I was speaking with a friend the other day. She has a 16GB iPhone and absolutely loves it. She, like many of us, finds that it has the potential to do so much that it is often the only thing we need to carry. It truly is a handheld computer and as the apps for it become increasingly stable and sophisticated that will only increase.

I commented to her that I was looking forward to the new firmware because my iPhone had begun crashing all the time. She looked at me and said "Your iPhone crashes? Mine hasn’t crashed once." I was more than a bit perplexed. Sure, I know people whose iPhones have been more stable than others, but I had not heard from anyone who had NEVER encountered a crash.

It made more sense when she told me that she had never had more than one additional app on her iPhone at any time. That made sense. No apps meant no crashes. Lots and lots and lots of apps has meant… lots of crashes and reinstalls. And boy have I gotten good at reinstalls. To my mind though, it has been a more than reasonable trade off.

The FedEx man stopped by a bit ago with my new iPod Touch (thanks michael!). Set up was incredibly quick in large part due to my having formatted and rebuilt both my iPhone and 1st Generation Touch so many times.

I loaded it with some of my favorite apps and am already ready to share a few initial thoughts.

One of the things I am most anxious to see about the new iPod Touch is whether or not it can be used for VOiP.

Early suggestions that the added functionality of a line-in microphone might make VOiP possible (without any additional hardware or modifications) were confirmed this morning by Cult of Mac. And since TruPhone has already released an app for the iPhone the possibilitites are huge.

Sorry for throwing two crApp App posts at you in the same week but this has got to be the biggest POC (piece o’ crApp App) yet. 

$1.99???? They don’t even have the decency to make this $.99 or even "Free". (And mind you, at "free" this would STILL be too expensive.)

The description from "developer" says…

CNet has a cool video of a new text input method for touchscreen enabled devices. It comes from one of the inventors of T9 . It is a cool looking input method that has a lot of promise. He even claims he can input at 50 words per minute.

The thing that caught my eye was their statement–

"Of course, this isn’t on the iPhone yet, but if the ubiquity of T9 is any guide (installed on 2.5 billion phones) this could end up "everywhere and anywhere."

WritingPad does the exact same and IS on the iPhone. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be on the App Store any longer.

Every day there are dozens of new apps but only one or two REALLY worth looking at. Over 3000 apps already but there is a lot of stuff not worth the space it consumes. These apps, though, go one step better. 

We’ve been through this before…

…how many tip calculators do you need?

…how many Magic8Balls?

But at least that stuff all comes from a wide variety of developers (redundant, repeticious and uncreative as they might be). When the garbage heap is made larger by the same developer over and over and over again… arrrrhg!!!!

Here is one good example (FOUR actually) that are crApps for sure…

I am liking this trend a whole lot…

A new app is released but is initially given away (whether for a few days or a certain number of users) in order to get a group using it and (hopefully) talking about it.

It is a big advantage for those of us watching the App Store each night since we might just get an App Gem for free! (I know, I know, most of the time it will be crApp Apps but once in a while…)

Two new apps are free right now on "Initial Release Special". While we can’t vouch for them yet (we just downloaded them ourselves) there’s nothing to lose since… THEY’RE FREE!!!!!

Read on after the jump for details and direct links…

I love my iPhone.

I really like my iPod Touch too.

No, I don’t really need to have both but the Touch is great to have for trying out new apps. Plus it is so thin that for many things, I actually like using it more than my iPhone.

I’ve been more than a bit interested in the development of the Touch since its introduction last year.

It was introduced as a media-centric device- a touchscreen iPod. It was SO media-centric, in fact, that the Touch didn’t originally ship with some of the basic functionality present in the iPhone. It was an iPod. Period.

It was only later, with a $19 software update, that the Touch gained apps such as —Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. Since that occurred, though, the Touch has been much more than a touchscreen iPod. It has, on many levels, succeeded where UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs) and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) only hoped to go. And with the firmware update this past July… WOW! Now, almost all the apps that tap the potential of the iPhone are able to do the same thing on the Touch. Nope, this was no longer just a touchscreen iPod.

So it struck me as a bit odd that in the walkthrough of the new iPod Touch it is described this way…

Well, now we know why NBC is using an iPhone to advertise their mobile portal…

I’m playing around with iTunes 8.0 and I am really loving the Genius feature. 

I LOVE the fact that it is now on my first gen. iPod Touch!