iPhone 2.0 only: Free application Fring puts popular chat applications on your iPhone, including Skype—and the ability to make Skype voice over IP calls when your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network. Fring puts all your chat buddies from AIM, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ, Twitter, and Skype on your iPhone, and lets you know who's online when. Chat your buddies whether you're connected via data or Wi-Fi, and make Skype calls (or Skype Out calls) when you're on a local network. Fring is a free download for iPhones running the 2.0 software.

Jailbroken iPhones/iPod touch only: iPhone-Backgrounder, a free app utility available through the (jailbreak-only) Cydia store, makes running apps in the background seriously simple. After installing the utility, you simply hold down the Home button to "minimise" an application. Call it back up again using its app icon, and then hold the home button again to kill it off for real. Backgrounding worked with at least four apps I tested, and kept the audio playing from Last.fm while checking email or web browsing. There are bound to be a few bugs and inconsistencies, but it's a great hack for keeping music, instant messaging, and other streaming programs close at hand. iPhone-Backgrounder is free and requires a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch (check our guides for Macs and Windows for help with that).

iPhone/iPod touch users whose offices rely on Lotus Notes for email, calendar, and contacts can now access their information through a customised Safari Mobile interface created by IBM. CNET reports that IBM and Apple are working on a full-fledged Lotus Notes Traveler app or interface for true push access, but in the meantime, iNotes looks like a pretty graceful way to fit your Apple phone into an IBM network. Your network administrator needs to have installed Lotus Domino Web Access 8.0.2 to grant you iNotes access; Notes users who've tried out this webapp, let us know what you think in the comments.

A number of blogs and web zines lately have examined Apple's App Store and its development policies and voiced their complaints. Chief among them are the app approvers' inconsistent approval standards—ranking the "Pull My Finger" app as not useful, for example, but allowing virtual bubble-wrap poppers—and taking a hard stance against any app that tries to upgrade or replace the built-in tools on an iPhone or iPod touch, like native podcast downloading or feature-added email clients. App Store developers knew Apple's policies from the start, of course, but many are calling for the Cupertino cool-maker to drop the secrecy and allow in competing apps. We're wondering what our iPhone/iPod touch app fans think—are you glad Apple's trying to keep an eye on the store, so to speak, or do you feel like you're missing out on potentially killer apps? Tell us your take on the store and its ground rules in the comments.

iPhone/iPod touch only: Free iPhone application QuickGold is a keyboard-based app launcher aiming to fill the shoes of "Quicksilver for the iPhone" (hence the name). You invoke QuickGold by pressing the home button when you're already at the homescreen. Once it activates, start typing and watch as its dynamic results quickly match what you're looking for. QuickGold can match any app on your home screen (including web clips), searches contacts and phone numbers, launches web pages in your Safari history, and even includes built-in keyword search (e.g., 'g lifehacker' will search Google for Lifehacker). Available only for jailbroken iPhones through Cydia, QuickGold demonstrates one of the biggest frustrations for App Store development—namely that an app like this will never enter the app store under Apple's current restrictions. For example, I'm sure this is exactly the kind of functionality Google's mobile app would have liked to include, but the SDK doesn't allow apps this sort of access to other apps on your phone. I guess that's why god invented the PwnageTool and QuickPwn.

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iPhone only: Considering that voice dialing has been a standard feature of even the cheapest phones for several years, the lack of any sort of hands-free voice dialing on the iPhone is frustrating. Cactus Voice Dialer is a free voice-dialing application based on an open-source speech recognition engine called PocketSphinx. Since it's speech recognition, there's no set up required. Just call a number by saying the contact's name and—if necessary—which number to call (e.g., "Adam Pash's mobile"). Cactus isn't the only voice dialing app available in the App Store, but it is currently the only free voice dialer as far as we can tell (VoiceDial, for example, is a whopping $US15). For as young as it is (and the lack of price tag), I'd say Cactus has a lot of promise. If only Apple would allow apps to tie to special buttons, like double-click home.

iPhone only: iPhone application iNap uses your location-aware iPhone to set off an alarm to alert you when you're nearing your destination. Say, for example, you're riding the train to work but want to catch some shuteye on the way. Just fire up iNap, set your stop as the destination, and let iNap worry about the rest. You can tweak the alert radius to make sure you're up in plenty of time, from 0.1 to 100 miles. iNap works with any iPhone, but the results will be most accurate with an iPhone 3G. Also, you'd definitely want to make sure you've got a signal near your destination; the app obviously won't work if it can't determine where you are. iNap costs $US1 from the iTunes App Store.

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Instapaper Free, the iPhone app cousin of previously mentioned bookmarking tool Instapaper, lets you bookmark up to 10 web pages you want to read while you're offline. That may not sound like an amazing feat, unless you've tried to keep a page open in mobile Safari and have it not try to refresh and fail when you're not connected. The app uses a JavaScript bookmarklet—which, at this point, you have to manually tweak a bit—and the Instapaper web service to provide you with your reading. The one drawback (or possible benefit) is that pages are knocked down to a text-only, mobile-friendly view. Other than that, it's a good way to ensure you can do some web reading on a plane or wherever you lack service. Instapaper Free is a free download for iPhones and iPod touch models running the 2.0 upgrade; the "Pro" version uncaps the 10-article limit.

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Free application O-Marks automatically syncs bookmarks to your iPhone from Firefox-syncing tool Foxmarks or from your Delicious account. The most intriguing feature for Firefox users is the Foxmarks integration, since once you've set up O-Marks with Foxmarks, your Firefox bookmarks now automatically sync to your iPhone. That means you don't need to use Safari just to sync bookmarks to your iPhone anymore. It just takes a little know-how to get it set up.

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Free streaming radio app FlyCast can grab streams from more than 1,000 digital radio stations, but what's unique about it is how it does so. FlyCast can be set to conserve battery life by pre-buffering minutes of music, and only occasionally using your Wi-Fi or cellular connection to grab more. More importantly for multi-taskers, by disabling the "Quick Play" option in FlyCast's settings, the app can be set to open audio streams inside your device's mobile Safari browser, which can be minimised to let you do other things while the audio plays on. For a free application, FlyCast sure solves a major annoyance of owning a web-connected music player. FlyCast is a free download, requires an iPhone or iPod touch running at least the 2.0 software.

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