Still, with this? Well, luckily there’s plenty of other stuff to tide us over until the Google Voice fiasco resolves itself. Like zombies! And weddings, and exercise, and soundscapes, and urban art, and political activism, and jokes, and, and, and…

The Onion Microfiche Reader: It’s from the Onion, so it’s pretty much guaranteed not to be not funny, but! For all the neat microfilm-esque presentation, this thing doesn’t actually have any articles—just a bunch of those jokes-in-a-headline that the Onion is so good at. Still entertaining though. A dollar.

Foursquare: Now you can see who else is checked in at a given venue, who the current mayor is, collect nearby Tweets, and enjoy better Google Maps integration in this extremely strange, strangely popular, highly addictive territorial app. Free.

Reqall: Evernote integration. That is all. Free.

Strands: The best free exercise app for the iPhone now lets you replay your GPS-recorded running path, signals you with audio cues during exercise, includes route elevation profiles and supports in-app playlists.

Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan: A fantasy wedding planner that is evidently really, really popular. Maybe because it’s fun, or maybe because it’s the easiest way to make your boyfriend super, super, super uncomfortable. Three dollars.

Alive 4-Ever: There are a surprising number of zombie survival apps in the App Store, I guess because they’re easy to make or something? I don’t know. I do know, however, that this top-down zombie slaughter is extremely fun, and only a dollar. I would pay multiple dollars, even. Like two!

Kodak Smilemaker: A charming app that adds comical smiles to your photos, or a meditation of the tragedies of birth deformities? I have no idea, but either way, its free. So.

NPR News: Sorry to keep bringing this app up, but it’s great, and the biggest issue people had with the last version—the lack of fast-forwarding and pausing—is solved in this one. Still free.

Air: Brian Eno done made another app, y’all! The last one made amazing music based (partly) on user input; this one makes amazing music based (partly) on user input, except it sounds totally different. It’s as mesmerizing as the last one, but feels fresh. 2bux.

Polyghost It took me a while to figure this one out, partly because I’d never really heard of “Vinyl art” toys before. Well, this is what they are, and like them or not, Polyghost is an aesthetically cool app. Here what you do: Using microtransactions, you buy little 3D characters which you can transpose onto photographs. The pricing’s a little unfortunate—four dollars for the app, with new characters at at least a dollar apiece—but if you’re a fan of artists like Tim Biskup and DEVILROBOTS, the rendering in this app does the work justice. So twee!

Howard Dean’s Activism Book Thingeee: Whether or not you’re a LI-BRULL, you’ve got to admire the concept behind this book-cum-activism app, which gets its users fired up with a message, i.e. Dean’s writing, then puts tools at their fingertips to act on their feelings, like a location-aware “call your congressman” function. I think it might be a liiiiittle more effective if you didn’t have to pay for it. Five dollars to CHANGE THE WORLD, or whatever.

This Week’s iPhone App News on Giz

• Google: Apple’s a Liar, Did Reject Google Voice iPhone App

• Navigon Wants an Extra $25 for Real-Time Traffic Data on the iPhone

• I Am Sting App Is Even Whinier Than I Am T-Pain

• Army of Darkness Invades the iPhone

• Wall Street Journal iPhone and BlackBerry App Free Lunch Is Over

• Penn and Teller iPhone App Is as Magical as It Is Doomed

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

This week in your facelifted, more searchable, iTunes-sortable app roundup: Flickr goes official; Navigon grows more sociable; spiders poop web; your homescreen gets organized; rhythm games find a new muse; and robots master the art of pillow talk.

Tick Talk Robot: In the mornings of the future, humanoid, quasi-British, deep-voiced robots will lull you with a reading of the day’s news, stroke your hair, and breathe fragrant, bacon-scented air across your cheek until you wake. Until then, there’s Tick Talk Robot, which does pretty much the same thing, except without all the roboculinary eroticism. Two dollars.

AppButler: This isn’t quite as cool as the press materials make it out to be, but it’s still not a bad idea, considering how much easier it is to arrange apps with iTunes 9. As it stands now—as a web app—AppButler gives you a bunch of free icons to place on your springboard as dead links, which act as labels (News, Productivity, Music, whatever) for your apps, so you can make interesting homescreen layouts. A native version—whatever that would look like—is mired in the approval process as we speak.

Riddim Ribbon: A new concept rhythm game showed off at Apple’s iPod event this week, Riddim Ribbon shoots your avatar/ball/blob/thing down a pathway, on which you have to hit lots and lots of targets. The more you hit, the more the song builds; the fewer, the sparser the instrumentation gets. This one comes out in October, unfortunately.

Fantasy Sports Stats Grabber: Aggregates cross-league stats in a Fantasy-league-friendly way, so you can keep closer track of how much money you’ve lost to your coworkers in this bizarre ritual of manhood that I’ll never, ever understand. A buck.

Flickr: Better late than never, Yahoo. At least the app is good at what it does, which includes uploading and geotagging photos, and managing your account. Warning: It can be sluggish, especially when loading thumbs. That’s nothing to get too worked up about though, seeing as this one’s a freebie.

Navigon: Navigon was only a killer feature or two away from a clear victory in our iPhone nav app Battlemodo, and with the latest free update, it may have gotten one. Or two! Now it features a full, proper-noun-reading text-to-speech engine for giving you vocal directions, as well as inbuilt music controls, which replace the iPhone’s limited default popup panel. Obvious, maybe, but still awesome.

Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor: You play a spider with an extremely overactive web gland, and hop around a bunch of levels, trapping bugs and solving mysteries. The demo video at the app’s website makes a better case for playing this lovely little game than I can, but I will say this: Spider game, I love you. Three dollars.

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

More than a year after launch, there are 74,031 apps in the iPhone App store. Most of them are crap. Some of them aren’t. Here are the 50 iPhone apps you actually need, all in one place.

Well, OK, if you count the overlapping apps—paid and free Twitter clients, neck-and-neck navigation apps, the jailbreakers—it’s more like 56, but that’s not the point, people: The point is, since the last time we corralled all the best of the best (barring our weekly roundups, of course), the iPhone and App Store have changed immeasurably. In the last nine months we saw the release of the 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0, Apple loosening its grip on what kinds of apps people are allowed to create, and hundreds of fresh developers making genuinely new, genuinely impressive stuff. It was time for an update, and a big one.

So, hit the “iPhone Apps” link on the left sidebar, just above Bestmodo (Note: It’s split into two pages, so make sure to click through), or just scroll down—they’re all here too. We’ve got the best games, messaging apps, eBook readers, dictionaries, productivity software and timewasters. We’ve got apps to keep you up on current events, to keep your daily music intake interesting, to keep you entertained on the train, and to keep you on the right interstate. These are the essential iPhone apps—a list that’ll transform that shiny, boring brick you just bought into the device that everyone’s always raving about.

What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we’ve missed anything huge, or you’ve got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We’ll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy!

Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps

AirSharing: Our favorite file storage app-shoots files to the iPhone’s flash memory via Wi-Fi for storage, transport, and easy retrieval.

Amazon: Amazon’s usually the first place I look during a fit of impulse buying, which their iPhone app now makes stupidly easy.

AOL Radio: More free radio content than any actual radio could ever have. Tailored radio stations are great, sure, but old-fashioned programmed stations-AOL Radio’s specialty-have their charms

BeejiveIM: Expensive? Sure. Totally essential for messaging hounds? Yup.

Bloom: Generative, ambient music by Brian Eno. If I need to say more, it’s also a mini-sequencer: Drop your finger on the liquidy pastel screen, play a note, make simple loops. Music For Airports that you can make yourself. In an airport, even.

Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima: A lot of people buy Nintendo DSes for the sole purpose of having those Dr. Kawashima-approved brain-training games at hand. With this app, you get the exact same mind-juicing benefits for a few bucks, on hardware you already carry.

Brushes: If you’ve ever seen on of those spectacularly detailed “paintings” done on the iPhone, chances are it was created with this. This is fingerpainting in 2009.

CameraBag: Image processing apps tend to be gimmicky, but CameraBag’s got enough artistic effects and editing flexibility to make the crappiest iPhone camera photos look interesting at worst, and spectacular at best.

ConvertBot: Plenty of apps can technically deal with unit conversions as well as ConvertBot can, but none of them have its fantastic, super-fast interface.

Epicurious: The only cooking app you really need. With its thousands of recipes, shopping list feature and meal suggestions, Epicurious will make you at least look like a passable cook.

Evernote: Obsessive documenters, take note(s): This is the only scribbling app you need.

Facebook: This was an essential app from the get-go, and it’s been steadily evolving-like the site-for the last year. Version 3.0 was a total refresh, and supports nearly every one of Facebook’s sprawling features, sometimes better than the site itself.

Fring: Every major instant message protocol, comfortably crowded under one (free!) roof. The addition of push notifications notched this one up from great to, uh, greaterer.

Frotz: Laugh all you want, jocks-us geeks know where it’s at: text gaming. Bringing virtually every text-based game you’ve ever heard of to the iPhone gives the genre a whole new lease on life, and you the most prodigious time-waster imaginable.

Google Mobile: Google Mobile was a solid app (but not particularly essential)-and then came voice search.

Google Earth: The same amazing Earth touring app found on the desktop, now spinnable via multitouch. Honestly if someone told me two years ago I would have a functional Google Earth app on my phone, I wouldn’t have believed them. This is now.

i.TV: Once you’ve used a wonderful, full-featured TV guide app on your iPhone, reading one on paper-or even on your laptop-will feel stupid. iTV is that app. It also works as a remote for some TiVo boxes, with more DVRs to come.

I Love Katamari: Mad genius designer Keita Takahashi left the series years ago, but Katamari is still among my favorite game franchises of all time (and I’m not alone), and it’s a natural fit for the iPhone’s tilt-controls.

Kindle: There are a pile of eBook readers for the iPhone, but only one connects to Amazon’s book store, and more importantly, your Kindle library.

Last.fm: Creates free, effectively endless custom radio stations, streams them over 3G and learns more about your musical tastes with time. There is literally no downside to this app.

MLB At Bat: Live streaming MLB games, every day, over 3G. That is all.

Motion X Poker Quest: Realistic dice physics meets ancient Egyptian gods in one of the more addicting iPhone games you’ll see.

Mujik: Mujik is like Bloom in that it lets anyone make amazing music in the space of a few minutes. That’s where the similarities end.

Navigon: Hey, so, have you heard your iPhone is also a really, truly good turn-by-turn navigation device? Because with the pricey-but-probably-worth-it Navigon, it is.

Ninjawords: An intelligently pared-down dictionary and thesaurus app, Ninjawords will make you feel and seem slightly less dumb. It works offline, too.

NPR News: Comes with text news, offline reading and an endless (seriously!) supply of calming, androgynous voices, either live or on demand.

Newsstand: One of the only RSS readers that isn’t slow, overcomplicated or missing something vital.

Pageonce Personal Assistant: Are you a fancy businessperson, with “accounts” and “subscriptions” and, uh, “dollars?” Personal Assistant sucks your scattered financial, travel and leisure concerns all into one simple, unscary interface.

OpenTable: Actually talking to a maître d’ on the phone: Out. Tapping your iPhone a few times to get a dinner reservation at a veritable assload of restaurants: In.

Pandora: Best internet radio app, hands down. Smartly auto-suggests music based on other artists you like. Both on the go and while at home. Streams well over EDGE and 3G. Free. What more could you ask for?

PanoLab: Who knew multitouch is the perfect interface for stitching photos together into panoramas? It is. Plus if the photo you just took doesn’t work, toss it out and take another one immediately. A paid version adds even more features.

Prowl: Easily the most useful push app Apple’s let through the gates, Prowl lets you forward any Growl notifications from your Mac or PC-everything from Mail to IM to Torrent downloads to Tweets-directly to your phone.

QuickOffice: Gaping void in default iPhone functionality #123: Real document editing. Solution #123: QuickOffice

Remote: One of the first apps we saw, and still among the best in terms of usefulness. If you use iTunes frequently at home and especially if you listen away from your desk via a stereo hookup or Airport Express, you need the Remote.

RjDj: A totally unique music application that processes sound from your environment and replays it according to a set program, creating a trippy, always-evolving soundscape.

Run Pee: An app to tell you when the boring parts of movies are so you can go pee-or if you’re feeling daring, more-without missing much. It’s a brilliant concept, with unexpectedly good execution.

Shazam: This just doesn’t get old: hold your phone to the air to grab the song playing at the supermarket (or being hummed by your friend), and have it identified in a few seconds. We live in a privileged age.

Simplify Media: Stream your home machine’s iTunes library and those of up to 30 friends to your phone. This app lives up to its name. Forget worries of filling up 8GB, or even 16.

Skype: On 3G, it’s perfect for Skype messaging and long distance texts; on Wi-Fi, it near-magically turns your iPhone into a VoIP handset.

Star Defense: Tower Defense games are one of the few genres that the iPhone excels at, and Star Defense, with an entirely fresh 3D take on the concept, multitouch, varied levels and multiplayer, is about as good as they get.

Slacker Radio: Yet another free, customizable radio app, but one that has a spectacularly huge music library, and that gives you fine control over the songs you hear.

The Sims 3: An amazingly faithful adaptation of the 3D life simulator that you routinely ridicule others for playing, but secretly enjoy yourself, every night, with a bottle of extremely cheap wine.

TomTom: If you’re used to TomTom’s standalone GPS units, their turn-by-turn navigation app will be a pleasant, familiar surprise. In some ways, it might even be better.

Tweetie: If you spend enough of your day on Twitter to consider paying for an app, Tweetie’s multiple account support, uncluttered interface and impressively broad feature set is about as close to a desktop Tweeting experience as you’ll get on the iPhone.

TwitterFon: And if you’re not willing to pay for a Twitter app-understandable!-TwitterFon isn’t too shabby. It’s super-fast and stupid-simple, so it’ll do well by all but the most obnoxiously obsessed Twitterers.

VLC Remote: One of the first apps we loved was the iTunes Remote-now, the Swiss army knife of media players VLC has one of its very own.

VNC Lite: View and fully control my computer from anywhere, as long as I am on the same network. So I can basically be at my computer without actually being at my computer.

WeatherBug: On the desktop, it’s excessive. But on the iPhone, WeatherBug gives you much more-and much more useful-info than Apple’s default app. And in the paid version, hyperlocal, data-driven weather nerdery abounds.

Wikipanion: Why even carry an iPhone if you can’t use it to settle petty arguments about things that don’t matter?

Yelp: Yelp is built on the premise that people really, really love to review things, and that this bizarre impulse should be harnessed for good. With a massive database of food/drink/everything else reviews, easy navigation, inbuilt maps, and augmented reality, it’s tops.

Jailbreak Apps

Before you dive into these, here’s a quick guide for jailbreaking your phone.

Jailbreak: AdBlock: Blacklist obnoxious ads, just like you do on your PC.

Jailbreak: Cycorder: Not everyone can upgrade to an iPhone 3GS. Everyone can, however, record video.

Jailbreak: GV Mobile: Google’s official Google Voice app may never see the light of day, so GV Mobile is the only way to get your all-in-one telephony fix on the iPhone.

Jailbreak: WinterBoard: If you’ve ever seen some guy on the internet proudly demonstrating his garishly skinned or themed iPhone, this is almost definitely what he was using. Note: It can be used for aesthetic good as well as evil.

Jailbreak: Veency: Like every other iPhone VNC app, except totally in reverse: It’s a server.

[Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps]

I’m happy to report that the leading car navigation apps for the iPhone work surprisingly well. Not only that, but for the next week, there’s a clear choice for best app.

Until August 31st, Navigon MobileNavigator will cost $70. In my testing, it competed neck and neck with the $100 TomTom, so for the next eight days, it’s the best value among the top contenders. But when they’re both selling for $100, that TomTom is going to look a lot more tempting. The third app I tested is TeleNav’s AT&T Navigator. It’s certainly worthy, and has some connected capability that the other two apps here don’t, but in the end, the economics are wrong: At $10 per month, it could become frightfully expensive, with no significant added value.

These three navigators are the most reputable in the app store (hence their heightened cost). They’re all based on software I’ve used in the past too, either in other phones or in portable navigators. Because of the familiarity, I knew I could spot anything amiss in the iPhone edition, but I was surprised to discover that, if anything, these iPhone apps are better designed than anything their companies made before—and run great on my iPhone 3GS. It’s a relief to know that GPS navigation with an iPhone is, finally, a really real reality.

Navigon and TomTom are completely contained apps that hog upwards of 1.2 GB a piece; TeleNav is a small app that relies on the phone’s net connection. Nevertheless, they all work more or less the same. They give turn-by-turn directions on an animated map, just like portable navigators. While they’re doing it, you can play music from the iPhone’s iPod, and if a call comes in, you see it pop up on the screen. GPS performance on the 3GS was better than I had hoped for—hiccupy at times but never completely gone, even when messing around indoors.

Every app also has direct access to Contacts—this isn’t just good for people for whom you’ve added addresses, it’s brilliant for quickly navigating to stuff you’ve found in Google Maps—you just whatever it is to Contacts with a single tap, open your navi app and it’s there.

No matter which app you’re using, the GPS runs constantly and the screen generally stays on, which means utter battery drainage: You will need to keep your iPhone plugged into the car’s lighter jack. You will also need a dashboard mount, which range from $10 to $30.

Here’s how the apps did against each other, followed by some deeper impressions:

AT&T Navigator by TeleNav
Product page; iTunes link

Unlike the other two, TeleNav is very much a connected app. It downloads a fresh map of your surroundings wherever you are, and it checks for traffic and POIs in much the same way. TeleNav’s servers are always being updated, so you’re never out of date. The trouble is that a) this costs $10 per month forever and ever, b) with the exception of searching for gas by price and the occasional useful traffic alert, the connectedness is hard to appreciate, and c) downloading maps and routes means that if you have poor phone reception, you might not have navigation.

TeleNav distributes its app “free” in the app store, but to get turn-by-turn navigation (the only reason you’d want the app), you have to sign up and commit to paying $10 a month on your AT&T bill. It’s a deal for the first 10 months or so, especially since you can cancel it at any time, so maybe you’ll only need it on trips. But if you intend to keep it and use it for more than that, you’ll kick yourself for not having paid up front for Navigon or TomTom—when you add up all those Hamiltons, the $100 apps are ultimately cheaper.

I had some trouble with the software, too. Version 1.1 of the “free” client app crashed a lot, and it didn’t automatically update to the more stable version 1.2i. I had to remove the app from my iPhone, and then add it again. The good news is, it worked and I haven’t experienced a crash since.

Though I was pretty pleased with TeleNav’s overall usability, but the connectedness did get annoying sometimes. The best example is the map section: TeleNav has very pretty maps, but they take a 21st century eternity to download (we’re talking 5-10 seconds here), and the whole screen has to reload when you pan or zoom. Also, when you’re in the map, you can’t tap on a destination and route there, a fact that seemed to render the maps useless.

The B- I give the program is a combination of the shortcomings, albeit minor, and the problematic economics for anyone intending to use this regularly for a year or more.

Navigon MobileNavigator
Product page; iTunes link

Navigon portable navigators had just started to get good when the company closed shop in the US. I can’t say I miss them, really, but what’s nice is that most or all of the great features of the portable product have arrived intact in the iPhone app. It really is startling to see how well both TomTom and Navigon have overlaid their core features to the iPhone.

Navigon comes with 1.29 GB of maps and POI data, good because, like TomTom, it’s not “connected.” There’s no live traffic, no online search, nothing like that. I can’t say I miss it. The app runs almost exactly like the last Navigon portables, with such nice touches as lane guidance (those screens that pop up saying which lanes you should—and definitely should not—be in). It lays out well in both landscape and portrait modes, and the driving interface, with its customization options, looks the best.

Navigon has always had some trouble with its POI interface—in this case, you can can easily search for something in the wrong place. If you don’t know the specific city a POI is in, just putting in the nearest big city is not enough. I recommend sitting down with it and familiarizing yourself with the POI search flow, because once you get the hang of it, you will be better at knowing where to look for stuff.

The biggest glaring omission of this app was the route view, what I used to call MapQuest view back when people remembered what MapQuest was: You get a full rundown of your turns, so you can see where the hell this thing is trying to take you. For the price, it’s still reasonable, and Navigon has already updated its software—for free—a few times since launch, so who’s to say that a good route summary isn’t up next?

I gave it an A- until August 31, when the price goes from $70 to $100. After that, it’s probably a B+ or B. On the level it can’t really beat the TomTom, but when it’s $30 cheaper, it most certainly does.

TomTom US & Canada for iPhone
Product page; iTunes link

I know some of you probably recall my negative sentiments about a recent TomTom portable navigator, and indeed, the whole family of TomTom navigators. I am happy to report that, by leaving hardware design in the hands of Apple, and by making at least a bit of effort to streamline the TomTom interface when bringing it to the iPhone, most of my complaints are rendered moot. There’s still the matter of taking four taps to cancel a route (it takes just two on the other two apps). There’s also the matter of POIs lacking coherent capitalization and punctuation, rendering them barely recognizable in English, and other hints of one-platform-for-all international scaling. But in general, it’s a damn worthwhile, even powerful app.

The next step is to see TomTom’s dock is any good. TomTom says it improves GPS performance, gives some voice command control and raises the volume on turn-by-turn instructions. I am currently using a generic iPhone dock, the one that sells for $30 on Amazon, and I plugged the iPhone into the car stereo for both music and instructions. Also, I didn’t really have any trouble with GPS performance (surprisingly), so whatever this thing costs, its value is as yet undetermined.

In the portable navigator world, Garmin is still king, but in this world, there is no Garmin, so TomTom will probably ascend to the throne. In the current lineup, TomTom’s offering is a B+, but that grade could go down as well as up. I just hope they take their roles as developers seriously and work on what still needs improvement, or else so help me I will nail another series of complaints to their door.

Tips for Using All GPS Apps
• Get a dash mount. Like I said, you can pay roughly $10 to $30 on Amazon, but the $30 version (middle in the pic above) has the nicer joint design. If you don’t mount it, you’re going to kill yourself. Note: The Amazon links are examples, not recommended products. Stay tuned for our review of TomTom’s mount, shown in the photo above at right.

• Never drive without a car charger. These things suck juice like nobody’s business. Operate without a charger, and your phone will become a brick within the hour.

• All these apps let you access iPhone Contacts. This means you should paste in addresses for your most visited friends and colleagues. It also means that if the app’s POI search sucks, you can go to Google Maps, do a search there (or with an app like Where To?) and then add that Google Map entry to Contacts. Instantly it appears in your navigation app too.

• You can listen to music while you’re navigating, if you can handle the navi voice coming on to tell you when to turn. Double-tap the home button to get a floating box of rudimentary iPod functions: track ID, volume, play/pause, forward and back. If you pause your music though, you can’t double-tap the home button to start it again. You’ll have to exit your navigation app, go into the iPod interface, and start it up.

Update: More Notes
Since I’ve probably driven with more various GPS devices in my car than almost anyone, and have been doing it since these silly things were a lot harder to use and cost $1500 a piece, I wanted to address some general questions from comments:

• There are two major map-makers in the world, Navteq (now owned by Nokia) and Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom). Though traditionally Navteq’s US mapset was superior, they are both now almost imperceptibly identical, thanks to Tele Atlas’ acquisition of a US company called GDT a few years back. They are both very reputable sources of road data now, and it would take you a long time to identify any differences, let alone one’s clear superiority over the other. In other words, at this point, since it’s one or the other, source of road data doesn’t really matter.

• Map updates, however, do matter—but they matter at intervals of at least two years. The map makers named above are constantly updating, but they don’t publish updates (even to monthly subscription services) instantly. It takes months—sometimes weeks if you’re lucky—for map data to go live, and most tweaks are new housing developments and other things you might not notice. Also, map makers may spend a lot of time and effort on an area where you don’t live, and never get around to fixing your particular neighborhood problem. (There’s an intersection in Poughkeepsie, NY that has been wrong in Navteq’s database for five years, because hey, it’s Poughkeepsie!) So it doesn’t make sense to argue that you should spend over 2X the money for a subscription app that isn’t as good as the fixed ones—even if you have to buy expensive map modules or new versions of them in a couple of years. On the flipside, many people driving with three- or four-year-old Garmins are pretty happy.

• Someone mentioned that certain devices make a “ding” sound at the turn. That was always a signature of Magellan (who like Garmin doesn’t make an iPhone app at the moment). Every app tells you when you are approaching a turn. They do so at different intervals. While it seems from a comparative standpoint that the intervals themselves matter, they do not after the initial breaking-in period. You just acclimate to the instructions you’re getting from your own device, and make safe driving maneuvers based on those instructions.

• The state of California does mysteriously ban suction-cup windshield mounts. I have still driven in California with such a device, and would encourage people visiting California to not worry about it. Those of you who live in California should probably check out those sandbag mounts, but please, if anyone knows anyone who’s gotten a ticket for this “offense,” email me about it. I really want to hear this story.

• ALK, makers of the CoPilot software, have been around for many years and have not ever been among the strongest contenders. However, due to their price and the fact that they’re still around, I have agreed to check out CoPilot, and will be posting on that app when I’m ready. But don’t let that stop you from buying Navigon while it’s still on sale.

PR speak doesn’t usually come this blunt, but the situation warrants it. AT&T’s full response to the FCC’s investigation into the Google Voice app rejection can be summed up like this: This one’s on Apple. As for Apple’s? It’s complicated.

An AT&T senior VP:

We appreciate the opportunity to clear up misconceptions related to an application Google submitted to Apple for inclusion in the Apple App Store. We fully support the FCC’s goal of getting the facts and data necessary to inform its policymaking.

To that end, let me state unequivocally, AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store. AT&T was not asked about the matter by Apple at any time, nor did we offer any view one way or the other.

We had nothing to do with this! Really! But we’re just saying, even if we did—we didn’t!-it wouldn’t matter, since you’ve got web apps! Seriously.

The most interesting in AT&T’s statement is regarding VoIP. It seems like Apple could actually allow Skype over 3G, if it wanted to (though AT&T would really prefer all VoIP apps run over Wi-Fi), and they agreed when the iPhone contract was first forged that Apple wouldn’t make its own VoIP app, meaning a video iChat probably ain’t in the cards for a long time:

“AT&T and Apple agreed that Apple would not take affirmative steps to enable an iPhone to use AT&T’s wireless service (including 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi) to make VoIP calls without first obtaining AT&T’s consent. AT&T and Apple also agreed, however, that if a third party enables an iPhone to make VoIP calls using AT&T’s wireless service, Apple would have no obligation to take action against that third party.”

Apple’s statement is even better, saying they haven’t even rejected Google Voice:

Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it. The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone. [emphasis ours]

Here’s where Apple states it alone shot down Google Voice:

Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application. No contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T have been a factor in Apple’s decision-making process in this matter.

Of course we all know their core reason—”it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience”—is a crock, since there are ton of other dialers and messaging apps out there, as we’ve pointed out. Apple pretending that it’s also because they care about your safety is cute, too:

“In addition, the iPhone user’s entire Contacts database is transferred to Google’s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways.”

Riiiight.

Amidst the swirl of horsecrap, Apple does provides key insights into the App Store review process: There are merely 40 full-time reviewers for those thousands of apps, and at least two of them must review each app. Apps that might have a problem are escalated to an executive review board that meets “weekly.” Even with these constraints, Apple says 95 percent of apps make it through the review process within 2 weeks. 20 percent of them are rejected. And incredibly they’ve reviewed over 200,000 apps and updates.

Anyway, there’s a lot to sift through here, though amazingly, none of it really explains what happened to Google Voice. See for yourself: AT&T’s full release release here; Apple’s here. Warning: They’re loooooong.