory, a lot of people (including me) assumed it would let iPod touch users become first class GPS citizens. This appeared to be an incorrect assumption after TomTom released the first version of its $99.99 iPhone app...

TomTom U.S. & Canada (iTunes App Store)

However, this has all changed in favor of iPod touch owners according to this AppleInsider article...

TomTom app updated to support iPod touch, first-gen iPhone

The TomTom GPS cradle kit is priced at $119.95. This means this is all quite a pricey combo if you don't already have an iPod touch.

8GB iPod touch + TomTom app + TomTom cradle kit = $418.94

Even the app + kit combo comes to $219.94 which is quite a bit more than many of the low-priced dedicated GPS units.

TomTom for iPhone (product page)