Just in time for the holidays! I was excited when Magellan announced a new iPhone GPS software product, and was eager to get it downloaded to test. I spent two days driving around (well, not the whole 2 days) and generally had a positive experience.

Magellan has been around the GPS business for a long time, delivering the first GPS handheld unit back in 1989. They also pioneered the Neverlost system in Hertz rental cars. The company has a lot of experience getting travelers to their destinations on vacations, business trips, and for the holidays.

They've put quite a lot in this first version for the iPhone which they call the Magellan Roadmate 2010. It sells for US $79.99 [iTunes link] for a 'limited time', then it goes back to $99.99, and it's a 1.36GB download. The app has text to speech, lane assist, iPod control, and a pedestrian mode, which is a nice touch.

The maps, which are sourced from NAVTEQ, include the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.

As a bonus, iPod touch users can use this app with the optional Magellan Premium Car Kit with a built-in GPS receiver. The car kit hasn't been released yet, but it's imminent.

Driving around using it was a pleasant experience. The maps are clear and easy to read, and work in portrait or landscape mode. The maps change colors for a night view automatically. If you like the look of the dedicated Magellan units you'll certainly like it on the iPhone.

Text to speech is clear, and you can have the unit talk to you in a male or female voice. You can get a list of all the turns you will make on your trip, and you can turn on a feature that auto zooms the display as you approach a turn so you can get more detail at intersections.



Read on for more impressions...

Barcodescan Pro [iTunes Link] is an app that uses the autofocus camera of an iPhone running OS 3.1 or better to scan a bar code and provide a variety of information on the product including pictures, high and low prices and more depending upon how much information is in the Barcodescan database.

To scan a barcode, you just hold the iPhone so that the barcode appears in a highlighted window and as soon as the image is steady enough, the app automatically takes a picture, compares it to its database, and renders your results. Another way of getting information into the app is typing in the numbers of the barcode into an oversized numeric keyboard.

I had it scan the CD of Tommy and it came back with a picture of the album cover, a prices line showing the lowest to highest found price which when tapped upon, showed the underlying five vendors, another tap gets you to the selected vendor's site to buy it. You can also choose a tab to get to Google for a standard search and another for Amazon where you can log-in and put it on your wish list or purchase the item. The vendors in the low to high price list never included Amazon, which I thought odd since Amazon was a persistent button on each search.

You can check If the item is found on iTunes. If so, you are presented with a contextual service option which brings in iTunes information. Instead of giving me one entry for the album of Tommy, it gave me many instances that contained the word Tommy.

Results are saved to lists. The Recent list shows the last thing you searched for, the History list shows everything you've searched for. You can create custom lists and easily move any searches between lists. Results can also be shared allowing you to email the search.

So, is it any good? Read on...

Zoowawa [US$0.99, iTunes Link] is a cute app targeted for toddlers between the ages of two and three. Your child is presented with a split screen displaying two animals. Tapping on one of the animals plays the sound that the animal makes.

Each half of the screen can be swiped individually to reveal 14 animal pictures per half, or 24 animal pictures in all. The pictures are brightly colored and the app has a very clean look to it. Zoowawa runs on any iPhone or iPod touch using OS 3.1.2 or better.

My daughter is finishing a masters in education and has familiarity with very small children, so I asked her about the appropriateness of this app. My first impression was that along with the sound, the printed name of the animal should be shown. My daughter told me that for most kids in the targeted age range, adding the text would be too complex since reading often doesn't start until a child is three years old or older.

She did have few problems with the size of the pictures, saying that they may not hold a child's interest for very long. Kids like big things and dividing the screen to make each animal half of the screen size was probably not the best idea. Even at full size, a picture may not attract the attention of a toddler for too long.

I also had a bit of a problem with the quality of the animal sounds. Most are not digitized animal sounds, but rather a recording of someone making the sound with his voice. Since for many kids this app might be their first introduction to animals, I think that sound accuracy should be important.

Novelty and social applications are a big hit on the iPhone. A new one from the folks of Taptivate is sure to be a big hit when it is released in the near future. Voices for iPhone is touted as an "audio recorder with a twist" and even a "social voicemail" utility.

With Voices [iTunes Link], you're given tools to manipulate your own voice in many fun and odd ways. Whether you'd like to transform into Darth Vader or a chipmunk, you're good to go with Voices. Sporting a unique and very pretty user interface, the application boasts a lot of cool extras sure to show you how hard the developers have worked on it.

The app has a home screen-like selection window where you can choose the way in which you want your voice manipulated. A stack of your recordings can also be accessed with just a tap.

After initially seeing this app when it was in early beta, it has come a long way since then. The app is being published by Tap Tap Tap and is available for only 99 cents. Also, to celebrate the release, MacHeist is offering a special "Tweetblast" deal, giving away a free copy of Voice Candy for Mac to people who help spread the word on Twitter.

Here's some shots of Voices in action:

There have been some important upgrades to Agile Messenger [iTunes Link] since I last wrote about the multi-client chat app. Notably: a "walk and talk" feature that uses an iPhone camera to give you a view in front of your phone if you want to chat and walk at the same time. That's useful if you're going to type and walk around, but the under-the-hood upgrades are worth a mention as well. The biggest update for me was the ability to search contacts. If you have dozens of contacts, being able to search by name is essential; scrolling a huge set of lists is a chore. Searching works great in Agile Messenger, I'm happy to report. Push notifications work exactly as they did before.

There are some cosmetic tweaks and performance tweaks, and I noticed the performance seemed snappier overall. Still, BeeJive recently added (somewhat limited) chat room support, which Agile still lacks. The iPhone IM wars are still on!

Agile Messenger is only $1.99 for the next couple of weeks, which is a steal for the normally $9.99 app. If you use IM a lot, it's a great experience.

With over 100,000 apps in the app store, it's getting harder and harder to find something new; most apps seem to be 'me too' versions of something else. Balloons! US $2.99 [iTunes Link] for iPhones running OS 3.0 or better, is something I haven't seen before, and it's really very clever. TUAW first got a look at an early development version of Balloons! back at WWDC, including a video interview with the developer.

Balloon mail has been used, along with the more common phrase message in a bottle, to describe sending a message into the wind or sea and hoping that someone finds it and contacts you. It's sort of non-directional social networking with a hint of mystery built in.

In this app, you start making a balloon by choosing from a variety of balloon styles. Next you create a message that the balloon will convey. Tap in the middle of the screen and the camera activates to take a picture of what's going on in your life at the moment. Then add a bit of text and send the balloon out into the world. Other users, over 900 in the first 3 days of sales, are doing the same thing. Over 3500 balloons have been sent up from the US, Europe, and Japan already.

Next, you'll want to catch a balloon. When you do, you'll see the message from the person who made the balloon along with a separate flippable page from everyone who caught the balloon, added something to it, and let it fly again. As more people catch, add to, and release balloons, each balloon takes on a history and often has a story to tell.

The balloons don't travel randomly. If launched in New York City, you can't immediately grab the balloon in London; it needs time to travel.

If you want to see what has happened to your balloon, there is a balloon tracking option that tells you how long your balloon has been flying and if has been caught or not. Tap on one of your caught balloons and you'll see all the notes added by those that have seen your balloon. I found this to be a lot of fun.

There is a free, advertising-supported version of the app [iTunes Link] that doesn't include the tracking option. I liked the idea of giving out a free appetizer, since you can get a great idea of how Balloons! works and quickly realize that the best part of the app is the tracking option.

The graphics suit the app nicely. Screens are very cartoonish using bright colors and animated clouds. I was taken by the whimsy of this app, and can see it being great for kids as a nudge toward becoming interested in geography. It's also fun, tinged with a bit of longing for faraway places, for everyone.

Take a look at the video in the 2nd half of this post to see it in action.

Irene's Spirit [US$1.99, iTunes Link] puts a fortune telling spirit into your iPhone or iPod touch (with the exception of the first generation iPod touch) as long as you're running OS 3.0.

Forget the Magic 8 Ball or Ouija Board. That's kid stuff. Irene doesn't use a 20-sided die or easily pushable planchette to give you an answer. Her answers come from the other side. The other side of what I'm not so sure, but who cares when she is dead accurate. She will make you wonder if ectoplasm will void your warranty.

I had my son ask Irene a question and he totally lost it when she told him the name of his dead grandfather. After two more passes, he got skeptical and figured out what was happening. I should have stopped while I was ahead.

Yes, it's an illusion.

I was very impressed with the best tutorial system I've seen in any app. Being an instructional designer, I know that chunking instruction and requiring feedback periodically is the best way of transferring information. Irene's Spirit is a textbook case of how to get it right.

With a bit of practice, operating the illusion is easy and distracting your audience is helped by lot of vibration noise and weird looking scrolling screens that look like something out of The Matrix.

I thought that it was a well designed, easy to learn trick that will be a hit at birthday parties, but only good for one or maybe two questions before we more skeptical grownups get wind that something's up. I had a good time with it as a casual app, and really think it's worth a look.

Take a look at this video and see Irene in action.

Voice on the Go has been out for quite a long time, and I'm surprised we never reviewed it. Imagine getting your emails and texts read to you while you drive, and creating and sending emails and texts while never touching your cellphone. Recently a friend suggested I give it a try, so I did and found there was actually a new iPhone app [iTunes link] that supported it.

Here's what Voice on the Go is all about. You sign up, choose a local number to connect to them, and assign yourself a 4 digit password. If you live in a smaller town and there isn't a number for Voice on the Go you can call any of the numbers. If you're on a national cell plan there won't be any extra cost.

You then go to the Voice on the Go website and put in your email details, and you can upload a CSV file that contains your contacts. This is much easier if you have an iPhone, so more on that later.

Once you are set up and in the car, you can call Voice on the Go, and an automated attendant will ask for your passcode. You'll then be told if you have any emails or SMS messages. You can listen to them, skip them, delete them, or the really nice feature, you can respond to them. You do it all by voice, with simple and obvious commands.

You dictate your mail, and the Voice on the Go software turns it into text and sends it off to the proper destination. As an added feature, your email gets an audio attachment so the person can listen to what you said.

How accurate is the transcription? Very. I sent about a dozen emails and every word was correct. That was calling from a noisy moving car using the Bluetooth speakerphone. A couple of times, when I was on a rough patch of road and issued a command, the attendant would ask me to repeat something, but the system always got it on the second try.

We loved Triazzle 3.0 [iTunes Link] when it came out in July, but with winter nearly upon us it's time to dust off the sleigh bells and dreidels because Triazzle Holiday [iTunes Link] is here in a new seasonally-inspired version. This slightly cut-down version of the US$2.99 app sells for US$0.99, and runs on any iPhone or iPod touch running OS 2.2.1 or higher.

Triazzle is a puzzle game where you are given a sectioned triangle board and 9 (down from 16 in the full app) smaller triangle pieces that fit in the larger triangle like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are moved to the board and rotated to get the proper orientation, when all nine are in place, you have won. The rub is that many pieces can look maddeningly similar and there is only correct solution to each puzzle. So even if it looks right, you can be wrong. When you are right, you are rewarded with an animation and the match counter increments.

This version of Triazzle is chock-full of holiday lights, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Dreidels, Nutcrackers, and a litany of other things to make you think of the holidays. The game has 4 difficulty levels ranging from one for kids to level 3, which is really quite difficult. Animated hints are available along with an option invoking the Triazzle Tiki Gods to solve the puzzle for you.

What sets Triazzle Holiday apart from just about anything else is its craftsmanship. Every screen is more gorgeous than the next, and the level of detail of the graphics can leave you breathless. If the visuals get too complex you can choose to display simpler backgrounds to make things easier to see. You can also adjust whether or not snow will fall, and you can set the volume level of music, ambient sounds, and game sounds.

Music is a large part of the game. Right after the splash screen you are advised to use headphones. Drag them out of the closet for this one -- it's worth it. The music is wonderfully recorded and reproduced using such favorites as Jingle Bells and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies from The Nutcracker Suite. In addition there is a lot of original music, including a spirited Klezmer number backing up a game full of Dreidels.

Triazzle Holiday will only be available through the holiday season, so get your copy now, put on your headphones, and immerse yourself in this impressive game.

I've always thought aquariums as screensavers were a no-brainer. Most are lacking, limiting themselves to small fish you'd find in just about any aquarium, freshwater or salt water. MyReef 3D Aquarium [iTunes Link] isn't going to shake up the genre, but it is certainly the most realistic, smoothest and most relaxing "fish simulator" I've used so far. It serves no purpose other than to completely mimic the function of a real aquarium: to sit there and look pretty and be relaxing. And it does a good job.

You can add many types of fish, some aquarium decorations and plants, and feed the fish or tap on the glass. You can pinch to zoom in, seeing quite pretty 3D fish. These are not 2D sprites flopping around a flat screen, these are real, OpenGL graphics and they look terrific. In fact, something I love about this app is the attention to detail. Fish behave as their species would behave, including group behaviors and dorsal fin indicators. Those small touches will really appeal to any fish fans out there -- and there are plenty.

If you're an aquarium hobbyist you will love this app. If you want a pretty thing to look at or mess around with or relax to, MyReef 3D Aquarium is quit nice. It doesn't "do" a lot, but what it does it does well. I think it's a fair value at $2.99.

We did a fairly extensive rundown of eBooks for the iPhone/iPod touch in August; you can take a look back if you're new to the eBook universe for Apple's mobile devices.

BookReader [iTunes Link] , a US$4.99 app for devices running OS 2.21 or higher, has just joined the crowded eBook market -- but it brings little to the table to recommend itself. The app when first run looks beautiful. You are shown a wonderfully rendered bookshelf which looks very similar to the one found in Classics [iTunes Link], but a bit more nicely rendered, showing the spines of books instead of covers in a scrolling list.

Impressive, but now what? I really had no idea since there were no instructions on how to operate the app either in the app, or on the Readdle site. This, as I've often said, is a major downfall of many of the apps in the store. It would be fine if it were an adventure game, but not at all acceptable in something offering utility that you would like to get at quickly.

The only documentation in the app is a cursory explanation of one of three methods of getting content into the app -- connecting via Wi-Fi and WebDAV to your computer in a fairly arcane manner. You connect to an external server and provide an app-created numeric password. From there you can add books to the server folder... or so they say, but they don't go as far as saying how. I added books to the server, and they never showed up in the app. I was left stranded on the Wi-fi access page and didn't know where to go from there. Now I know that I'm missing something minuscule, but that's exactly my point; there wasn't enough given to me to allow me to complete the task.

The second method of acquiring content is through Readdle Storage. You need to set up an account on the Readdle site which gives you a free 512 megabytes; larger amounts of storage are available for purchase. Once you set up an account, it works fine, but unless you know what to do, you may not find it on your own. You can easily add documents to Readdle Storage and they do show up in the app.

Many documents, unfortunately, don't look very attractive. Anything that started as a .pdf document winds up looking like garbage since all the graphics are gone, and the formatting is stripped out. The list of formats that BookReader handles is also lacking. It doesn't understand some very popular formats such as Kindle, MobiPocket and Microsoft Word's .DOC as do other apps such as Stanza [iTunes Link]. DRM is not supported, but that's par for the course in the eReader market.

TouchPad [iTunes Link] is my new best friend. It allows you to control the mouse and keyboard on your Mac through your iPhone, as well as Front Row. It is currently on sale in the App Store for $1.99 (50% off) for a "limited time" so you may want to grab it while you can.

At the end of most days, I settle into bed to watch a little TV on my iMac through EyeTV. Last night I was all snuggled under the covers when I realized that I had left the mouse pointer over the video window. EyeTV kept thinking that I wanted to move the "time scrubber" and so it kept popping up the on-screen overlay.

Most of the time I keep an Apple Wireless Keyboard on my nightstand in case I need to control my iMac from bed (don't you judge me!) but the batteries had run out. I pulled myself out of bed, went to the kitchen where the batteries had recharged, put them into my keyboard... and they still didn't work. So I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out why before I finally gave up.

All I really needed to do was move the mouse off-screen. If I had TouchPad, I could have done that.

When I viewed the webpage and iTunes listing for TouchPad, I wasn't clear how it worked. Turns out it is very simple.

By default, TouchPad works like a touchpad on a Mac laptop. Drag your finger around the iPhone screen and watch the mouse move across your Mac (yes, it supports multiple monitors).

Tap the keyboard icon and the usual iPhone keyboard will appear with the addition of several special keys: escape, tab, shift, control, option, and the classic Mac "cloverleaf" command key. These special control keys are used when you want to access keyboard shortcut such as cmd+space to bring up Spotlight.

Tape the "Play/Pause" icon and you will be presented with what looks like a regular Apple remote control; however, it will only control Front Row. Click "Start" and Front Row will launch on your Mac, and then you can use the TouchPad controls to navigate. Press Quit to exit Front Row.

I was disappointed to see there are no Function keys, making it impossible to change the brightness, or use the play/pause, fast-forward, rewind media keys, or even trigger Exposé or the Dashboard. You can adjust the volume settings if you have it in the menu bar, but that would be a pretty precise "hit" from across the room. It would be a good addition to add a third icon up near the existing two in the top-left (keyboard and Front Row remote) to add the "fn" key plus F1-14 and an eject button.

That said, for $2 this app is a steal. It works quickly, the setup instructions are very straightforward. You can easily control multiple Macs. It supports Leopard and Snow Leopard using Screen Sharing, and it also supports Tiger using Apple Remote Desktop settings.

A quick search of "VNC" in the App Store results in about 25 applications, including Jasdu VNC which appears to be a full VNC client which will put your computer screen on your iPhone (see its website for more information). Very cool, but a costly $25 far more than I would spend without being able to try it out first. (Dear Apple: please give developers a way to offer time-limited demos so we can "try it before we buy it!")

I have not tried all of these VNC applications (I'm sure TUAW readers will let us know in the comments which ones we should check out) but TouchPad is going on the home page of my iPhone, and my Apple Wireless Keyboard has lost its spot on my nightstand. (Another TUAW favorite is HippoRemote which you'll be hearing more about soon. You might want to check it out too!)

Zensify announced its latest app, ZenNews [iTunes link], this morning. It's basically an intelligent news aggregator, using algorithms to find "what's hot" from a variety of sources including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, the Guardian and more. It parses Twitter and other social mediums to figure out who's talking about what, and then creates a tag cloud of hot topics. There's an aggregated view combining all sources, or you can view a tag cloud for each source. You can toggle sources and/or categories on and off in the preferences.

If a keyword in the tag cloud reveals more than 5 articles, tapping it will drill down into another tag cloud, repeated until the keyword returns a list of 5 or fewer articles. View articles within ZenNews using the built-in webkit browser, or open them in Safari. You can always switch from the tag cloud to a list view for any page, and there's a default view titled "All News" which lists all the aggregated news (in list format) at once. You can drill down to specific topics in the Categories view, and see what's new/hot from all enabled sources for a single category. As you read, you can mark any article as a favorite, and view a list of your marked articles in the Favorites view. You can quickly share articles via Twitter or email, as well.

It's all quite slick, and pretty solid for a first release. I did run into a bug which would bring up blank tag cloud pages if a specific combination of being on a certain view and losing a network connection at the right time occurred. I spoke with the developers yesterday, and I'm confident they'll smooth out any wrinkles quickly.

Zensify is offering ZenNews for free. Their plan is to demonstrate the buzz-detecting algorithms, and then offer white-label versions -- using a subscription model -- to companies with a need for up-to-the-minute buzz tracking. For the rest of us, this is a good-looking and, as far as I've been able to tell, accurate way to see what's happening in the world at any given moment. Check out the gallery below for a preview, and grab a copy on the App Store.