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!

Engadget's resident legal gadget eagle, Nilay Patel, has put together a great, depth analysis of Nokia's recent lawsuit against Apple and the iPhone over patent infringement.

As usual, the race to hype this dispute as a bitter standoff between two tech giants desperate to destroy one another has all but ignored the reality of how patents -- especially wireless patents -- are licensed, what Nokia's actually asking for, and how it might go about getting it. And as you know, we just don't do things that way, so we've asked our old friend Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us sort things out and figure out what's really going on here -- read on for more.

In a nutshell, Nokia believes Apple is infringing on 10 patents that are core to GSM/UTMS/Wi-Fi. All the other major players have paid up. Apple hasn't. Apple may believe the patent fees are already paid by the manufacturer of the components they bought for the iPhone, or they may just be using the legal system as way to negotiate a lower ultimate licensing fee from Nokia.

If the area interests you, check out the whole analysis and then let us know what you think!

According to an Engadget exclusive, Apple brought a new specification for optical port connection to Intel who, after some heated back and forth, has produced Light Peak:

Based on what we've learned, Apple will introduce the new standard for its systems around Fall 2010 in a line of Macs destined for back-to-school shoppers -- a follow-up to the "Spotlight turns to notebooks" event, perhaps. Following the initial launch, there are plans to roll out a low-power variation in 2011, which could lead to more widespread adoption in handhelds and cellphones. The plans from October 2007 show a roadmap that includes Light Peak being introduced to the iPhone / iPod platform to serve as a gateway for multimedia and networking outputs. While the timing doesn't line up, a low-powered Light Peak sounds like the kind of technology that would be perfect for a device with a need for broad connectivity but limited real estate for ports... like a tablet.

Can one port rule -- and replace -- them all? Do we want to kiss our USB/FireWire, VGA/DVI/DisplayPort, Ethernet, and all other connectors goodbye and replace them with a single, standardized optical cable? Check out Engadget's full post for more, then let us know what you think.

New Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was the debut guest on the brand new The Engadget Show, and host Joshua Topolsky asked many of the questions that needed asking. Starting off with some of Ruby's history at NeXT and Apple with Steve Jobs and his role in resurrecting the latter with products like the iMac and iPod, they segued into Palm talk for a bit, before bringing in back around to more controversial topics like Palm holding product announcements/releases right before annual Apple iPhone/iPod events, and the ongoing Palm "hacking" iTunes sync saga.

Fascinating interview, and awesome start for the Engadget crew. Congrats on the new endeavor, and we can't wait to see if Jobs, Schiller, Cook, Joz, or Forstall show up next...

Yep, the iPhone has won Engadget's Gadget of the Year and Smartphone of the Year awards, not just from the editors, but from the readers as well. That's quadrupal honors for those keeping score at home.

For the Engadget Awards in general, the editors also picked the unibody MacBook, and iPod touch (handheld and portable), and gave the BlackBerry Storm the worst gadget honors. Readers, meanwhile went far more Apple, with for iMac, unibody MacBook, 24" LED Cinema Display, the iPod touch (for both handheld and portable), and Time Capsule for storage. Zune was worst gadget.

TiPb's own Editor Awards and Reader's Choice Awards were handed out on New Year and Oscar Sunday respectively.

Someone told Daring Fireball that Apple not only asked Google to remove the multi-touch from the Android/HTC T-Mobile G1 smartphone, but also to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The first part was reported earlier and makes the kind of sense that only tricky mega-corp coopetion can make (iPhone eyeballs are more valuable to Google than the G1's multi-touch at this point). The second part... not so much. Specifically, Daring Fireball's source mentioned Apple's use of the remote buttons on the headset to control media playback as the reason for Google avoiding the jack entirely on the G1. (Note: while this sounds familiar, a Google search didn't turn up any links for Apple patenting anything associated with such processes, so if anyone can point us towards that info, please let us know in the comments).

Other smartphones have long used the 3.5mm headphone jack, and since the G1 is hardly a media powerhouse (it doesn't even include a built-in video app), there's little reason to believe HTC couldn't have included a non-remote, standard 3.5mm jack.

(Aside: Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, has managed to confirm that both the BlackBerry Curve 8900 and Pearl both make use of some type of headset based media control, so there we go...)

Chris Ziegler over at Engadget Mobile weighs in, calling the entire Apple/Google story from VentureBeat FUD, and the sourcing on the 3.5mm piece sketchy, and while admittedly an unnamed Android source, absent corroboration, doesn't pass the traditional media test, here's the other thing:

HTC seems to love the ExtUSB in lieu of 3.5mm headset jack. It's not just the G1, but an increasing array of their smartphones that are -- and will be according to the 2009 HTC roadmap that was leaked -- abandoning 3.5mm for the ExtUSB.

So, we're not sold on this story yet, how about you? Does it seem likely Apple talked Google out of a 3.5mm jack, or that HTC just plain doesn't like them and never considered it?