For a lot of users, the first two will be more than welcome additions — seriously, who can argue with speed improvements, especially if they apply to networked libraries as well. Also, as I’m sure a lot of other non-shuffle owners will agree, the Autofill feature is one that has been much lamented over. The shift to a higher encoding rate, however, is an interesting move and may cause confusion with some users when they suddenly can’t fit as many songs on their iPods and/or iPhones as they were used to, notable because Apple’s capacity calculations are still based on the 128-Kbps bitrate.

Party Shuffle has been transformed into iTunes DJ which, beyond a more suiting name change, adds an extra layer of interactivity for touch device owners with the Remote app (iTunes link), that was updated last night to version 1.2 to add iTunes 8.1 compatibility. When enabled, you can “allow guests to request songs with Remote for iPhone or iPod touch” as well as “vote to control when songs play.” Access to the DJ playlist is password protectable to limit access, and if you’re so inclined, you can also greet participants with a welcome message.

The update is available now via Software Update and the Apple-released notes for this update are below for your perusing.

• Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation).

• Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.
• Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.

• Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs.

• Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods.
• Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus.
• Includes many accessibility improvements.

• Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls.

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The Dark Knight: Batmobile Game (99 cents)
“How fast can you get Batman through Gotham City?” Tilt your touch device to avoid obstacles and gain speed for jumps.

Disney Fairies Fly! ($4.99)
Based on the Tinker Bell movie, Disney’s Fairies Fly lets you play as one of six fairy characters through five levels of gameplay. Using the accelerometer, you dodge obstacles and collect power-ups to progress to the next stage.

Fast and Furious: Pink Slip ($2.99)
Use the motion sensor to steer your car in one of four different types of races. Then, challenge others online to win their rides. Thirty-two cars to win in 32 challenging races.

Iron Man: Aerial Assault (99 cents)
Guide Iron Man through the skies as you use his high-tech arsenal to battle enemies.

Lightsaber Unleashed (Free)
Swing your touch device around to emulate lightsaber sound effects. Choose a Force Unleashed character of your choosing (or create your own) and play along to some dueling music.

Saturday Night Fever: Dance / Lite (99 cents/Free)
Tap and slide to perform hundreds of dance moves to disco classics such as “YMCA” and “Car Wash.” Choose from two playable characters and a multi-player mode on a single device.

School of Rock (99 cents)
Learn rock ‘n’ roll music theory, test your knowledge in the trivia section, then rock along to classic tracks by bands such as Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Scorpions, or to songs in your music library.

Shooter – The Official Movie Game ($1.99)
Choose from a large arsenal of weapons and equipment in over 30 levels of gameplay taking out enemies as Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger in this first person shooter.

Spongebob’s Atlantis Treasure ($3.99)
Play through five themed levels in this match three or more puzzle game based on your favorite pants-wearing sponge.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed / Lite ($5.99/Free)
Use the force as you tap, touch, and swipe your way through the foes of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice.

Star Wars Sound Board (99 cents)
Choose from sixteen unmistakable Star Wars sound effects, from Darth Vader’s breathing to Obi-Wan’s “May the force be with you.”

Underworld Game (Free)
Play as either a Vampire or Lycan in this head-to-head fighting game. Choose between three levels (the Woods, Castles, or Catacombs) in three modes of difficulty.

Watchmen: Justice is Coming (99 cents)
Team up and fight other players in this turn-based RPG based off the recently released Watchmen movie.

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beamME (Free) To even use this app, you’re required to have an account from rmbrME. Once you log-in (or sign-up as the case may be), you can choose the phone number or address of the person you want to “beam” your card to. If you enter a phone number, the recipient will get an SMS message with a URL they can click (or visit later, if they don’t have internet access via their phone) that presents them with a web page of your contact info. From there, they can have that information emailed to them with a vCard attachment. If you go the email route, you can skip that extra set and have all your information sent in an email along with your vCard attached.

Contacts2Go (99 cents) This app has a bevy of interesting features. Once you set the email address you want the vCards to come from, you can send as many vCards from your contacts list to as many people as you want. You have the option to turn off what information from vCards get sent, which is good if you keep notes about people in their contact details, and you can even “Introduce” people — both vCard contacts get each other’s information, a virtual “Hi, Jim. This is Bob. Bob, Jim” sort of situation.

EmailContact (99 cents) EmailContact is undoubtedly the most bare bones of the lot. You are presented your contact list where you’re told to choose the information you want to send. From there, the information is pulled and attached as the body of an email. You can then email it to whomever you choose. A vCard, however, is not attached to that email, so the the recipient(s) will have to manually create a contact for themselves. This could prove to be a hassle for iPhone users with the lack of copy and paste.

FriendBook (99 cents) This is much more than an app solely for sending contact information, it’s more of a Dialer/Contact replacement. With FriendBook you have access to all your contacts to either call, text, or email them. You can also merge multiple contacts, delete contacts and move them around groups. There’s a “Face Dialer” which is a more visual favorites that gives you one touch access to a contacts number. The send vCard option is interesting as it uses your location and the accelerometer to send a card. You put two touch devices together and shake them in a handshake motion (QuickTime link) and the cards are beamed to each other. While definitely cool, the app is hindered by the fact that you can only trade information with other owners of FriendBook — there’s no option to just send a vCard.

Handshake (Free) Like FriendBook, Handshake is dependent on the person receiving your contact information having the application, thankfully, there is an option to send an App Store link so they can download it right away. Once you set your own vCard, Handshake uses location services to find other Handshake owners and your potential recipient. From there you can either choose to send your card or someone else’s in your contact list, pick the person you want to send it to and almost instantly a notification is presented asking the recipient if they’d like to “Preview and Exchange,” “Preview,” or “Discard.” Once you accept the vCard, it’s automatically added to your contacts list. You can also choose to send a picture from your camera roll, which makes sharing photos virtually effortless.

Handshake Premium ($2.99) The premium version is exactly like the free version, except for the lack of advertisements and the good feeling you get for supporting indie developers.

iBeam (99 cents) iBeam is another app that works best when the person you’re trading contact information with also has it. Thankfully, it isn’t totally dependent on this fact and still lets you send information via email. When sending the contact details, you can choose to either attach a vCard or send as a plain text copy in the body, but not both, which would have been a nicer touch. For situations where there is no network connectivity, iBeam also allows you to trade information via an auto-generated QR code. The receiver uses iBeam to take a picture of the barcode and the app will convert the information to a vCard.

Nameo (99 cents) Akin to FriendBook, Nameo requires that both sender and receiver have the application. From there, you just hit connect and your name, number and email are transferred. Unlike all the other apps, you have to input this information manually, that is to say, you cannot choose yourself from the contacts list, and that is all the information that will be exchanged.

Send Contact (99 cents) Send Contact picks up where Email Contact left off. You choose who’s contact information you want to send and then the information is put into the body of an email with a link to a service that will generate a vCard to download. While not as simple as just attaching the vCard to the email, it is still nice that you are given both options to choose from. The email also includes a link to the app for touch device owners to buy and import the contact details with. A huge plus is that before you send each vCard you can choose what extra fields to turn on and off, so you don’t find yourself sending personal information.

Sharecard ($1.99) Sharecard is designed for sending only your vCard. Once it’s assigned, with as few as two taps, it’s attached to an email and in the recipient’s inbox. Like some of the other apps, you can specify how much extra information you want to share when you’re sending it, in the settings, but beyond that, Sharecard is a pretty simplistic app wrapped in a snazzy interface.

vCards (99 cents) vCards is another bare bones app, which it makes apparent from it’s single screen illustrating the three steps to sharing a vCard: Choose the card to send, choose the contact to send it to, and then hit send, where vCard will be attached to an email and sent off. While it’s nice that you can choose whomever’s contact information you want to send, the app is hindered by the fact that the recipient must already be in your contacts list, there is no option to just enter an email address on the fly.

While everyone’s needs and wants are different, I feel that I can say safely that Contacts2Go is the clear winner. While Handshake would have been my top choice, the dependency on both users having the application, free or not, severly hinders the trading information process, which should be as effortless as possible. Contacts2Go, while not as polished as a lot of the other apps, makes that happen. If you have a personal preference or another app you think is better, sound off in the comments.

vCard App Table (click to enlarge)

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Apple announced today that it’s bringing some major changes to the iTunes Music Store. Most notable among the announcements is their shift to making its entire 10M-plus song library completely DRM-free.

Prior to today, Apple’s iTunes Plus selection was fairly slim. Now, all songs from the four major labels, as well as the plethora of independent labels, will be available by default as DRM-free iTunes Plus downloads. Previously purchased songs can be upgraded via iTunes’ “Upgrade My Library” option in the Music Store at 30 cents each, music videos for 60 cents, and entire albums for 30 percent of the original price (roughly $3 if it was purchased at $9.99). According to Apple, 8M songs are available in the iTunes Plus format now, with the remaining 2M-plus tracks to be converted by the year’s end.

With this upgade, also comes an eventual update to the pricing scheme to offer the the major labels “more flexibility.” Starting in April, songs will be available for either 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. There was no clear indication on what would affect the prices, but during the keynote, Phil Schiller said that “most” songs would be available at the lowest tier. Apple stated that, despite the change in per-track pricing, most albums would remain at $9.99.

Lastly, Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store for the iPhone would be freed from its Wi-Fi chains. Previoulsy, accessing the store via a cellular data connection limited you to the Podcast section, however, as of today, the entire music store will be in your hands. As before, the prices on the iPhone will be the same as they are on your computer and all tracks purchased via the iPhone will be syncable back to your main iTunes library. Looks like there may have been some justification for the apparent cellular data outages AT&T experienced this morning on the East coast.

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Not to be left out, AOL also updated the native client for their portal, AOL Desktop for Mac, to version 1.5. This update adds a new Parental Controls Assistant that “works with Mac OS X to turn off Internet browsers and other applications and deliver age-appropriate content via the AOL Desktop for Mac browser.” This, however, is a bit more redundancy on AOL’s part as OS X has its own — and much more robust, I might add – parental controls built-in.

While it’s good to have options, I can’t help but feel that AOL’s Mac offerings are way too little way too late and I think the appeal only lies within those who have a bit of nostalgia for their dial-up days. If you, however, do decide to venture the “official” route and pick up AIM for Mac, note that to disable its annoying habit of opening the “AIM Dashboard” in your browser every time you sign-on, un-check the “Show AIM start page when I sign in” option under the “General” tabs in settings.

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Unable to ignore the ubiquitousness of Apple’s touch devices, Microsoft has released its first app, a tech-demo of Seadragon.

For those unfamiliar with the project, Seadragon is one of a few applications being developed under Microsoft’s Live Lab division. This one in particular provides “seamless browsing of vast quantities of visual information [...] regardless of the amount of data.” With the app you are able to quickly breeze through thousands of giga-pixel images and zoom in multiple times to view them in their full resolution splendor.

Seadragon comes with access to a collection of images which among them include satellite images of Mars and the Spitzer’s Galaxy, documents from the Library of Congress, and a couple of different map views of the world. You can also add images from RSS feeds, any Deep Zoom content, and from Photosynth users (Photosynth being another Live Lab project that “[a]utomatically reconstructs a three-dimensional space from a collection of photos of a place or an object”). You can set it up to use your photos as well, but they have to be uploaded to Photosynth which is only in testing for the Mac and requires Microsoft’s Flash-variant Silverlight, which means non-Intel based Mac users are left out.

Taken for what it is, a technical demo, Seadragon is a rather impressive technology. Pinching and stretching your way around images only to see how detailed they really are has a definite wow factor and just one more thing to use when showing off why the iPhone stands apart from everything else in the market. However, it is admittedly a bit odd that the developers didn’t allow you to browse the pictures on your camera roll directly, as well as shipped an app that wasn’t complete — the “Browse Photosynth” is broken — but I guess, such is the nature of a demo.

The developers claim that there is more “cool stuff” to come, though not specifically for the iPhone/iPod touch. Regardless, based on this app alone, that claim doesn’t, at all, seem far fetched and I’d gladly welcome more Apple friendly offerings from Microsoft’s Live Labs.

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It was only two months ago that Flickr unveiled a beta version of their mobile site optimized for iPhone and iPod touch users, but now it’s official.

Compared to their previous mobile endeavor, this update of the site is nothing short of leaps and bounds ahead. Beyond a svelte new interface that makes browsing, not only, your and your contacts’ activity a breeze, it also puts Flickr’s much touted “interestingness” photos within easy reach.

However, undoubtedly the biggest boon to come with this update is the ability to play back videos — or “long photos” as Flickr so poignantly likes to refer to them as. (It should be noted, though, this only applies to videos uploaded since December 3. Videos on the site previous to that date will be updated for mobile playback in the coming months.) Without delving into the technical details, Flickr is able to do this by utilizing their parent company’s, Yahoo!, Video Platform. Via said platform, Flickr can serve video to the dizzying array of available handsets on the market that support it, and accommodate for their varying screen sizes and codec dependencies, including the iPhone/iPod touch.

After putting the site through its paces, short of an upload dialog box, the new mobile site feels right at home. The design and layout, as well as the video playback, were obviously very well thought out and the execution is nearly flawless, though some will have their minor quibbles. While touch devices still have the option to browse the site in full, Flickr took great care in providing convenient access the most common features you would want while on the go. For example, just as easily as you can “favorite” a photograph or video you like, you can set/update the privacy or safety level setting of your own. Which is great for those moments when you have a lapse in judgement and realize the upload you just made via your mobile wasn’t meant for the world at-large.

Needless to say, It’s good to see that, while most ventures have moved away from iPhone/iPod touch optimized versions of their web apps/sites for official apps — and in unfortunate cases, nothing more than Webkit wrappers — Flickr is still focused on its core competency of helping people “make their content available to the people who matter to them,” by continuing to provide an enjoyable experience to its growing number of mobile web users. Though, that’s not to say an official Flickr app wouldn’t be welcomed, right?

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Thankfully, Infectious (see disclosure at bottom) is happy to fill that lack of identity with its line of iPhone Art adhesive decorations. Featuring artwork from well known illustrators and graphic designers like David Lanham, Jeremy Prasatik (aka JP33), Emil Kozak, and MAD, among many more, Infectious currently offers 38 designs to adorn your iPhone with. Each comes with a full and mini sticker that covers the full back of phone (with a cut-out for the camera lens) and the bottom portion of the front, respectively; as well as an Infectious logo sticker for good measure.

The stickers are made of a 3M durable vinyl material — Infectious estimates a three year life span — that makes applying and removing it a cinch. While in use, there is a protective laminate to reduce any scratching to your device, and when you are ready for a new design taking it off is an afterthought as there is no sticky, filmy residue to deal with.

iPhone Art is available now for $9.99, with a few prints carrying a $14.99 price tag. And, for the discerning buyer, all of the designs are offered as laptop prints as well, so your MacBook [Pro/Air] doesn’t feel left out.

Disclosure: Infectious is backed by True Ventures, which is also an investor in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this network. Giga Omni Media founder Om Malik is a venture partner with True Ventures.

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Quordy
Find the most words, get the high score.

Smiles
Two games in one. Play the Drop mode for Bejeweled-like game play or the Zen mode for a Solitaire-esque game.

Spin
Rotate the object to match the silhouette.

Puzzloop Endless
Fend off a non-stop barrage of colored balls.

MetaSquares
Compete against the computer or another player in capturing the most squares.

Dizzy Bee
Use your touch device’s accelerometer to control Dizzy Bee and save its fruit friends.

Lumen
Use mirrors and colored filters to guide a laser beam through check points.

Imangi
It’s Scrabble meets the Rubick’s cube.

Amazing Sudoku
A flashy, stylized version of the cult game.

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Via mobile provisioning, for promotional copies to be granted, developers would have to get the UDID of the touch device from each person receiving a copy and from there generate a .mobileprovision file to send with the actual application file that would bind that app to each specified device. Once both files were received, the end user would drag and drop them into iTunes to sync it. With the promo code method, all that is eschewed for a system that as easy as redeeming an iTunes gift card.

In the future, we can see this opening the door for more than just a developer/reviewer relationship, and extended to contests and giveaways. With complexity removed and the fact that the codes are linked to a specific app, developers would be able to invite people to win copies of their app without relying on gift cards, which is a hockey method since there value of the gift-card may not match the price of the app thus costing the developer additional money and there’s no guarantee that the recipient will actually use it to buy the app.

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