These days the Appstore on iPhone has become so massive that its pretty tough to find the best apps for a certain task. Whether its productivity, games or entertainment, you cannot simply go and download the most popular app of the week. While the popularity of an app might be indicative of how good it is, in many cases the top selling app in a week might be merely doing so well because it is on sale, or its just a “fad”.

Luckily there is now a source to quickly find the very best apps out there. No searching through Top 25 lists, just the very best.

Here is how it works:

Applications are nominated throughout each month by our knowledgeable (and good-looking!) committee members. Once each month, our committee will then vote on the nominated applications and induct, at most, 12 applications into the App Hall of Fame. Those inducted applications will be displayed on the site for all time as a reference to app lovers new and old.

Their first twelve apps have just been announced:

I have to agree with their choice for the first month, these are all great apps – I personally use Evernote, Twitter and Shazam. But I dont care about the games. While I do play Angry Birds and Flight Control, games typically fall in the “flavour of the week” category for me. Here is hoping they focus a bit more on actual useful apps as well.

While I am on about this – here is my own personal App Hall of Fame (excluding the ones mentioned already):

• Facebook (has been neglected recently, but still a great app, in fact I never use the Facebook website)
• News24 (I know, I know, but this is the best SA based news source on the iPhone)
• CNN (Interface works well, and video clips are a bonus. You need a decent Wifi conenction though)
• Beejive (The best IM client on the iPhone. Little pricey though)

At first App Hall of Fame will only focus on iPhone and iPod Touch apps, but they will approach iPad and Android apps in the future as well.

The SA based wordpress design pros over at Obox have gone and made it easy for any wordpress site owner to go “mobile”. And I dont mean those standard iPhone plugins which just redact the posts and give them neat iPhone buttons. No, this is a plug and play solution that instantly makes sites look professional, as if they were made to run on a mobile phone. And its not iPhone only – its optimized for webkit browsers, so your Android and Nokia site visitors will be treated to the same effects. Current features that can be enabled in Obox Mobile include:

• Touch operated feature post slider
• Automatic orientation adjustment
• Menu management
• Search bar
• Commenting (including threaded comments)
• Logo uploader
• Background uploader
• Advert management for mobile
• Theme switcher
• Automatic upgrades

I tried out the site demo’s and I was pleasantly surprised – sliders loaded quickly and the effects were pretty great considering they were rendered inside a browser. I was especially impressed by the orientation changes – images rerender automatically to fit different widths, and resolutions. So whether you use iPhone (Retina display or not), or one of the many different Android resolutions out there, the orientation changes works without problems.   I patiently wait for the first sites to start using this, and this would probably be soon enough, seeing as it is merely a plug and play add on for wordpress.

As a bonus if you go ahead and purchase Obox Mobile over the next month you can be entered into a draw to win a brand new iPhone 4. What better way to demo your brand new mobile enabled site? It could not be any easier to enter: Once you’ve purchased your copy of the framework, you’ll automatically be taken to a “tweet this” screen. Push the button and BANG, you’re in with a chance.

Have a go and demo Obox Mobile, type this URL into your phone and watch the magic happen: demo.obox-design.com/oboxmobile

Zenoss recently released its annual Open Source Management Survey, and the results are quite surprising. It turns out that over time OSS is slowly being adopted in the enterprise. While the line “98% of Enterprises use Open Source” sounds impressive, you have to take into account that it doesnt mention where these OSS deployments are used. My bet is that most of these deployments are on a few select servers – desktop users in the enterprise tend to still stick to Windows.

One shift is perhaps the use OSS mobile devices – Android to be specific – and enterprises are scrambling to be ready for the onslought of these gadgets, be it mobile phones or future slates.

Thanks to Distimo, we can look at what is the most popular apps in the various appstores of the different mobile platforms – the report covers the Apple App Store for iPad and iPhone (with specific focus on in-app purchases), as well as BlackBerry App World (Worldwide), Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile for June 2010 in the United States.

Here are the top selling apps by platform:

True to form, the top selling apps on Android remain tools and utilities, which pretty much confirms who the Android phone’s current target market is:

On the iPhone, games dominate the top selling apps. Its clearly the preferred platform for game developers currently.

On the iPad, things look a little more productive. Like in the last report, Apple’s Pages word processor app is the top seller. It seems people are willing to actually pay for apps to make work easier on the iPad.

And then on the Blackberry front, here are the top sellers. The best sellers are themes for the OS:

Some other interesting tidbits out of the report:

The percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the Apple App Store for iPad (10%) than in the
Apple App Store for iPhone (2%). The Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of
applications with in-app purchases available.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
MobiTV (MobiTV), ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup (ESPN) and Tap Fish (BayView Labs).

The most successful paid applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone are
Guitar Hero (Activision Publishing, Inc.), TomTom U.S.A. (TomTom International BV) and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II
(Activision Publishing, Inc.).

Mirroring the Distimo report covering May 2010, Pages and iBooks, published by Apple Inc, are again the number one paid and free
applications on the Apple App Store for iPad, respectively.

Three out of the ten most popular applications in the Apple App Store for iPhone were published by Electronic Arts.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad entered the top 10 highest ranked paid applications chart in the 6th position. It was the
top grossing application in the Apple App Store for iPad after Pages by Apple Inc.

Nine out of the ten most popular paid applications on the Apple App Store for iPhone are Games, however only two out of the ten
most popular free applications are Games. In the Nokia Ovi Store, seven out of ten of the most popular paid applications are
Games, while only three out of ten of the most popular free applications are Games.

If you want to see the report for yourself, go look at it here.

The Distimo report is a monthly report that shows current trends in the mobile application development marketplace. It takes into account all the handset manufacturers’ different stores through which they distribute applications on their devices. Here are some of the interesting developments:

- Mobile apps are cheap, or free. More than half of apps are below $2. So developers who charge high prices, remember, the large group of users out there should make you worry less about profit per sale.

- The iPad’s current application seems to cost a bit more than the iPhone. This can be attributed to increased development costs, but I have to commend developers who write universal apps. Universal apps you purchase once, and they run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Dont make me pay twice for two devices.

- The Android market is made up of more than 57% free apps. Why? Is it because Android users are less likely to buy apps than on other platforms? Or is it because the free apps are good enough?

- Games are still by far the most popular apps. Out of the top 10 paid for apps on the iPhone, 8 was games.

- Amazon’s Kindle app seems to be under fire. Apple’s iBooks app is the number one app on the Appstore. But its still great that Amazon is making their platform available to other platforms as well. After using the iPad, I have to say my Kindle has become neglected. And with good reason.

What is interesting is seeing how the appstore ecosystem is changing. iPhone still seems to be the one that has the monetary edge, but that might change soon enough. With the number of Android handsets being released, there is plenty of oppurtunities for developers. The number of free apps on Android might sound great, but this does not take into account the quality of these apps. Whereas the iPhone Appstore is verified by Apple on a app for app basis, Google’s marketplace has no such process.

The disadvatange to this is of course that low-quality or poorly designed apps get in there as well. While people criticize Apple’s quality control, there are just as many postive aspects as well.I really reckon Google can do with a similiar process – not to replace the current marketplace, but a “Google Verified” section for apps that Google does approve of. That way you have the best of both worlds.

That way you cater for both developers who want to quickly and easily want to get into the marketplace, but end users who want high quality apps can find them as well. Tools like AppBrain does address this somewhat, but what I am talking about is a official source of apps. Maybe Google should have a chat with AppBrain?

You can download the full Distimo report here.

Mobile ad network AdMob has just released its latest stats tracking the rise of Android, and it’s clear that Google’s mobile platform is quickly gaining steam. AdMob writes that between October and December, the number of ad requests worldwide from Android devices increased a whopping 97% to over 1 billion ad requests. In other words, the number of Android devices doubled in just two months.

AdMod records the number of ad requests its system generates, meaning this leap has come about through more people downloading and using ad-supported apps via the Android market.

Here are the higlights of AdMob’s latest metrics:

• 97% increase in worldwide requests from Android devices, totalling to 1 billion ad request between October-December
• 98% of the ad requests came from HTC devices in October, 56% in December from HTC devices and 30% from Motorola DROID.
• Among the Android devices that generated more than 3% of ad requests are Motorola DROID, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic and HTC Hero.
• Motorola DROID received 30% ad requests in December making it the number one Adroid handset in terms of ad requests.

Interestingly, these data have to come in just in time for Google’s announcement of the Nexus Phone. And even more interesting is the fact that AdMob is already owned by Google.

Will the Nexus One phone add spike to Android’s current achievement in terms of ad request?

Check out this Youtube video featuring the Motorola Droid Android 2.0 head to head against the iPhone 3GS.

If you thought that the app store helps rake in millions for a developer, it is probably your misconception and not all (actually not sure if any) developers sitting out there are driving Ferraris because their application was a popular arrival at the app store.

As per a recent AdMob survey (with 1,117 relevant respondents) users purchasing applications at the App Store spent on average $9 per five downloads.

Apparently there’s $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, which makes for some $2.4 billion a year. But people love freebies and believe it or not the main thing that convinces them to spend money is actually playing with the free one at first.

The iPhone and the Android users download ten new applications a month and the iPod touch users get 18 new apps downloaded a month on average. Combining the stats for both iPhone and Android, almost half the number of people downloads the freebies. The fact of the matter is that ‘cheap is here to stay’ and a free version is how you can entice a user to download your application.

So how many of you have made money with apps … and can you tell us how much?

[via ArsTechnica]