First of all, got to say how truly great the App Store is. Some fantastic apps available – free and otherwise. The remote app from Apple is excellent, NetNewsWire is nice, and the Facebook app is pretty good too.

It’s a shame some developers seem to have sold out and set completely silly prices for apps that really should be free, and there are a lot of clones on there (do I need 10 sudoku apps and 17 tip calculators?)

It’s also great to see our fun little apps doing well. Both NearPics & PhoneSaber are easily in the top 50 free apps, and PhoneSaber is (at time of writing) the 5th most popular free app (beating NetNewsWire, MySpace, Twitterific & The Mobile News Network)! Also, it’s great to see almost everyone taking PhoneSaber in the spirit it was intended – a fun free app. Pointless… but fun.

Getting some attention on the net too, Gizmodo said “Lightsaber application similar to the one on Installer.app. Five choices of iPhone colors and slightly better accelerometer detection for better lightsaber sounds. Free.”  Laptop Mag called PhoneSaber “The best, most useless iPhone app” and posted a moderately amusing video of them playing with it!

Enjoy the App Store everyone!

PhoneSaber
PhoneSaber is the app Star Wars fans have been waiting for… As you swing your phone, a range of lightsaber sound effects will be emitted from your phone’s speaker (or connected audio output). Not only that, but you can also withdraw and put away your saber, and change it’s colour! Screenshots and more info on the app’s official page. PhoneSaber will definitely be available on the App Store at launch, so don’t forget to check it out next Friday.

NearPics
NearPics is a simple, fun app for travellers (and everyone else)! As soon as you load up NearPics, it gets your location using the iPhones unique location based services, and uses that to instantly find photographs taken near to your exact location. NearPics is great fun when you’re on holiday somewhere new, or even just when you’re in your home town, to see photos of places you might never have known about! And when you’ve found an interesting photo you can even find out where it was taken using the iPhones maps application. Screenshots and more info on the app’s official page. NearPics will hopefully be available at the launch of the App Store next week.

Units
Units is a really useful app that lets you easily convert from various units into lots of others. It can convert Area, Currency, Energy, Temperature, Time, Length, Weight, Speed, Pressure, Power, and Volume. Last, but not least, it has a small built in ruler for quick measurements on the go. Screenshots and more info on the app’s official page. Units will hopefully be available at the launch of the App Store next week, but if not, should be available shortly after.

Hope you’ve enjoyed that run down of our apps, and we hope you’ll check them out next Friday!