My iPhone has been a life-saver for me on the road. Whether it’s managing my tasks or dealing with car trouble, iPhone always comes handy. iPhone is particularly useful on the road. Without it, you may have to carry extra toys with you to get things done. But iPhone saves you the trouble and can help you get a lot of things done (from managing your flights to waking you up for your meetings).

If you are a serial traveler and want to use your iPhone to get more things done on the go, here are 10 travel apps for iPhone that are worth a look:

1. TripDeck: a cool travel app that lets you manage all your itineraries on your iPhone. Helps you keep track of your flight schedules and deal with delays and cancellations.

2. Zagat to Go: the best guide to restaurants and local stores on iPhone. Has plenty of options and can find you what you need fast.

3. Kayak: Kayak is a cool service that lets you change your flight at the airport or find a hotel. Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone may be an impressive device all by itself, but it’s even more impressive to see all the companies that are jumping on board and offering their innovative app using the iPhone platform. Even news organizations are realizing the potential for this market, which is why they are jumping in one by one. CNN is the latest news organization that has jumped into the iPhone app business. It has just released CNN Mobile that is designed to keep iPhone holders informed with the latest CNN news on the go. CNN Mobile comes with videos, push notification, local news, and everything else you need to stay informed. The people at CNN seem to be optimistic about the fortunes of this app:

This is a major event for CNN…The impact that mobile can have is increasing. This app is really going to be an important indicator of where CNN is going moving forward.

CNN Mobile is very easy to use and provides with an easy way to skim through the news and even upload your own video to iReport. You can also customize what you want to see and filter out the junk.

The Video tab provides you access to the latest live streams from CNN. So whether you are in an airport or just waiting for a cab, you can listen to the latest CNN news on the go. You can also save stories and videos and view them at a later time. But perhaps the most powerful feature in this app is CNN iReport. If you happen to be close to where an important incident occurs, you can capture your video and upload it to CNN, hoping that they will actually show it during their daily programming. Read the rest of this entry »

The iPhone platform has let a lot of developers achieve stardom in the past few months. If you have talent for coding and the determination to study the game and think outside the box, there is no limit to how many apps you can sell on the iPhone. As long as you have a decent app that is well-designed and entertains, you can expect to be successful in this field. It seems many iPhone developers are finding Hollywood a source of inspiration. That’s nothing new. Almost every movie comes with its own game. Now, most of them come with their own iPhone app as well.

Fast and Furious and Star Trek are two new applications that show this trend. Are these apps going to dominate the iTunes’ bestsellers chart? Nobody knows. But it just goes on to show that you can always leverage the latest news and developments in Hollywood and even around the world as to develop a killer iPhone app. It’s not too hard to guess that someone is already working on an action game where the Navy SEALs battle the Somalian pirates, and I’ve got a hunch that game can go viral if it’s designed well.  This is not the only tactic to go viral on iTunes, but it’s worth trying if you are out of ideas. The more coverage your inspiration gets on TV, the bigger opportunity you have to make it in this field.

Who would have thought a couple of years ago that Apple would people to download its iPhone apps a billion times. That is just a staggering number. It’s true that the actually number of iPhone users is a small fraction of this number, but this number goes on to show the brilliance of Apple’s iPhone strategy. Apple competitors should be watching this petrified. Most of these folks have focused on the hardware side of things, while Apple has been building up its software platform. That’s why the iPhone is so hard to kill.

Apple will pass 1 billion downloads in the near future. But where does it go from here? We know iPhone 3.0 comes with more gaming features, and the application side of things will be improved as well. My hunch is that Apple’s international efforts will help it pass the 2B download mark faster than it took Apple to get to 1B downloads. The next natural step for Apple is going fully international and expand in more markets. From what we have heard about iPhone 3.0, that’s exactly what Apple is doing.

Puzzle games are extremely popular on the iPhone platform. Many of them have gone to top the best sellers chart on iTunes. And there is a simple for that. Puzzles are stimulating, and they do kill time. So if you are bored, you can get over it fast with a nice puzzle. ParkingLot is another puzzle for the iPhone platform that involves you getting your car out from a jammed parking spot. Sounds familiar? We have all been there before, and it’s a challenge even in the real world. But of course, this game goes beyond anything you see in the real world. You have 12 packs of more than 450 puzzles to solve, and you have the option to make things very difficult for yourself in this game.

The graphics are great, and the puzzles get truly interesting as you solve a few couple. I don’t know about you, but I always love a challenge when it comes to parking cars, and while I don’t have time to spend all day parking my car in real life, I can easily tackle all kinds of situations on ParkingLot. Overall, if you are looking for a challenging iPhone puzzle that is not only fun but simple to understand, you won’t go wrong with ParkingLot.