Apps, Gadgets | featured news

If you've got a new iPad 2, or you're getting one today, you'll be needing some apps to put on it. Here are some suggestions.

A new iPhone application is designed to help blind people identify United States currency in real time by speaking the denomination aloud.

A major software attack that distributed malicious programs to around 260,000 Android phones has put pressure on Google to do more to secure its market for smartphone apps.

A new report predicts that revenues from downloadable applications will reach $38 billion by 2015. It may be hard to remember, but when the Apple iPhone had its debut in early 2007 there were only a few apps available for the device — no Angry Birds, Doodle Jump or Netflix.

The top 5 things I'm hoping to see in The Daily, the iPad-only news serviceFull Coverage: iPad

When it came to translations, you used to either need an interpreter or a book to navigate another language. That was either costly or cumbersome, respectively. Then the Internet came along and made things significantly easier. Except you had to be chained to your computer to translate something. A year ago, Google made things easier again by launching their Translate app for Android.

"The Smurfs' Village," a game for the iPhone and other Apple gadgets, was released a month ago and quickly became the highest-grossing application in the iTunes store. Yet it's free to download.So where does the money come from? Kelly Rummelhart of Gridley, Calif., has part of the answer. Her 4-year-old son was using her iPad to play the game and racked up $66.88 in charges on her credit card without knowing what he was doing.

Nokia today publicly confirmed a milestone for the Ovi Store that also highlighted its current struggle to gain support from developers. The company now says that it sees 2.3 million downloads every day, up from just two million only a few weeks earlier. About 200,000 new users sign on each day.

But as you scroll down the list of Kindle offerings, you can't help but notice all of the steamy writing that seems to be targeted at men--an emotionally uncommitted genre which, if not exactly new, is associated with book publishing less commonly than with "Penthouse Forum."

The App Store review office at 1 Infinite Loop has officially frozen over: we've gotten word that the official Google Voice application is on its way to the iPhone in the next few weeks. In fact, we've heard from a source close to Google that it's already been approved — Google just needs to revamp the application to work with the iPhone 4 and iOS's multitasking capabilities. If you're a Google Voice user and you're on an iPhone, this is great news.

It's been a long, long road to get here.