Apple App Store

Amazon has purchased Lexcycle, the company that developed the free iPhone eBook reader Stanza. The software is widely seen as a rival to Amazon's own Kindle application. Stanza provides free access to over 100,000 books in ePub format, which Amazon's Kindle does not support.

Details such as the cost of the acquisition were not revealed by either company. Over one million copies of Stanza were downloaded by the end of last year. Amazon's Kindle iPhone app is free, however users must pay for content. The Kindle 2 electronic reader is now priced at $349.

Now the entire Kindle library of books, magazines and newspapers is accessible without a Kindle device. All you need is your iPhone or iPod Touch, the free application released by Amazon, and your Amazon account. Just install the Kindle app, then register your iPhone with Amazon by entering your account information.

After you're in, you have access to all titles you've purchased through Amazon's website or with your Kindle. 225,000 titles are available, and $9.99 will deliver you a New York Times bestseller immediately. For $1.25 a month you can get the current issue of the Atlantic (sans pictures) delivered automatically as soon as the new issue hits newsstands.

Settle the dispute with your golfing buddies on the spot, and learn a thing or two about the ever-complicated Rules of Golf. An iPhone and iPod Touch version of the award winning "Golf Rules Quick Reference" has been submitted to Apple for approval.

The developers are expecting the application to be available on the iTunes App Store in February for $9.99. The author of the booklet, Yves C. Ton-That, has been an international rules official for over 10 years and spent 4 years developing the reference.

With the release of the second generation iPhone 3G right around the proverbial corner, Apple has released the accompanying iPhone OS 2.0 to the public. iPhone OS 2.0 has been in beta testing with developers for months now, and has been the test bed for the first official third party applications which are now available via the iPhone AppStore (you must be running OS 2.0 to access the AppStore).

New iPhone 3G models will be pre-loaded with iPhone OS 2.0, but the public release of the software allows existing owners of the first generation iPhone to upgrade their phones to the new 2.0 firmware. The new iPhone OS brings a host of new

One of the readers of TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) recently sent in what is believed to be the first set of screenshots of the new iPhone App Store. The App Store is an iPhone application showase/marketplace built into the new (currently development beta) iPhone firmware.

Users who previously tried to load the iPhone App Store on their iPhones were met with a "cannot connect" message. Sometime recently, this changed is allowing access to the App Store which now includes a few applications.

Below are a couple of the screenshots which were leaked. One of the screenshots shows a native Facebook application for the iPhone.