Apple’s iPhone OS 3.1 introduced some great new features, including that MMS thing we’ve all been waiting for, but the update also brought some hiccups, including even poorer battery life for an already thirsty device. Apple’s doing something different with this round of complaints, though. It’s getting involved.

This weekend the company started contacting forum users who had complained about battery life, asking follow-up questions like, “When you notice a power drop, does it seem to be a legitimate power drop, or rather an issue with the battery icon indicator?” The users were also prompted to install a battery life logging profile which then syncs back to Apple when you connect to iTunes. There are also instructions for turning off the logging feature once data has been collected.

Apple has gotten involved with some of the past iPhone concerns. Hopefully this time things will get fixed in a timely fashion.

It’s really becoming a year among years for Apple. The super-trendy company was once a sleeping puppy in a den of wolves, quietly wooing customers to the questionable promise of a more stable lifestyle. Since then they’ve released the Kleenex of the MP3 player market and turned tens of millions to the iPhone. Just three months ago their app store hit 1 billion downloads and just this month the store had its first birthday.

Today marks another milestone for your favorite fruity company. According to an Apple press release, the app store has reached 1.5 billion downloads to date. We already know Apple’s iPhone as host to the fastest growing development community in the world, sending coders on a rite of passage with dreams of hitting it rich. Those quasicultish seekers have made more than 65,000 apps available in 77 countries around the world.

Our congrats to Apple. May your useful apps continue to improve and your frivolous apps continue to make us scratch our heads as we look at the download counts.

You can read the full press release here.

The folks at PocketGamer.biz recently took a look at the iPhone gaming situation to come away with some cold, hard data about what people are buying and why. I’ll spare you the full report (really I just don’t want to leech all the credit here) and focus instead on some of the more interesting details.

For standards, PG took a snapshot of the top 100 applications and then broke down the results by price, price by rank, games by publisher, and source (new IP, console port, music, movie, etc.).

Pricing was actually different than you might think. While most of the top 100 came in the $.99 category (36 titles), second place went to the $4.99 bracket with 20 titles. But that’s just number of games for each price bracket. Obviously since they are top 100 these are games that are getting downloaded a lot, but how much do the games get played after downloading?

If you look at price by rank, the top 10 games average just $1.89/download. At 11-20, the price drops to $1.19. Of course there are a load of factors that could contribute to the rankings. Are people really playing these cheap games more or are they just deleting them more often and so being prompted to rate more of these games?

Perhaps the most useful statistic, at least to industry developers, is the rate of new downloads and the desire for new IP. Of the top 100 games, 40 were released in June or July (this likely includes a few updates). Another 22 were April or May releases. As for IP, 52 of the top 100 are fresh content, designed just for the iPhone.

If you’re downloading games, where does your allegiance lie? Are you a bargain shopper, only buying apps that are cheap or on sale? Or do you look for the best IPs from hot developers, regardless of price?

This is the month of phone hype, beyond a doubt. We’ve seen the Pre release, Nokia’s super-expensive N97 spot with LL Cool J, iPhone OS 3.0, and now the iPhone 3GS. Of the phone launches, the biggest is certainly the update iPhone, though it may have come more quietly than the world expected.

Lines outside Apple’s flagship store in NY reached several hundred, but amidst some rain, they were all shuffled under Apple’s roof making this the smallest iPhone launch yet. Still, AT&T reports hundreds of thousands of preorders for launch day, which dwarfs Palm’s Pre 50,000 first weekend statistic.

It wasn’t just scale that kept the launch quiet, though. In part, it was a lack of hangups that have plagued Apple’s past launches. Apple announced both iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS at WWDC this year, but the set the launch days two days apart. The staggered launch was presumably to reduce server load so that new owners weren’t trying to activate their 3GS while 20 million others were waiting for OS 3.0 downloads. It was a smart move, and it kept problems with the 3.0 release and problems with the 3GS launch (so far, at least) to a minimum.

Now the focus shifts to AT&T and how their network will handle more users hoping to see the wireless carrier make good on promises of MMS and tethering. Will MMS from iPhone users bring the sole US carrier to its knees later this summer?

We already posted a how-to for enabling tethering on your shiny new OS 3.0. While awesome, it is clunky, slow, requires a mac… yada, yada, yada.

Leave it to iClarified to give us a handy and simple way to enable tethering right from the phone. All you have to do is use Safari from the phone and navigate to a specific website. Click a link here, say yes there, and next thing you know, tethering is enabled on your iPhone.

I know someone, who knows someone, who did it (wink, wink) and it was as easy as pie. Click through and try it for yourself. Let’s just say I know it works.