Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they're iPhone (or iPod touch, and soon... iPad!) related, they're fair game.

Confession: in all the iPad hubbub last week, Rene didn't get around to posting everyone's pick. Bright side, you get almost twice as many this week!

So who's on deck this double-dose and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad's Pick I: MobileMe Gallery

Apple's new MobileMe Gallery app is awesome. I really like the way it previews photos at the top (just like Apple TV) and you can easily share photos, albums or movies. Adding friend's galleries are bonus too! I just wish you could comment on photos...

Just like with the MobileMe iDisk app, once you view an image, it saves it to your iPhone for easy access later. You can also tap and hold to save your images to the iPhone's camera roll. [Free - iTunes link]

Chad's Pick II: Engadget

This week I decided to look at some news apps, specifically Engadgets new app. What is nice is that they have all three of their sites available to view: Engadget, Engadget Mobile and Engadget HD. The app remembers the last news source and looks beautiful doing so. The standard fanfare is there too such as posting to Facebook and Twitter any articles that you find interesting. One nice bonus is streaming video, including the Engadet Show. Give Engadget a try for all of your gadget news from TVs to robots! [Free - iTunes link]

Chris' Pick: TaxCaster Mobile

With tax season upon us, Turbo Tax has given iPhone user an easy tool for a quick tax estimate. With basic deductions and incomes, you can get a rough idea if you will owe money or (hopefully) get a nice hefty refund. You can enter exact amount or just estimates to see what your fate will be this year with the IRS. You cant export data for your return, but for a free app, this is a useful tool to have. [Free - iTunes link]

Derrick's Pick I: Homerun Battle 3D

Homerun Battle 3D is hours of fun, mainly because it has online play. I'd suggest to try out the LITE version of this game and I'm sure you will love it and buy the full version. [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Derrick's Pick II: Booooly!

Booooly is a fun little puzzle game that is very entertaining and I would suggest it to anyone looking simply to pass some time. Even better, Booooly has a free version you can try out on the App Store! [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Matt's Pick I: Readdledocs 2.0

I know in the past, I have picked Readdledocs before; however, with the version 2 having come out, it adds a whole slew of new features that make it easily worth mentioning! Readdledocs is a document viewer with so many feature, it's ridiculous! I think it is probably one of the best, if not the best PDF viewer for the iPhone.

The new application includes numerous new features - a new interface, capable to view PDFs in "text reflow" view (allows the text to be made larger or smaller), better handling of large documents, zipping files, text file creation, file filter views/tasks and lots more! [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Matt's Pick II: SoundHound

Recently I have been digitizing my parent's CD collection and quite often my Mom has come up to me humming and asking me if I knew the song. I rarely have a clue. So the other day I grabbed SoundHound and had her hum the tune and the app found it. We spent much of the evening using the app exploring songs from the same artists. I've been an avid user of Shazam, but SoundHound blows it out of the water with all it's features! [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Rene's Pick I: DropBox

When MobileMe's iDisk stopped syncing on me the last time, turned out it was also for the last time, and I decided to give the much geek-loved DropBox a try. It's free for up to 2GB of data, and $10/m or $100/y for 50GB, but it's features are so far ahead of iDisk that Apple really should buy them up before Google does. For those not familiar, basically it lets you store your files on their cloud server, and with the Dropbox desktop client, mirror that folder on any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer you own. You can see the sync status of each folder and file and easily share them, and the photo folder gets special gallery-style treatment. And, of course, it has an iPhone app that lets you browse your cloud-stored files, or star them to keep a copy locally on your iPhone. Note for the security conscious -- you can, of course, encrypt files or directories before uploading them to Dropbox, but then you lose the web and iPhone access. The battle over convenience rages on! [Free - iTunes link]

Rene's Pick II: Classics

Interested in that iBooks app Steve Jobs showed off for the iPad and upset you can't have one or both new? Users of the existing iPhone app, Classics, know from whence iBooks borrows a lot of its look and feel (with an even earlier nod to Delicious Library!), but that means that if you want to get your bookshelf storing, multitouch paper flipping, eBook read on, you can do it now... With one caveat: as the name suggests, Classics only contains free, public domain, classic books. As a bonus, however, following the iBooks announcement, the makers of Classics have decided to give it away from free, so it's definitely worth a download. [Free - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You're part of team TiPb too, so what's your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us -- and everyone -- know in the comments!

e-Book reader Classics [iTunes link, which like Delicious Library saw its UI copied by Apple's new iPad iBooks app, has decided to go free in celebratory protest. Gorgeous app, great public-domain content, so check it out.

iBomber [iTunes link] is also free, though we're not sure for how long. Georgia recommends it though, so give it a try.

And to celebrate the 2,000,000 download mark one of the top games of 2009, Battle Bears, [iTunes Link] is now FREE for today only in the App Store!

Check out the video of Battle Bears in action after the break!

[Via Touch Arcade]

Classics (and all around awesome icon and UI) designer Sebastiaan de With posted on his Cocoia blog that his co-creation is currently being featured in a new ad for the iPhone:

How very awesome it is to see this on Apple’s website (and possibly on TV!). You can read about the design process of Classics here.

This latest ad continues Apple's current trend of focusing on apps as the killer iPhone feature, this time specifically on a variety of different apps that let you "read" in one way or another: Yelp for restaurant reviews, OsireX for MRI scans, and Classics for "regular old book".

It seems that e-book readers are going to be technology's next big thing. With the Kindle being named Oprah’s favorite gadget and other e-book reading devices battling for pole position, the e-book reader is populating daily culture. But who wants to pay that much money for a dedicated reading device that is admittedly limited and still has no true standard format?

Insert iPhone. We all know that the iPhone does a great job in converging multiple devices, why not add being an e-book reader to its capabilities? Obviously we won’t have any e-ink technology in the iPhone but the e-book readers in the iPhone, Classics and Stanza, offer ease of use and a great free selection—plus you don’t have to plop down an extra 400 dollars to read a book.

See what we think of Classics and Stanza in our App vs App!

Design

Classics is wonderfully designed. Upon starting the app, a virtual bookcase filled with the covers of popular books gives you your reading options. The interactive bookshelf definitely makes for a virtually pleasing layout—it gives a experience similar to grabbing a book from your shelf, but in this case, tapping will suffice. You can also rearrange the books in any order, though the obvious flaw is when more books become available this design layout may not be the most effective to navigate.

What’s great about Classics is that the look of the pages seems carefully designed and well implemented. The pages look like pages of a book, complete with a clothlike texture and instant readability. Another great touch is the flipping of the pages, swipe from right to left to move pages in the most accurate rendition we’ve seen in an e-book reader.

Stanza makes up for what it lacks in groundbreaking design by offering seemingly limitless customization. If you want the color of the words a certain hue of grey or the background completely black, you have the option to do so. This amount of customization allows you to create layouts that better suit your eyes.

Stanza's library page is akin to the iPhone’s setting page—effective and efficient but hardly awe inspiring. It gives you a basic list to select from and it’ll narrow your selection from there. Overall, it works but it definitely feels like you have to learn how to use the controls before you read, rather than just get to reading right away.

Usability

Classics notable feature is its ability to realistically flip through pages. Because there is no customization options whatsoever in Classics, Classics needed to nail this feature to warrant any type of consideration. Luckily, they absolutely nailed it. The animation and physics of turning the page are extremely accurate and if you’re sliding the finger to turn but decide not to, it follows your movement and the page falls back in place. You really have to give it a try, it’s the most accurate representation of page turning that I’ve ever seen.

Also, I found that the overall page design of Classics was fairly easy on the eyes. It uses a tan/brown mix of colors to create a more paper-esque texture to the page. It almost looks cloth like. Overall, Classics did a wonderful job in presenting themselves and I enjoyed reading from the application.

But by no means is Classics perfect. It doesn’t have a great selection, offering only a handful of “classic” novels and it offers no customization whatsoever. There is no ability to customize page layout, to change fonts, no ability to add books—you really have to run with what the developers designed for you. You can’t even change the font size, so you’re stuck turning pages at a pretty fast rate. So though Classics looks great, it is definitely limited.

Stanza on the other hand, is completely customizable. You can add books, newspapers, magazines, and thousands of books from different publishers. The sheer number of books is simply staggering, you can always find something to read.

Also, you can customize the page layout to fit your eyes’ preference. The text color, background color, link color, font, font size, alignment, line spacing, margin width, images, and controls—it can really be tweaked to whatever you prefer. Want to read with a black background and white text? By all means! Black Helvetica text on a red background with justified alignment? Sure!

But in the end, I still preferred the overall look of Classics standard page layout over Stanza’s customizable options. No matter what I did, and I tried to emulate Classics, it just wasn’t as easy on the eyes. Also, turning the page is nowhere near as pretty. It only slides out in Stanza.

But the unarguable advantage of Stanza is its ability to add books. That makes it a much more powerful reader and definitely lengthens the life span of the application. You'll never be able to read everything that the folks at Stanza offers because it really has a library worth of literature! 

Final Thoughts

So I guess what it really boils down to is: do you want an e-book reader that looks good with a limited amount of books or a fully customizable reader with limitless options of reading material?

In conclusion, I think having a greater selection wins out. The fact that Stanza can add a variety of books, newspapers, and magazines to your library makes it the winner in this week’s App vs App. The complete customization of the page layout also deserves kudos because it lets the reader decide what he or she wants to see.

It’s hard to knock Classics though. As a reading application, it deserves stellar marks for nailing the physics of turning the page and offering such a great, easy on the eyes, page design. Even though customization is huge in e-book readers, the stock look of Classics is still by far the best look in comparison with the two.

But Classics falls short by not offering a wider reading selection. It simply can’t seriously compete as an e-book reader when you can only read the same “classic” books over again. I love this application and think the developers did a fantastic job, but the lack of selection makes it hard for me to give my full recommendation. I definitely think it still merits consideration as the most exciting reader app for the iPhone. But as it stands now, Stanza has still got it beat.

Classics Rating

Stanza Rating