It’s a day that should have been here a lot sooner, but now that it’s here, everyone’s too happy to care. It’s the launch of the iPhone Apps Store. Now we can install third-party applications on our iPhones! As if we haven’t been doing that all along!

Well, most of us have, anyway, through the magic of jailbreaking. Confession time: Not me. Though it may seem unbecoming a self-billed geek, I never jailbroke my iPhone. None of the “underground” apps appealed to me enough to take the plunge, and so my naive iPhone prattled on, running its default set of apps and nothing else. Today, as novices and hackers alike dive into the third-party pool together, I can come clean with my shameful secret. It feels good.¹

But in this new, Apple-sanctioned world, are the apps that much more desirable? I’ve been stumbling around the aisles in the App Store all day to find out.

My first download was the Facebook app. It doesn’t stray much from the iPhone interface Facebook has offered on the web for months now, but it feels snappier, at least. I like it, but your mileage may vary. It helps if you have better friends than the ones in the Apple screenshot.

Joe Hewitt: is boring. And lonely. Those two things are not unrelated.
Scott Marlette: isn’t satisfied to post that he’s listening to music; he needs you to know that it is punk music.
Laura Copeland: Somebody needs to have kids already.
Dave Morin: is more important than you.

MySpace is also on the iPhone, keeping true to their brand with an app that is more annoying and looks crappier than Facebook’s.

Many of the marquee apps out today are games, chief among them Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, a very cool Marble Madness-esque game that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer in very clever fashion. You tilt the phone to roll the monkey’s orb around the course or, in my case, send that freaking monkey to his fiery doom over and over again. There’s a bit of a learning curve.

Another challenging game is puzzler Enigmo, although the biggest challenge here is resisting the temptation to grind your iPhone into a fine paste after a few minutes of playing. Enigmo was originally designed for Mac OS X, where the mouse allows you a high degree of precision. The iPhone is somewhat less precise, and while the game is still fun, it’s tough to make it through a level without a few dozen misplaced taps screwing up your progress. That gets frustrating. The decision to make a double-tap serve as “pause” struck me as especially misguided somewhere around the billionth time I triggered it by accident.

Joking aside, I think this is going to be the No. 1 problem with many PC-to-iPhone game ports.

No portable platform is complete without a Texas Hold’em game, so Apple programmed their own to ensure that the niche would be filled. In the iTunes listing page, Apple sweetens the deal with this lady in an (alluringly?) half-upturned cowgirl hat. The description boasts of the game’s “realistic opponents.” Having played a fair amount of hold’em in a real-life casino, I beg to differ. If they wanted to be realistic, the pretty lady would be nursing an hours-old chicken caesar wrap and she would insist every 30 seconds or so that “Keno, there’s the real money game!” Also, the pretty lady would be a retired snowmobile salesman in a Members Only windbreaker.

Not a Hold ’Em player? Perhaps you’d prefer Karen Weems’ Hold On! The object of this game is—well, see if you can guess from this screenshot.

Rather than bill this app as a “game,” which it is in the barest sense of the word, Weems instead registered Hold On! in the Productivity category, justifying that odd classification with this promo copy: “Develop your perseverance and improve your concentration skills to make you more productive!”

Do our schools have an adequate holding-buttons-down curriculum? Are we failing the next generation of workers?

Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on Hold On!—what more can I expect for free? You have to pay for the higher class of apps, like Shout It, which asks $4 to transform your iPhone into a space-age device capable of saying

Name one scenario in which using Shout It won’t make you look like an enormous tool. (I do give the developers credit, however, for alerting people to the more sensible, free alternative to “Shout It” right there in its title.)

I don’t have a problem with simplicity, though. My favorite app of all is called Light. When it opens, the iPhone screen turns white so that you can use it as a flashlight. No joke, I use my iPhone for this all the time. Just try that with your Nokia! Wait, no, don’t. It’ll work.

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1. The nadir of my secret, un-jailbroken period came while I was watching a recent episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. In the limo on the way to an awards show, Griffin beau Steve Wozniak scoffed at her virgin iPhone in disbelief—“You haven’t hacked your iPhone?!”—and immediately jailbroke it for her. I felt Woz’s scowl through the TV screen and knew that he was disappointed in me, personally. ↑