New apps for the iPhone

analysis
Jul 15, 20082 mins

Looks like there's been a slew of new applications enabled by Apple's new iPhone, SDK and app store. While a lot of the emphasis is on communications and games, there's a surprising number of good business applications. First to market among open source business applications for the iPhone are Pentaho with their open source Business Intelligence extension for dashboards, reports and drilldowns, Funambol with ope

Looks like there’s been a slew of new applications enabled by Apple’s new iPhone, SDK and app store. While a lot of the emphasis is on communications and games, there’s a surprising number of good business applications.

First to market among open source business applications for the iPhone are Pentaho with their open source Business Intelligence extension for dashboards, reports and drilldowns, Funambol with open source contact sync program, Zimbra with an open source email client, Zmanda with an iPhone client for their Enterprise backup tool, and SugarCRM with their offline client edition.

I have no doubt that many more business applications –both open source and closed –will follow. Even though the iPhone isn’t quite the open platform that Linux is, it looks to be a good platform and there’s a lot of interest among business users. There’s a full list of new iPhone Enterprise apps over at the InfoWorld test center.

In the meantime, if you want to check out some of the communications and games apps, here’s a list of top iPhone applications recommended by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Walt recommends AIM and MotionX Poker by Fullpower, Pandora and MLB.com at bat among others. Mossberg also wrote a review of the new iPhone 3G including extensive tests that indicate the new model is indeed faster, but battery life is shorter.

BTW, MotionX from FullPower looks like an interesting play by Philippe Kahn to establish themselves as the Intel inside of sensor-based mobile computing. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.