Apple iPhone Apps Teem with Web 2.0 Flavor

Since it became available on July 11, more than 1 million iPhone 3Gs have been sold in first three days, and 10 million iPhone applications have been downloaded—10 million!

Last week I wrote about Google's big statement-making application for Apple's 3G iPhone, Google Mobile App. Oracle and Salesforce.com issued their own iPhone offerings July 11 on the enterprise side.

If you have purchased an iPhone 3G but have not added new applications for it, there are a number of other cool apps you may not be privy to, mostly from vendors that fly under the radar. These applications range from trivial to pretty useful.

One thing that became readily apparent in the course of looking over the 500 or so applications for the new gadget is that the desktop experience is being replicated for the mobile Web.

Resource Library:

I can't claim that the user experience of apps on the iPhone matches what you get on a desktop, although the touch-screen helps. Yet the variety of things that can be done on an iPhone is increasingly coming to approximate what can be done on a laptop or desktop. ReadWriteWeb is a fan, too: See this cheery review.

For example, Quote Sheet for iPhone is a complete online quotation and pricing application geared to "meet the needs of all businesses who need to prepare customer quotations and access complex pricing materials from anywhere, 24/7."

The app, from Furnishing Industry Software House, includes price list entry and updates, quick quoting, the ability to e-mail quotes directly to customers, a Web customer portal that allows customers to access their quotes online as soon as they're done entering them, and event management from a calendar layout.

Lunar Logic Polska's PicoWiki lets users add, edit and view their notes and documents from any Web browser. The app is designed for users who like to employ a wiki for notes or as an organizational tool.

Similarly, Noter from dBelement provides iPhone users an offline notes and to-do list. Users may type up notes, store offline and sync any time with their dBelement accounts. They can retrieve notes on any computer or iPhone, or make changes and send e-mails to friends or colleagues multiple times without refreshing the page.

At a time when users are increasingly plopping weather, YouTube and other widgets onto their iGoogle pages, an eponymous application from Widgetop lets users add and manage widgets on their iPhones. These can run as stand-alone apps bookmarked on the home screen. Users can also search and add RSS news feeds with the app.

On the social networking and collaboration front, Floort lets iPhone users expound on various topics. Members can respond to tell you what they think about what you think and voila, a dialogue ensues. The app includes community features, allowing users to track favorites and respond only to those that interest them.

Also, all Floorts are now posted to the Floort Twitter account as well as to individual accounts, which makes sense, as Floort looks and operates a lot like the popular microblogging platform.

In the interest of getting more businesses to give up outfitting BlackBerrys or Treos for their employees, Files2Phones Enterprise Edition is a processing platform installed behind the corporate firewall that lets iPhone business users access their desktop data inside the network through the VPN capability of the iPhone, from anywhere at any time. This app comes from 1stWorks.

Nervous about who might be able to access your iPhone content?

That is why the GoTrusted Web security service encrypts all iPhone or iPod Touch network traffic through Wi-Fi and EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution). This app locks up your identity and personal data from unwelcome eyes and allows you to bypass local firewalls and network filters.

Clearly, there is no shortage of apps, both for the consumer and for the enterprise, for the new iPhone. What is your favorite new iPhone app?