How to Use the iPhone Application Store

Josh Dubois: Hi, I am Josh Dubois. Today, we're talking about the iPhone 3G and the Software 2.0. And right now we're going to go over possibly the biggest feature of the new software release and that is the Application Store.

The first thing to do for either 3G iPhone owners or the original iPhone owners is to download iTunes 7.7. This has the Application Store in it.

Next, you want to make sure that your old iPhone or your iPod Touch has the new firmware, the 2.0 release. If you have an iPod Touch, this will cost you $9.99. Go ahead and download that.

First, we'll show you how to use the Application Store through iTunes. If your application -- the Application Store is down there to the left underneath music. Here are some of the newest applications available. Up here to the right we'll see that you can browse and search for applications. You also have your account and old iTunes information.

Next, down here we'll see that you have the top paid applications. So these are the ones that you have to pay money for. Most of them are around $9.99. Through the applications that are considered hot basically this means combination through new and downloaded a lot. Here's the list of the top ten free applications. Currently Remote is number one.

We'll go over here and you can see the categories of applications and right above that are the three categories of iPhone applications, iPod Touch applications and all the free applications. The free applications are really small, so you might as well download all of them. Over here to the left underneath audio books, this is where all of your applications reside, and you can see here I've got quite a few of them already; they list them alphabetically.

Down here to the right you can see that you can check for updates of all of your applications, currently none of mine need updates. And then right down to the right of that you can go and find more applications.

Now I will say, even if the application is small, it does take a significant amount of time to install it on your phone. So if you've just gotten your iPhone and you want to play with a couple of different applications, I suggest not loading up your iPhone with about 30 applications right away, pick the one or two that you want to play with and then later when you go to bed, go ahead and sync up the rest of these. Say an application is about 5 megabytes, it takes way longer than a 5 megabyte song to actually put on your iPhone because it actually is installing.

All my apps together took right around an hour. Choose the App Store on your phone; it's really, really intuitive. It will bring you to a feature page at first. It shows you all the ones -- basically the same ones that are featured on the iTunes page. You can browse by category, just the same as on iTunes. You got your top 25 that's actually not on iTunes. You have the search and then you can check to see if all of your apps are up-to-date.

The only thing different about the App Store on your phone and on your iTunes is if you're not connected to a Wi-Fi signal, you can't download applications that are more than 10 megabytes. Honestly, most of them aren't, so you should be fine. If you have a Wi-Fi connection to your phone then you can download even the biggest applications but if you're downloading straight from the network, you can't download anything over 10 megabytes on your iPhone.