The App Store is a bit of rolling sea of pricing turmoil, according to madvertise’s findings in the U.K. App Store, with regular highs and lows that make shopping on certain days more advisable than on others. Fridays turn out to be the best possible time to spend your hard-earned cash, since 19.58 percent of iPad and 18 percent of iPhone app prices on average see a drop just before the weekend, and none of the top five categories of apps see any price increases on a Friday.

Don’t jump the gun and think you can get away with buying earlier, though; Thursdays are the worst possible day to shop, with 17.9 percent of iPad and 17.36 percent of iPhone apps showing an increase in price that time of week. Thursdays are good for one thing, however, since along with Wednesdays it’s the most common time for new apps to arrive in the App Store. Updates also come most frequently on Thursdays, with Tuesdays coming in a close second.

Madvertise’s study, which it created in conjunction with AppZapp, a bargain-hunting tool for App Store shoppers, concludes that Friday is the best day to shop for apps. That’s not too surprising, since a lot of publishers seem to promote their wares with weekend sales in order to lock in lucrative positions high up in the App Store rankings.

All bets are off during this weekend, owing to Black Friday, but there’s little reason to doubt Friday won’t be a great time to pick up some cheap apps, both in the U.S. and abroad, too.

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While the idea of a sale at Apple, where sales are seldom seen, is tantalizing, if history is any indication, there’s no real reason to get too excited about Apple’s Black Friday plans. Last year, for instance, discounts were in the order of around 8 percent across its product lines. In other words, you’d save about $100 on items over $1,000, and much less on cheaper items like iPods. Not bad, but not great; generally people can get similar discounts using education or business purchasing discounts.

You can do better. There are lots of sites out there that will have deals that make sure your money goes further on Apple products on Friday. One recurring favorite is MacMall, which often offers discounts at least as steep as those offered by Apple itself, and often beats the official prices by at least a few dollars. Amazon  is another place to check for bigger reductions, especially since it offers access to many partner stores, as is MacConnection, which already has some decent sales running.

It’s even worth keeping an eye on Best Buy, which is apparently offering $150 off MacBook Pro and iMac devices this year, as well as $100 iTunes cards for only $80.

Don’t get me wrong. For Apple to loosen its tight grip on pricing enough to let you save even a few dollars on any of its products is reason enough to pick up that new MacBook you’ve been dreaming about, but make sure you can’t get a better deal elsewhere first; Apple isn’t running out of its own products anytime soon.

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Black Friday by Brad Deals (Free)

If you want the virtual experience of looking through those fun newspaper inserts with lots of pictures and happy models wearing ugly sweaters, then this app is for you. Plain and simple collection of ads that aren’t searchable, saveable or sharable. But despite limited features, as someone who enjoys marketing, I genuinely loved looking through the national ads with this app, in their full print glory.

Black Friday App (Free)

This app is put out by the very reputable and addictive Dealnews site. This app is a great tool for searching for a particular product or product category. Need an external hard drive? Search for it, find the best deal and then click on the item to find out when the store offering that deal opens, whether you can buy it online and how long it’s on sale. You can also save the deal to a list, or share it with others via social media.

This is a great browsing app for seeing what’s out there and remembering where to go. For each deal it has a list of the store limits for items and limits per customer, letting you know how early to get online for them (for some, you’d better be reading this while in line!). Logical and easy to use.

ShopSavvy (Free)

While not specifically a Black Friday app, ShopSavvy is the definitive guide to finding the best deals online and off. Scan a barcode on an item or simply search for it, and the app will check online prices as well as local stores. It can even tell you if an item is in stock. If you miss that “1 item per store” deal, this app will help you find the next best price.

The interface is slick. You can create lists of items you found and sync them with DropBox or export them for later use. If you see something you want someone to buy for you while shopping for others, this app will help you drop some hints while saving you money on your own purchases. You can also quickly create lists of potential gifts for others.

Sale Saver LT (Free)

So many Black Friday sales are percent-off deals requiring you to do some fancy calculations every time you want to know what the price is. One or two deals is fine, but doing mental math for a long list can be very taxing. Sale Saver quickly figures out the sale price based on the listed price and percent off. Plus, it figures sales tax.

A quick cheat sheet in the app is included to quickly calculate deals that are a standard percent off of everything in a store or section. Put in 20% and it calculates the price of products ending in .49 cents and .99 cents, since nobody ever prices their products in round numbers.

Decide.com (Free)

Decide.com is a technology-focused price predicting engine. It analyzes pricing trends for popular products and tells you whether to wait on purchasing or go ahead and buy. Using a bar code scanner or  through basic searches and browsing, the app will look at the price of the item within the past two weeks to determine if its recent price trend. Think of it as a stock predictor for electronics pricing. Once you decide it’s time to buy, it will compare prices locally and online to help you get the absolute best price.

mGifts ($2.99)

To track all those purchases and to make sure you’ve got something for everyone on the list without duplicates, mGifts helps you organize your purchases. Can you get your entire list done in one day? mGifts will make it possible to stay organized enough, but unfortunately won’t help you pay for anything. mGifts isn’t exclusively holiday, related so you can use it all year for birthdays and anniversaries.

eBay (Free)

A true Black Friday warrior is as interested in buying things for themselves as turning a little profit by reselling the incredible deals they get. The eBay app makes it easy to scan a barcode and see what an item is selling for. This is also helpful for selling the stuff you already have around the house to pay for your Black Friday overindulgence.

Finally, don’t forget individual store apps. These are always free. The Amazon Price Check  app will search all of Amazon and stores that sell via Amazon. National retailers such as Target and Walmart have individual apps to help you find the best deals, and some even offer coupons, so it’s a good idea to have the app for the store where you’re shopping. Even some national mall chains have apps, and it can’t hurt to have them since they’re always free.

Now you’re armed with a quiver of apps to get the best deals of 2011 while keeping your sanity, though waiting in line still might drive you batty. Happy hunting.

Disclosure: mGifts provided a promo code for their app for review purposes, which is about as close to a Black Friday deal as this writer will get this holiday season.

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Facebook and Twitter share links are kind of a weird addition, if you ask me. Are people really all that likely to want to share basic information about available Apple products along with links for where to purchase them? I can see people maybe using it to brag about an upcoming purchase, but that’s about it. But it is something that’s been in place at the iTunes Store for a while now, and I suppose if even some people tweet or post about Apple products to their wall, the links will have done their job.

As mentioned, so far, these drop-down menus are only appearing for Mac Pro and iPod classic models. It’s possible that the role out was stopped midway, if it somehow contributed to the store outage, which web performance monitoring firm Catchpoint told GigaOM via email was network-related.

We’ll keep watching to see if these appear throughout the store, and let us know if you spot them anywhere else, too.

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The idea behind SaleLocator is that finding local deals should be fast, easy and require as few barriers to entry as possible. The app definitely makes good on that promise. It auto-detects your location upon launch (after you provide permission, of course) and immediately loads up sales at local retail outlets within range. You can sign up with a SaleLocator.com account, but you don’t have to, unless you want to be able to bookmark relevant sales for later use. SaleLocator isn’t just for big-city dwellers, either; the app provides useful info regarding sales in any U.S. market.

In an email interview, SaleLocator Co-founder and CEO Michael Falkson explained the app can do this because it sources the data to find sales using a multi-pronged approach. There’s a dedicated research team of employees who check out deals, and a “proprietary retail sourcing process that utilizes a variety of online and offline data sources.” SaleLocator has also managed to secure relationships with 25 national retail partners so far, including H&M and Barnes & Noble, and Falkson noted that “more are joining the program each day.”

The privately-funded app currently offers all its functionality completely free of charge, but Falkson explained that after an initial period during which the company plans to focus on “getting feedback, improving the app’s functionality and growing the overall platform’s user-base of consumers/shoppers and retailers,” the company plans to create an ad-supported version of the app, in addition to a paid version that will be ad-free. Ads seem like an easy sell, given that users of the app are already looking to make purchases in the first place.

Revenue-gathering attempts won’t come without additional features aimed at winning over and keeping users, however. Falkson says international support is on the way, and possibly even “loyalty credits,” which might resemble the sort of reward systems we’ve seen in other apps aimed at mobile shoppers like Foursquare.

Group-buying apps like Groupon may be the stars of location-based mobile shopping for those of us who are keen on social networking and live on the web, but for average users, an app that just opens and tells you which stores nearby are having sales, and on what, is a lot less easier to accept when making the move from traditional paper flyers. 

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Best of all, the app is free, so you won’t even have to use it to make your money back. It’s dead simple to use, too. Just search for what you bought, or enter the product’s UPC code and find out if it’s eligible for protection (a few products aren’t, though the app doesn’t exactly make it clear why). If it is, you can tap Protect My Purchase, enter the date you bought or received (if ordered online) the item, and you’ll get a push notification the instant the price drops, provided you’re still within the no-hassle return period for said purchase. The app also sends you an email in case you miss the push alert.

The app won’t actually drive to the store and deal with the Customer Service desk for you, but at least you won’t be left in the dark or stuck scouring Best Buy’s weekly flyers. The app tracks prices in real-time, and even provides price histories so you can see how low the price of any item has been in the past 90 days.

You have the option to upgrade the app through a one-time $1.99 in-app purchase. This removes the single item limit on purchases you can track, and unlocks the barcode scanner, which allows you to just scan the UPC of the product you bought instead of searching for it manually.

I’m not sure if Best Buy is going to be terribly pleased about this app, but it’s a great little tool for consumers, and should come in handy for iPhone-assisted holiday shopping. If you’ve recently bought anything from Best Buy, or are about to, try it out and let us know how it’s working for you.

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1. In Person from Apple Retail Stores

It’s a popular option, especially with Apple’s aggressive retail expansion of late. However, its popularity can be its greatest weakness. If you go into an Apple store during a peak time, expect a large crowd and long wait — and not much personal space. Personally I feel a bit awkward discussing a large transaction being elbow-to-elbow with others.

A major advantage of buying from an Apple Store is that they usually have the best stock levels. And, like the App Store, everything in the Apple Store is curated, and the staff are more likely to be familiar with all the products. They’ll spend as much time with you as you need to help you make the right decision. Your computer and AppleCare are automatically registered and any rebates are pre-submitted on your receipt.

Educational and government employees can also use their discounts here, but the proof you need to show can vary by store and staff. As a general rule, it’s a good idea to bring your college/government ID as well as a class schedule or a paystub. To find out what your pricing would be, check online first.

You won’t find many discounts at the Apple Store, but at least you’ll always know that you aren’t being overcharged, either.

2. Online from Apple’s Website

Buying online from Apple helps you avoid the hassles of the store, as well as serving parts of the country where no physical Apple Store might be located. You will retain all the benefits of buying direct from Apple, and you can even order from your iPhone with the Apple Store app. In fact, for educational and government purchasing, this is easier because no verification is required to buy from these programs online.

The drawback, of course, is the wait. If you want your Mac as soon as possible, you can pay for faster shipping. You’ll also have to be home to sign for the shipment. Returns can sometimes be made at a brick and mortar Apple store, but that’s at the manager’s discretion. As a general rule, you should expect to have to ship it back should you want to return it.

Apple online is also the primary place to purchase refurbished Macs — computers that have been repaired or returned and certified by Apple as fully working and warrantied. Be aware, refurbs sell out quickly so they often won’t have what you want. Apple will fully warranty the unit from the date of purchase and allow you to extend your warranty via AppleCare. For price conscious consumers, this is a great deal. Beware of buying a refurbished Mac anywhere else, though, as it may not retain Apple’s full warranty.

3. Online from Authorized Resellers

Before Apple stores existed, third-party authorized resellers were the primary way many of us bought our Macs. Every few weeks you got a catalog extolling the virtues of Apple’s new products, and “Jennifer” from MacWarehouse was ready to take your call! Today, the “indirect channel” struggles with its primary supplier also being its biggest competitor.

Although Apple has “Minimum Advertised Pricing,” these retailers will offer slight discounts on occasion of up to 5 percent, but since it angers Cupertino, they don’t do it often. More likely they’ll throw in extras such as additional memory or software. These upgrades may not be covered by Apple’s warranty. In particular if they add additional RAM, Apple won’t cover it.

Depending on what state you live in, you’ll also skip being charged sales tax and most will include free shipping. Additionally, you might find some indirect discounts. For example, credit card companies may offer extra points for shopping via their portal. Amazon credit card owners will get extra points on their cards. Personally, I use Fat Wallet to get a few percent back on each purchase. Only Apple Direct will offer educational and government discounts, though.

When you purchase a Mac from the “indirect channel”, you’ll often have to register your Mac and AppleCare yourself. Don’t forget to register because doing it after the initial warranty expires requires special approval from Apple. Other than the registration, your Mac retains the same warranty and support as a Mac purchased direct from Apple. You can walk into the Genius Bar and get help, call Apple for support, and go to an Apple Authorized Service Provider for repairs.

The key disadvantages of a third-party reseller is that you have to know what you want. Most online resellers aren’t exclusive to Mac and even if there are sales consultants, they may not be Mac fans. They won’t always be able to figure out the right Mac and accessories for your needs.

Be sure to go to Apple’s reseller locator and make sure they are authorized. Buying from unauthorized resellers can cause a whole slew of problems with warranty and support.

4. In Person from Authorized Resellers

As the popularity of the Mac increases, resellers both big and small want a piece of the action. This includes “big box” resellers such as BestBuy and MicroCenter, as well as smaller companies and regional chains.

Before even thinking of a purchase, make sure the store is an authorized reseller. It’s also good to already know what you want, since Apple doesn’t actively monitor the quality of service and staff at authorized retailers. Around the holidays, too many companies hire temp staff members who may not be properly trained.

That’s really the key disadvantage compared to an authorized reseller: consistency. Some will provide you exemplary service while others just see the dollar signs and don’t really know or care about Macs. Some will also be Apple Authorized Service Providers, so you can get your Mac serviced there under warranty, but many are not.

5. Apple Specialist Designated Resellers

Apple Specialists are unique third party resellers. They’re committed exclusively to Mac. It was the Apple Specialists who were first entrusted with selling the iPad when it came out. In fact, if you want to know if an Apple Specialist is well-respected, ask them if they sold the iPad on day one. Apple clearly holds those that did in extremely high regard.

Apple Specialists are smaller operations and usually will provide you the highest level of sales consulting, but in a less crowded environment than Apple Retail. They often provide free and paid training (in a more private way than Apple Retail). All staff dealing directly with customers are required to be Apple Product Professionals and work at creating a long-term relationship with the customer. Apple Specialists will also have repair facilities in-house, with a Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) on staff.

Similar to other resellers, they won’t compete on price, but they are often willing to deal. The more you buy, the better the deal. Here’s a tip: buy enough and they might even lower the price on your Mac. Resellers are often given coupons by Apple to give special discounts. They only get a few per quarter though. The more Apple-branded products you buy, the more likely that when you ask for a coupon they’ll give it to you. For some, this can lower your price below any other discount, including the education/government discount program.

6. Apple Authorized Campus Store

These are limited to students and others affiliated with a particular educational institution. Not every school has one, so check here. Because Apple sales are usually managed by the bookstore, don’t expect to have highly-trained salespeople or much selection. The obvious advantage is the fact you can get your educational discount and walk out with a new Mac while you’re grabbing your books and other supplies for the semester.

Bottom Line

So of these six choices, which is best? I recommend to family and friends the Apple Specialists. They provide the direction and service non-technical people need to find not only the right Mac, but a complete sales and service solution, without the large Apple Retail crowd. I’ve had nothing but outstanding experiences with the Apple Specialists I’ve worked with and in particular those in the MacXprts network. Here’s where to find a complete, searchable list.

For customers looking for the educational/government discount, and not interested in a large purchase, buying direct from Apple online avoids the verification hassles and the crowds at the Apple store. If price is your primary factor, buying online from Amazon or other major resellers combines tax-free or deferred sales tax combined with other bonus discounts.

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The update comes on the heels of fresh rumors that did indeed predict the new services. Those services include the ability to reserve products for local pickup at Apple retail, add your Apple Store appointments to iCal, and check-in with the store when you arrive to let employees know you’re there.

Finally, if you’re making purchases through the app, you can add engraving and gift wrapping, features which are timed very nicely with the beginning of the holiday shopping season and the arrival of free iPad device engraving.

You can grab the updated app now for free in the App Store. It requires OS 3.0 or higher, though the new check-in and iCal features will only work on devices running 4.0 or above.

Maybe Consumer Reports’ refusal to issue that recommendation is why the app isn’t optimized for the iPhone 4′s Retina Display, though that wouldn’t make much sense, as the newest iPod touch also supports high-res graphics. Either way, I’m surprised to see a new app come to market today without Retina-optimized visuals, especially when it’s an app that costs $9.99.

Graphics aside, what really makes the Mobile Shopper app useful is its ability to tag barcodes on the fly and return product information and ratings. While it may just be that I was trying out things that weren’t well-suited to the technology, I found the barcode scanner to be hit or miss. I tested five or six products, and only video games and Amazon’s Kindles returned results. No Apple products worked.

When it did work, it was impressive. The Kindle DX included a ratings report card, with detailed information provided in an easily readable format consisting of clear icons displayed along with a legend. There’s also a review, complete with highs and lows.

Manually searching for products is only marginally more time-consuming than scanning barcodes, and much more likely to return good results. You can also view local results, and shop online, though shopping locally will kick you out to Safari. Shopping online will, too, but at least you get to see a PriceGrabber comparison chart in-app before selecting an actual retailer.

A nice feature Mobile Shopper provides is the ability to compare devices in the same category. You’ll get a chart if one is available, providing scores, price and buy recommendations. You also get access to CR buying advice, which provide tips on how to shop for different categories of products. Basically, you get access to much of the content you only get through the ConsumerReports.org website by subscribing, and for a much cheaper one-time fee of $9.99 (or $14.99 beginning Jan. 1, 2011).

In the end, though, unless you’re an avid Consumer Reports user, I can’t recommend this app. From the low-res graphics, to the poorly designed user interface, to the sporadically effective barcode scanning, it just seems like an amateurish offering. Which is too bad, because the content is there.

Maybe if we see an update that brings the app in line with the type of quality we’ve come to expect from developers these days, especially when affiliated with an organization like consumer reports attached, I’ll have a change of heart, but until then, doing comparison shopping the old-fashioned way (via Google in mobile Safari) is not only easier, but also easier on the eyes.

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Walmart confirmed the news Monday evening, following rumors circulating last week that it would start carrying the iPad sometime this week. All six iPad configurations, including both Wi-Fi and 3G + Wi-Fi models, will be on sale at the Arkansas-based big box retailer.

You don’t have to wait until this Friday to make a purchase at Walmart, though. According to some sources, the iPad is already appearing on shelves in some stores next to the iPods that are already there. Also, you can order a few models of the iPad online through Walmart’s online store, though the only shipping option available is site-to-store. At the present time, only the 64GB iPad with Wi-Fi, and the 32 and 64GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G are available for online order, with the rest showing “Out of Stock.” It’s likely the cheaper models are being reserved for in-store sales, since they’re much more likely to be bought off the shelf.

Walmart joins Target and Best Buy, both of which began selling the iPad as major national third-party chains to offer the iPad for sale. Apple is clearly keen on making sure that it has as wide a retail base as possible going into the holiday shopping season, especially now that it seems to have resolved the supply chain limitations that kept its popular tablet sold out at many locations following its launch.

The iPhone first went on sale at Walmart in December of 2008. Apple reported its best quarterly revenue and earnings ever for the quarter ending Dec. 27, 2008, including quarterly iPhone sales of 4,363,000, which marked 88 percent growth compared to the same period the previous year. Obviously, Walmart wasn’t the only reason for the spike in sales, as the iPhone was steadily growing in popularity before it became available there, but increased retail presence at one of the largest chains in the U.S. couldn’t have hurt those numbers.

Availability at Walmart, even in limited quantities (sources report only five per store at launch) will help ensure there’s an iPad under as many trees as is realistically possible this holiday season.

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