Not all the applications in the app store are serious. There are a wide variety of games in the store, even good free ones. The iPhone and iPod Touch is an amazing device for games with its large widescreen, accelerometer controls and touch screen, these all put together can be put to good use in interesting games. The iPhone and iPod Touch is very powerful and can support games that are on par with a lot of the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable games. I have played quite a few different games on my iPhone. Here are my top free games for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Aurora Feint -This game is pretty similar to Bejeweled, where you have to line up 3 cubes to make them disappear. The only difference is that the blocks are getting pushed up, so you must not let them get to the roof of the level. You can tilt the device to allow you to move the blocks vertically or horizontally, in relation to the game board. The unusual thing about this game is that you are collecting to blocks so you can get abilities and things for your character. I assume that there is going to be more to this game, because this game is Aurora Feint: The Beginning.

BubbleWrap – This is an interesting game to show off the touch screen. You have a sheet of bubble wrap, and you have to pop them. Pop as many as you can in the allocated time and you may get a high score. The bubbles come back up so you can pop them again. Its fun for 5 minutes, but it is a really good app to show off what the touch screen on this device can do.

Cube Runner – Most of the people that want to play on my iPhone want to play this game. Its a very simple looking game, where you control the turning of a little ship thing and you go through the level dodging cubes and as you progress, you get faster and faster and then weird things start happening to try and put you off. This simple game is quite challenging and fun. Do check this one out. It’s a great demo of what this thing can do.

Lightsaber Unleashed -Who doesn’t want a lightsaber? Well here you can have one, a virtual one, with built in lights and sounds. You can have different coloured one that can fill up the whole screen with saber glow and as you move it around, it makes battle sounds. Its a really cool app to show people, especially geeks. Other than that, it is useless, but cool to have there.

Sol Free Solitaire -As the name suggests, this is free solitaire. This app has a large selection of card games, including solitaire. Its the exact same game you are familiar with, just on the iPhone or iPod touch and using the touch screen. There is not much more to say. If you like card games, get this app!

Spinner Prologue – You are a button thing, and your goal is to traverse through the maze to the finish. Instead of directly controlling the object, it moves forward and you move your device around, from a vertical position to make it turn. It starts off easy and straight forward, but it gets really difficult further on and the levels get more complex and you need to be able to traverse awkward parts of the maze, and fast.

Tilt Me Lite – This is a fun little game for demoing the accelerometer on this device. You have to get a little ball, onto a small circle and hold it there for a few seconds. As you roll over the tiles on the level, it makes a sound. It provides really interesting sounds as you play along. It gets a little more difficult when you have to get 2 balls onto 2 different circles at the same time, and hold them there for a few seconds. Fun little game and great demo.

Tris – Unfortunately, this app is no longer in the app store because the developer was forced to remove it by the people who own Tetris. This app is Tetris. The controls could be a bit better but that is the only gripe about this game. There is not much you can do to Tetris. Tetris is Tetris, and this is a well made version of it. I like the high scores list, except for the fact that it is filled completely with my name. If this app ever returns, snap it up while you still can.

One of the great things about the App store is the wide variety of free apps. A lot of these are pretty well done, some even being higher quality to some paid apps. These applications do a number of things including storing and displaying different kinds of information and performing various tasks. I have used quite a number of apps on my iPhone and here is a wide selection of ones I have on my iPhone. These are my top free applications for iPhone and iPod Touch.

1Password – This application is great for storing your passwords onto your iPhone. It is PIN and password protected so you don’t have to worry about someone finding out your passwords. It can be time consuming to type in a password using the iPhone and this app makes its a piece of cake to login. Also, if you have heaps of different passwords for sites, this will make it easy to manage them on this device.

Balance – I use this application to keep track of the money that I have stored in one of my bank accounts. This is not a very feature full app but it does what I want it to do, keep track of deposits, and any odd withdrawals, on my account. I can access and see the balance of my account anywhere. I’m sure there are many other applications this can be used for too.

DoBot ToDos – This is a free to do list application. What makes this one great, is that you can have multiple categories of list, and inside them have your todo’s for that. You can write notes with them and set due dates, like you can do with most other todo applications. I use this for keeping track of personal tasks as well as school tasks. These are kept in separately, which is how I like them.

Fring – This app is pretty new but I can see it being a really useful app. What this does it allow for VoIP calls over wifi. You can use this to talk over Skype or SIP or lots of other common voice chat messaging clients. The quality is really good as well. There are still features that could be added, but this is a really nice, and promising app. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do VoIP over 3G, which is what a lot of iPhone users want.

Light – The Light app I use has been removed from the app store for some reason. Still, you should definitely find a good light app from the store. You may not use it for a while and it will just be sitting there on your home screen but one day, it will come in handy, and you can thank me then. My one has a bunch of customizations, you can change the colour of the light, and there were even some flashing ones. My personal favourite is the police light, a blue and red flashing light. In saying that, the white is the best, because it is practical to use so I can see in the dark.

MiGhtyDocs – If you use Google Docs, this application is great! No, this doesn’t allow you to edit your documents or spreadsheets, but it does let you view them on the iPhone. But there is an added bonus, you can view any cached documents for offline viewing when you don’t have an internet connection. It’s really good for storing files you may want to look at offline, and on our iPhone.

Pocketpedia – Got any of the Pedia software on your Mac? If so, then this is definitely a must have app. This allows you to access your media collections right on your device. Even if you don’t have this software, it allows you to create collections right on the device. You just search for the Movie, Album, Game, or Book, and it finds on Amazon and you can add it to your list. You can also use it to make wishlists, so if you find an item you want, you can add it to your list to get at a later date.

Remote – This has to be the first application that you download! It does wonders. It allows you to control your iTunes via your iPhone or iPod Touch. It has a similar interface to the iPod tools on the device, so you should already be familiar with how to use it. It looks exactly as if you were controlling the music on your device, except you are really controlling music on an external iTunes library on your network. I found it to work really well when using a full screen application, such as a game, and didn’t want to minimise to exit to control my music. Remote allowed me to do this easily.

Shazam – I’m sure you’ve been either listening to the radio or in a shop playing music and wonder what is the name of the song playing. Well this app helps you with answering that question. You launch the app and get it to listen to a few seconds of a song and it will return you back the name of the song, the artist and the album and save it in a list, and even provide you with links to purchase it in the iTunes store. With this app, never again will you be wishing you knew what the name of the song playing.

WeDict – This is a pocket dictionary, on your iPhone! It comes with word lists and allows you to easily find the definition of a word in a few seconds. No longer do you have to find a dictionary, and then spend time searching for the word. This take 10 seconds to get you the definition of the word you are looking for. Not everyone needs a dictionary, but if you do, why not get this app?

The iPhone is an amazing device, don’t get me wrong. In saying that, there is still room for improvement. That is why we have hacks for this device. A “jailbroken” iPhone can do much more than its virgin self. These include unlocking, unofficial third party apps, background applications, accessing the file system and theme modifications. The main reason my iPhone is jailbroken is because it is illegitimately on Vodafone, which required an unlock to do so. All the other reasons are secondary, but do offer so much more over an unjailbroken iPhone. There are 2 major pieces of software that jailbreaks your iPhone, or iPod Touch, PwnageTool for Mac OS X and WinPwn for Windows XP/Vista.

After receiving a 1.1.4 jailbroken and unlocked iPhone, I quickly wanted to update and jailbreak to 2.0. After over a month of waiting. Eventually it did finally arrive and I could happily get iPhone software 2.0. This method required me to get the WinPwn software, the official 2.0 restore image. WinPwn then creates a custom software image, with the jailbreak and Cydia (unofficial third-part app loader.) It then pwnd iTunes to allow me to restore this custom firmware onto the iPhone. From here, it’s all up to iTunes for updating the device.

First you need to backup your iPhone. This is so you can later restore your settings, messages and such back onto the device. From here, you put your iPhone into DFU, which an unusual process that you can find instructions to on the internet. This will get iTunes to prompt you to restore your device. Then you hold down the shift key while clicking restore and then you can now select the custom software you built earlier. Then it pretty much does its job updating the software. After this lengthy wait, you will then want to restore your setting and sync your music, videos and such back over to your iPhone. This whole process took me about an hour.

After that, you are left with a nice, jailbroken iPhone, ready with Cydia to get your fix of unofficial third party apps, along with the new App Store for your official applications. You also should have all your settings and files back from before the restore. Thankfully, this process has been made much easier. Shortly after Apple released the first 2.0 bug-fix version, the team behind PwnageTool released another jailbreaking tool, QuickPwn. What this does is jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch without having to do the full, lengthy restore each time. I used this process to update to 2.0.1 right through to the most recent 2.1 software.

To do a QuickPwn, you first get the QuickPwn software, and the official iPhone software. You then use iTunes to update your software. This will get rid of all your jailbroken apps, but all your other files and setting will stay in tack. Because this isn’t a full on restore, it takes a fifth of the time to update. After you have your upgraded iPhone, you then launch the QuickPwn software and follow the instructions. It will get you to point to the official firmware and then instruct you on how to DFU the iPhone. Then after a few minutes, the process will be complete and you can now re-download your unofficial third party apps.

It is amazing how they managed to change the way you jailbreak your iPhone device. No longer are they days where you spend over an hour to restore you iPhone with the custom jailbroken firmware, we are now in the quick jailbreaking days where there are no restores or restoring backups. The process takes a short 15 minutes, or less. The jailbreaking process couldn’t be so easy and friendly to do.

Over the past few years, there has been a whole lot of hype about a game created by Will Wright, the maker of The Sims. This game was Spore. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. Well that’s what Wikipedia says, and yes, it is about that. As well as the big PC title, there was also a mini version, Spore Origins for mobile devices. This concentrates on just the first stage of the main game as a unicellular organism.

To start off, I played Spore Origins on the iPhone. The controls on this are very basic, using the accelerometer to control your little organism through the level on its objective to eat enough guppy creature things to collect enough DNA to move on. Most of the levels are this, except they start including unique creatures for you to attack or defend against. There are also special levels where you have to traverse a maze-like setting and your goal here is to get to the end without being killed by other creatures. This goes on for most of the 30 levels in the game, except for the 2 boss levels where you have to attack and kill huge creatures. This game is small, a little challenging at times but is worth checking out.

After getting to the end of that, I evolved onto the full PC title, Spore. At the start, it is much like the Spore Origins game, where you eat meat to grow and evolve. There is a fair bit more depth to the unicellular organism stage of Spore compared to its Origins counterpart. From here, you get to the stage where you grow legs and go onto land and either become friendly with another species or kill them. For me, this part of the game was the most interesting. It’s also where you get to customise your creature the most and turn it into your own unique creation.

Unfortunately for me, this is where the game all goes downhill for me. Then comes the Tribal stage where you either form friend a tribe, or again destroy them. Although the difference this time is that it is done in a RTS kinda way. The problem is it is not quite an RTS and is a bit weak. After this is the Civilisation stage. This is where it get completely ridiculous! It’s still the RTS type game but here you create the buildings yourself. that may be fun for some people, but I can’t be bothered with this. I couldn’t find any auto or random button so the game throws some random parts together to whip something up quickly in 5 seconds so I can get back to the actual game. Maybe I am missing something, but it’s still pretty annoying and ridiculous. I endured anyway and through the taking over of cities and silliness of creating building and vechiles.

From here, the game started getting better again, although not as good as the second stage of the game, in my opinion. Here you traverse through space, encountering other civilized planets. There are missions you have to do here to get through the game, and there are even missions to be done so you can form a good relationship with a civilization so you can form an alliance with them. Or you can annoy them and go to war with them, your choice. What you do through this stage, you collect badges for various objectives and such. This is by far the longest part of the game, and the rest of the game has literally been building up to this point.

To get a good feel of the game, you’d have to play it yourself, either by purchasing the game, or acquiring it by other methods. I did enjoy the game, but there was a lot I didn’t like about it. The game felt like a whole bunch of little mediocre games all thrown in a blender and released as some sort of huge game. For example, for anyone who has played a real RTS before, the RTS stages of this game will feel horrible to play and fairly weak. Although they definitely aren’t going for a full experience like you would from an actual game from that genre. This game is probably not going to give much to gamers, but for non-gamers or casual gamers, they might enjoy this a whole lot more because it offers a wide range of different things to do. This game was definitely not for me, but hey, it might just be the game for you.