USA Today has released AutoPilot for the iPhone and iPod touch, and it looks like a winner. This free app [iTunes link] lets you plan your trip, informs you of flight delays, gives you quick links to hotel, rental car and airline phone numbers, gets you the weather for your destination, and pulls up Flickr photos of where you are going. Whew!

There are lots of other travel apps, but I think AutoPilot has hit all the highlights of useful information that people will want in one place.

The app even reminds you to check in for your flight, and allows you to email your itinerary to others. If you need to quickly call your hotel or your airline, all that information is there. You can tap on a phone number and the call gets made, or you can save the info to contacts. You can also click on a URL and go to a hotel, airline or rental car website

I put in some suggested trips, and everything worked very well except for flights with connections. Each flight had to be entered one at a time. I'd have preferred to be able to enter all the flights at once by typing in flight numbers separated, for example, by a comma.

The app integrates with Tripit, so if you have an account there it can pick up your flight information. Tripit, by the way, has an excellent iPhone app [iTunes link] as well.

Everything else about this app worked very well. There are ads at the bottom of the screen, but I did not find them distracting or obtrusive.

Having the flight tracker is very nice when you are meeting friends at the airport, and the information appeared up to date. The app was developed by Mercury Intermedia, the same firm that did the excellent USA Today [iTunes link] app. It's very slick and reliable for a version 1.0.

I can't think of any reason why a traveler wouldn't want to try this app out. I'm thinking about making a trip I don't even need to go on, just for the experience.

One other suggestion I'd make. The app shouldn't be limited to just air travel. If I'm driving somewhere, I'd still like the ability to define a trip, have the hotel and weather information and the destination galleries available for me, and maybe add some points of interest whether I'm driving or flying.

Check out the gallery for screen shots of AutoPilot in action:

Instead of sifting through the piles of TIME magazines at your doctor's office, where you don't know who's healthy or unhealthy hands have touched the pages, you now have another option to browse through TIME content on your iPhone.

The recently launched TIME Mobile [iTunes link] app provides a better browsing experience and more content than the mobile version of magazine's website. In addition, the app brings with it support for video, which is lacking on the mobile version of TIME's site and not supported for the iPhone on the full version of the site because the videos are encoded in Flash.

TIME Mobile also brings a new approach for browsing articles. Like Cover Flow view in the iPhone and iTunes, TIME Mobile's "Image Flow" provides some eye candy in front of the meat and potatoes of the article content.

One thing absent in the app is support for offline reading, a useful feature for situations where data connectivity is lacking, such as on an airplane. The USA Today app [iTunes link], which is in the same app genre as TIME Mobile, supports offline reading by tapping on the update button on each section. Perhaps such a feature could be added to TIME Mobile as a paid-for feature, or as for free to those who subscribe to the paper version of the magazine. Update: TIME's app team tells us that offline reading is built-in as part of the app, but for some reason I could not get it to work consistently; we're following up with them to figure out why it's wonky.

Powered by Polar, a mobile publishing provider that also powers BusinessWeek [iTunes link] and CNNMoney [iTunes link] iPhone apps as well as a host of other apps on a variety of mobile platforms, TIME Mobile is available as a free download in the App Store.

Catching up on the happenings around the blogosphere is a difficult task. Luckily, I happened to stumble upon John Burke's Download Squad piece on the release of Regator [iTunes link].

So, if you'd like to get caught up on the latest news, insights and commentary on Rod Blagojevich around the blogosphere (now that's a tongue twister), Regator could be of assistance.

Regator's user-interface is similar to USA Today's iPhone app [iTunes link]. A horizontal menu displays a number of categories -- such as sports, lifestyle, and entertainment -- that are touch-scrollable. Tapping on a category displays its subcategories. For instance, NBA news would fall under the basketball branch of the sports tree. While a breadcrumb trail displays your viewing hierarchy, the browsing menu disappears as you scroll down; this was my only annoyance with the app, although it's a relatively minor one.

Regator's stand-out feature is what it calls "trends." Like a tag cloud on a blog, in which bigger clouds are usually associated with more hot topics or issues, trends provides a listing of the latest hot topics around the blogosphere.

For instance, a look at sports trends shows Tiger Woods at the top of the list -- which is no surprise given Y.E. Yang's surprising victory over him this past weekend. And Brett Favre's retiring-unretiring-retiring-unretiring-retiring-unretiring puts him near the top of the trends list as well.

Regator is available as a free download at the iTunes app store. Domo arigato, Regator!

MSNBC recently added an iPhone app to the store, so we thought it was a good time to take a look at a few news apps.

The gold standard for news on the iPhone is the USA Today app. Love them or hate them, the USA Today punchy writing style feels right at home on the iPhone. News can be received from a wide range of mobile sources, and it's the design of this app that makes it stand out. I would love to have the authors pack my suitcase the next time I travel, since they have found a way to cram an incredible amount of information into a very small package. Using persistent buttons on the bottom of each screen, you can get to Headlines, Sports Scores, Weather, Photo Galleries, and Snapshots (which are a set of insta-polls), from anywhere.

What makes it special is that, along with the local weather, at the top of most category screens there is a sliding set of sub-categories allowing you to get to just what you want in no time. For example, if you wanted to get the score of the Yankees' game, just tap Scores, and the sub-categories of NFL, MBL, NBA, NCAAF and NCAAB appear at the top of the screen. Tap MLB and there it is. Two taps total.

Similarly, tapping Headlines brings up sub-categories of: Top News, News, Money, Sports, Life Tech and Travel. When in any category, tap Top Stories and you can set a default for the type of story you would like to see first. For example, under the sub-category of Money, you can choose to set the default to: Top Stories, Markets, Economy, Cars, Personal Finance or Industry. Set it up once and you'll be able to drill down to specific results in a universe of information with just a few taps.

Tap on Share Article and you can Email, Text, Twitter (your Twitter client can be chosen in the setup pane), or log into Facebook. in all the apps covered here, you can share, but this has the most robust feature set of the lot. The fit, finish and depth of the app is, okay I'll say it -- awesome. Weather is location enabled, the Picture Galleries are extensive and under Snapshots there are nine running polls in each of the four sub-categories of News, Sports, Money and Life. USA Today is not just for hotel rooms anymore.

I've spent most of my life in the news business, and like many people, I can't get enough of the latest political, sports, tech or business news. There are plenty of apps for the iPhone and iPod touch that help you keep on top of what is going on, but USA Today [app store link] has done a good job of translating the paper to the iPhone. Like many of the competing apps like the New York Times [app store link] or AP Mobile News [app store link], USA Today is free, although some unobtrusive ads do appear at the bottom of stories.

When you install, you can customize the app for weather in your favorite cities, and your top ranked city temperature helpfully appears on every page you navigate to.

There is a good sports section, but no way to customize favorite teams. In addition to sports news, there are up-to-date scores for all the major contests.

Stories you like can be emailed to friends, sent as a text message, or to Twitter. The setup section also allows you to submit bug and feature requests.

USA Today appears to download everything it can when you are connected via Edge, 3G or Wi-Fi, so if you get on a plane and have no Internet access you can still read all the content. I noticed that all the pictures were not available though.

The app also gives you access to USA Today snapshots, and allows you to vote in various polls. Some of the polls were out of date, however, like asking what people are going to wear on New Year's Eve. When you do vote, you're asked if you want to share your location. I think this allows the polls to be parsed by section of the country.

Keep in mind that USA Today is an American newspaper. This is not the app to use to search for much news outside the U.S. of A., and users report you can't even start the app if you are outside the country. The developers say that is a bug, not a feature and will be fixed soon.

Having said all this, the USA Today app for the iPhone/touch is very fast, nicely laid out, follows iPhone GUI conventions very well, and despite some of the little glitches I saw, was a pleasure to use. Just the thing for getting the latest news while strolling around the Macworld Expo, or anywhere really.

While most people are waiting in line for their soon-to-be new friend, pal and everyday communications device, the world's top tech reviewers have already been playing with the long awaited device. Below is a summary of their findings along with links to their full reviews of the iPhone 3G.

Walt Mossberg (Wall Street Journal)

• Pros: Faster cell network data speeds, GPS
• Cons: Weaker battery life due to 3G/GPS
• Bottom Line: If you don't already have an iPhone and can live with the weaker battery life, then you should go ahead and buy; otherwise wait out for the 2.0 firmware update (hmm... I think I've heard this advice somewhere else)
  

David Pogue (New York Times)

• Pros: You can talk and access 3G data network simultaneously, cheaper, improved audio quality
  
• Cons: 3G isn't wide-spread, AT&T pricing,
  
• Bottom Line: "iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade," 2.0 firmware update will make your original iPhone in most ways similar to the iPhone 3G
  

Edward Baig (USA Today)

• Pros: Faster data network, cheaper, GPS, Visual Voicemail
  
• Cons: Slow EDGE speeds when not in 3G area, no video, no memory expansion
  
• Bottom Line: "The Sequel, is worth the wait," he also shows a side-by-side comparison between EDGE and 3G speeds
  

As an interesting note: David Pogue says that the iPhone's GPS antenna is too small to provide you with turn-by-turn directions in Google Maps -- this is something that Apple has failed to note until now.

Two more reviews of that loveable scamp of a cellphone are out on the Interwebs, and it's more more more of the same: Steven Levy of Newsweek and Ed Baig of USA TODAY are saying it's time to start believing the hype. Both writers, like Pogue and Mossberg, point out the iPhone's weak spots (EDGE, no one-touch or voice dialing, limited apps, no video capture) while furthering the basic premise: by and large, the iPhone experience lives up to the insane advance billing. Levy's long and thorough review states it plainly early on, as he reports on the reaction to his iPhone use during a visit to Pittsburgh, PA:

"[W]hen I showed the iPhone to people during that trip and in the days afterward-especially people under 25-the most common reaction was, "I have to have this," sometimes followed by a quick, if alarmingly reckless, consideration of what might need to be pawned in order to make the purchase.... And there it is: one of the most hyped consumer products ever comes pretty close to justifying the bombast."

Baig puts it this way: "[W]ith a few exceptions, this expensive, glitzy wunderkind is indeed worth lusting after... That's saying a lot. After months of hype, Apple has delivered a prodigy - a slender fashion phone, a slick iPod and an Internet experience unlike any before it on a mobile handset."

Interesting tidbits from both reviews: Levy got a call from Steve Jobs during his evaluation period, just to check on how he was doing (!), and he noted the new thinking behind Apple's buy-it-and-go-home iTunes activation plan. Baig's article includes a sidebar entitled "The Quest Begins" with the get-an-iPhone strategies of a few would-be buyers, and Baig encountered a feature I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else; when he finished watching A Bug's Life (it would have to be a Pixar film) on his iPhone, the device asked him if he wanted to clear the movie from memory to reclaim the space. Nice.

via Apple 2.0

Over at Mac Daily News, they're citing a USA Today article which indicates that Apple's "home computer market share" hit 7.6% in May 2007, up from 3.2% in May 2004. MDN says "we assume that the market share number came from USA Today research." Presumably this number is for the US and obviously focuses on consumers rather than businesses, but this feels right to me. We've already mentioned that sales are way up and Mac shipments are up 30%. Let the Mac train roll on!

[via Digg]

Andrew Kantor has posted a pretty darn funny piece of satire at USA Today based on the idea that Boot Camp is actually going to cause Mac users to switch over to Windows (ok, maybe it isn't 'satire.' Maybe it's 'saying anything he can for page views'). I have to hand it to Andrew - if this article wasn't obviously a clever piece of humor, he would instead have what could quite possibly be an educated, insightful and altogether accurate argument for why Mac OS X users should simply replace their cumbersome, overpriced and useless Macs with a Windows PC from, say, Gateway.

Andrew, I gotta tip my hat - you really know how to hit the nail on the head. Once I used Windows on my friend's MacBook Pro "long enough to be deprogrammed," I'm already on the hunt for the nearest garbage can to dump the PowerBook I (begrudgingly) am typing this on right now. Anyone have the sales phone number for eMachines?