Wolfram Alpha recently released an update for its overpriced iPhone app. The update includes some new keyboards, graphics, and tables. The one thing it didn’t improve on was the price. The app still runs $50, back up from the $19.99 it cost during the holidays.

It’s not that the app blows everything else out of the water. An app called BarMax runs a full thousand dollars. But BarMax isn’t available on the web. Wolfram Alpha is. All of it. They removed the iPhone-optimized version of the site some time ago, presumably to encourage sales for the app. You can still get everything out of Wolfram Alpha, though, if you just visit the website on your phone. The only thing you’re missing is screen specific formatting.

If you really need that kind of formatting and have $50 laying around, maybe this is for you. Personally, I’ll keep my Wolfram calculations on my laptop.

Source: TechCrunch

A few weeks ago I was in a crisis. I had an 11-hour drive in front of me and for some reason I missed a week of my This American Life podcast. It took a good bit of scouring, but I finally found a place to download it (no, it wasn’t available on iTunes any longer). Well no more!

My favorite radio show (and many others’ as the podcast rankings prove) finally has its own iPhone app, replete with on demand access to any episode of the show. You can stream for free or download any episode for the usual $.99. The app itself will run you $2.99.

If you haven’t listened to TAL, you need to. It’s just that simple. There are some truly incredible stories on the show, and often some very informative ones as well. They did a show about the sub-prime mortgage crisis that simply blew my mind. For my money, there’s not really a better way to spend a long drive.

Remember that app called “I Am Rich,” the one that served no purpose other than making the developer a couple grand if people actually bought it. Apple pulled the app for the fear that a glut of such products would appear, polluting the App Store with useless junk. And yet, we still have fart apps.

Well there’s a new super-expensive app on the market, and it actually might be worth something. The app is called BarMax and it’s a preparatory tool for would be lawyers headed toward the bar exam. So why a grand? Well, the prep classes often cost as much as $4,000, so a 75% discount isn’t such a bad deal.

The coolest part of the app, in my non-litigating mind, is the audio lectures. The app itself is over a gig, which puts all sorts of papers on your phone, but you also get a huge selection of lectures to listen to. Good stuff.

iTunes Link

Google has been notoriously quiet about the number of apps available in the Android Marketplace. After this week’s announcement that the mobile OS has 20,000 available apps, the search giant stepped in to set the record straight. As it turns out, there are just over 16,000 apps available, not that 20k AndroLib reported.

Google contacted TechCrunch with the updated stats, and mentioned that it was looking at new ways to disclose information about marketplace growth to consumers. Google wouldn’t confirm the ratio of paid to free apps. AndroLib claims the discrepancy is because Google is only counting the apps available to US customers, or not including anything since the end of November. I’d guess the former, since it’s highly unlikely 4,000 apps have been added in 16 days time.

Source: TechCrunch

There should be no remaining doubt that 2010 is Android’s year. The mobile OS will finally have some compelling handsets, and we’re likely to see exponential growth in global adoption. This latest bit of news will certainly make Android look a little better for consumers. The Android Marketplace has hit 20,000 apps.

True, the iPhone has over 100,000, but that’s not really what Google is after. There will be a few people here and there that avoid the iPhone like the plague, but Google will really be poaching market share from companies like Nokia and Microsoft. It’s going to be a while before Google is competing directly with Apple in the mobile market, but the data giant is rushing toward that goal at about the same pace Apple did when the App Store blew up. It’s taken just five months since the 20,000 app marker. We could see 40,000 as early as April 2010.

If one thing still stands in Google’s way, it’s the wide variation in handset hardware. That’s still something that makes Android less attractive than the iPhone OS, where just about everything is controlled. The Nexus One can serve as a sort of roadmap for manufacturers, but it is by no means the gold standard for a perfect phone. Google is also using the phone to flout American cellular practices, a gamble that will likely end in very low adoption rates for the handset unless it’s subsidized some other way.

Source: AndroLib