This Week In iPhone/iPod Touch Apps!

It’s hard to beat Netflix when it comes to movie rentals. The company provides a easy inexpensive way to kick back with the family and watch whatever you want by stripping away the need to return it the next day. For $4.99 a month and a postage stamp, you just can’t beat it. Maybe that’s why even Apple is willing to allow Netflix apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch. iRentMovie is the newest, and it’s a pretty good one with a ton of options that allow users a myriad of ways to keep track, search and rent movies from the (i) device.

iRentMovie is an application that allows you to manage your Netflix account on the go. You can pretty much do anything you can in official Netflix website. Here is some good examples of usage for our application: A friend of you recommends a movie to you in a lunch conversation. Fire up our application and use the search feature to find the movie and immediately add to your disc queue or instant queue.

You are tired of using your desktop to select instant movies to be watched in your XBOX 360. No big deal. Find the movies you want to watch directly from your iPhone at the convenience of your couch. Add the movie to the instant queue from our application and movie will show up in your XBOX 360. This feature is not limited to just XBOX 360. All Netflix approved devices should work. You are having a really hard time finding instant titles. No problem, we support searching and browsing instant only titles.

Grab iRentMovie for $2.99

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Guitar Hero World Tour Theme

Some rockin good news for Blackberry owners who can’t get enough Guitar Hero. Now, thanks to Bplay, you can take your favorite game with you anywhere you go. Yeah sure you can play the game on your Blackberry, but now with the “Guitar Hero World Tour Theme” you can have your Hero cake and eat it too!

This theme animated and comes with rotating screens that bring your favorite Guitar Hero artwork to the home screen all throughout the day.

$5.99

BlackBerry Themes
Customize the look of your device with hottest themes from Bplay. Easy downloads and secure billing.

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Updated-Mobile Gmail

If you have been wondering what Google has been up to, wonder no more. They’ve been working on a way to make the mobile version of their landmark email service stronger, faster, smarter. Like the six million dollar man.

Not quite, but it will auto-complete for you as you begin to type in a name or address.

At Google we’re always looking for a way to do things faster. Today, we’re announcing two improvements that will speed up your Gmail for mobile experience.

The first improvement is faster address auto-completion. This means that as you begin typing the first few letters of your friend or colleague’s name or email address, Gmail for mobile will quickly display possible contacts. We sped up this process by reusing previously fetched matches in subsequent searches.

The second improvement is that we’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts for Android-powered devices with a physical keyboard. Now you can use all those familiar Gmail keyboard shortcuts to quickly move through your inbox. For example, if you’re reading an email you can press ‘u’ to return to the inbox or ‘n’ to move to the next conversation.

To try out Gmail for mobile, visit gmail.com in your mobile browser. This version of Gmail for mobile supports iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only. To make it easy to access your Gmail account, try creating a home screen link.

As you can see, as per normal, Blackberry, Palm and everything else will have to wait to give this one a go. But we can give Google a pass, (a short one) we know they are hard at work.

Google

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Updated-iGoogle

Google has released a new beta for iGoogle. The new app is only for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android G1 at the moment. The new and improved iGoogle is faster and easier to use with the new inclusion of in-line displays. This is is very good improvement over the last one which was difficult to use.

Today, we’re excited to roll out an improved beta version of iGoogle for the iPhone and Android-powered devices. This new version is faster and easier to use. It supports tabs as well as more of your favorite gadgets, including those built by third-party developers. Note that not all gadgets — like those with Flash — will work in mobile browsers.

One of our favorite new features is the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets. That means you can read article summaries without leaving the page. You can also rearrange gadget order or keep your favorite gadgets open for your next visit. None of these changes will mess up the layout of gadgets on your desktop computer, so feel free to play around and tune your mobile experience.

The new version of iGoogle for mobile is available in 38 languages. To try it out, go to igoogle.com in your mobile browser and tap “Try the new Mobile iGoogle!” Bookmark the page or make it your home page so you can return to it quickly. Finally, please fill out our survey by clicking on the “Tell us what you think” link at the top of the new home page. We’ll continue to use your feedback to make iGoogle even better.

Googleblog