As you might imagine, my iPhone is more littered with games than useful stuff like Steve's or Victor's. Sure, I've got Twitterific and NetNewsWire, but my most-used apps are of the video game variety.

The game that's most grabbed me so far is Aurora Feint. When it was first released, I didn't get much out of it, but since it's been updated a few times, Aurora Feint has turned into a pretty deep puzzle/RPG. There have been some security scares, unfortunately, and the game's "MMO" promises haven't yet come to fruition. But for sheer matching puzzle gameplay (it's similar to the great Poker Smash on Xbox Live), it's probably the most addictive game on the App Store.

My second favorite is Characters (I originally wrote about it on WoW Insider). If you play World of Warcraft and have an iPhone, this is the closest thing you'll find to an official Blizzard app. It lets you see every bit of information on the Armory in a very nice-looking iPhone app format. We're still waiting on Blizzard to provide us with an iPhone version of the in-game Auction House or mailbox, but until then, this is a great way to look up the WoW characters of folks you meet.

And finally, I've been really impressed with Midomi (and also the similar Shazam), a music recognition app. Hit the app, let it listen to a song you're hearing (or even you singing the song or saying the lyrics), and it'll tell you exactly what that song is. And once you've find it, you can listen to it, find it in iTunes or on Youtube, or see band pictures and reviews. Midomi is the kind of app I've never had on any other devices I've owned, and yet I've put it to great use a few times.

Honorable mentions go to Freeverse's (renamed) Moto Chaser, which is consistently the game that most impresses people playing with my iPhone; Trism, which turned out to be an excellent game, and Frotz and Sketches, both of which I've written about here before.

And I'm still waiting for two things: some great persistent pet gameplay (Wil Shipley, what happened to all of those ideas?), and some great location-based MMO gameplay as well. There's good stuff out there, but we're still just getting started in the App Store.

So the first generation of games and apps is in the iPhone's App Store, and as predicted, we've got more than our share of accelerometer races and the usual gaming standbys -- Tetris, poker, and even some nice tech demos like Andy Qua's Cube Runner. But now it's time to iterate and see if we can't start filling some of the promises a great would-be gaming platform like the iPhone offers. How about an in-depth RPG that uses the clock or camera, or a full-length platformer, or a social game that takes advantage of things like location awareness?

Italian company KikiTechonlogy dropped us a note to say they're doing their part -- they're working on a full-length, console-style RPG for the iPhone called PanfobiA. Unfortunately, we hope the game's translation is better than their blog post -- they're working towards "performing not less than 100 hours in single player," and "Online Gameing Modality," which is supposed to be some type of online gameplay after the singleplayer experience. The pictures provide a little more hope -- they show a nice sense of art direction and some old-school style RPG characters.

But even if PanfobiA is nothing but vaporware, they've got the right idea. For years, PDAs and mobile phones have had games, but they've all boiled down to poker, puzzles, and putrid junk. Now that the App Store is up and running, we can't wait for a developer to step up and provide a really deep and satisfying gaming experience on the platform.

One of our tipsters, Kenneth, pointed us to a Chinese web page (Google translation) showing what appears to be an iPhone running some sort of handwriting recognition geared especially for Chinese characters. According to the post, this is how Apple will integrate Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) input into the iPhone. As you write the character, you are presented with a list of the possible characters on the right side of the input pane.

According to MacRumors, Apple recently started hiring "Handwriting Recognition Engineers," could this mean the iPhone is coming to China soon? Only time will tell, but this should definitely give people something to hope for.


Thanks, Kenneth.