APPLE turned on the tap for its iPhone App store last week, unleashing more than 500 applications for iPhone users. If you have an iPhone, you just might forget the device is capable of making phone calls, since you’ll be so busy updating Facebook pages, coveting your neighbor’s co-op and wielding your handset to swerve around virtual racetracks.

The store is an object lesson for other cellphone makers and carriers on how to make your customers’ phones indispensable. The App Store is simple to use, thanks to its elegant and intuitive interface. Many of the apps are free, and most cost $9.99 or less (although a select few cost as much as $79.99).

Five buttons — Featured, Categories, Top 25, Search and Updates — line the bottom of the screen, and that’s about all you need to navigate. Each app includes an overview from the publisher, a rating (one to five stars) and user reviews. If you’re considering a for-pay program, read the comments first because reviewers often describe glitches that might change your mind.

The Categories screen will give you a good idea of the sweeping breadth of apps available, from work (scientific calculators) to play (tossing cows), with an emphasis on fun.

If you know what you’re looking for, the fastest way to get it is to enter keywords in the search field. To download an app, simply touch and hold the Install key. The phone will ask for your iTunes password, and then will automatically load the app. If the app maker charges a fee, the amount will be charged to your iTunes account.

The most promising of the new programs take advantage of the iPhone 3G’s built-in G.P.S. to provide location-aware capabilities. Suppose you’re having a drink after work and suddenly sushi seems like an imperative. Apps such as Yelp can automatically pinpoint your current location using G.P.S. and display nearby Japanese restaurants.

The iPhone can also do double duty as a hand-held gaming console, thanks to its accelerometer, which, for instance, lets you use the device to steer a race car in a driving simulator game. Better yet, the graphics are surprisingly crisp.

Many of the software titles present information that you could also find using the iPhone’s Safari Web browser, but the apps often win out. Say, for instance, you want to check your Facebook page. If you navigate to the Web site using Safari, you’ll need to home in on a certain part of the page and enlarge it to read, then scoot around to other parts of the page as necessary. With the Facebook app for the iPhone, all the information is reformatted so it is readable and organized. No scooting required.

One important limitation is that applications don’t run in the background, so if you’re listening to an online radio station and toggle to your e-mail application, you’ll lose the radio feed.

Here are eight of the best applications currently available. (Visit nytimes.com/personaltech for a slide show that shows you these and 10 other top picks.)

Entertainment

BoxOffice (Free): BoxOffice takes advantage of the iPhone’s G.P.S. capabilities to find movies near you. You can browse by theater, movies, showtimes and distance. When you find what you want, BoxOffice provides a short synopsis of each movie and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site. It will also display the address of the theater, and locate it for you on Google Maps. You can even link to Fandango for ticket purchases.

Games

Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D ($9.99): Flip your iPhone horizontal and hop into a hot rod with the crusading Crash Bandicoot. The iPhone’s accelerometer enables you to steer your car by tilting the phone to the left and right. The game offers 12 tracks and environments, as well as plenty of opportunities to blast through opponents and crates of fruit. The graphics are mighty impressive, but be warned that this game will drain your battery faster than an S-curve wipe-out.

Health Care and Fitness

Epocrates Rx (Free): This prescription-drug database contains data on more than 3,300 brand-name and generic drugs. While it’s meant for health care professionals, Epocrates delivers a wealth of information that is useful to consumers, too. For instance, Epocrates spells out common medication dosages for adults and children, side effects, interactions with other medications and even photos of the pills to help you identify or verify medication.

Lifestyle

Yelp (Free): Yelp fuses social networking, user reviews and local searches into one easy-to-use app that’s essential for any iPhone on the roam. This portable version of Yelp.com, a Web portal that has been around for a few years, has a substantial stock of user reviews (with ratings) and content. You can use G.P.S. to search for nearby restaurants, bars, coffee and tea shops, banks, gas stations and drugstores. Click the Map button and Yelp will display all search results on a Google Map.

Music

Tuner ($4.99): When you tire of your own tunes (remember, the iPhone is also an iPod), turn on Tuner, an app that serves up thousands of Internet radio stations in a format that makes it easy to find exactly what you want to hear. You can either browse its incredibly comprehensive genres section (Albanian, anyone?), check out the Top 500 list, or simply search for your own favorite station. As with most Internet radio stations, the sound isn’t CD quality and the volume is sometimes a bit low, but the selection is vast. Be warned, however, that when you flip to another application, Tuner closes and you lose audio.

Navigation

CityTransit NYC Subway Guide ($2.99): This subway map (no folding!) is your guide to trains in the New York metro area. Plan your transportation via a map view or using a stop-by-stop subway line view. If you’re out and don’t know where to find the nearest subway, hit the Locate button for a list of nearby stations. Select one and CityTransit will plot the station for you on a Google Map. Bonus: The app also includes maps of Long Island Rail Road and Metro North.

Social Networking

MySpace (Free): The MySpace site is known for its unabashedly homely appearance, so it’s a bit surprising that its software developers delivered an iPhone app that is attractive, easy to use, and packed with features. The app offers many of the same features as the Web site (without the annoying music). Check on all your friends by viewing their photos, bulletins and comments. This app is an amazingly tight distillation of the full-fledged MySpace site.

Sports

MLB.com At Bat ($4.99): Stat-happy baseball fans will cheer for MLB.com At Bat, which delivers real-time scores of all Major League Baseball games. Click a game (they’re organized by date) and you’ll get an inning-by-inning rundown of runs scored, as well as stats on the winning and losing pitchers. Each game includes eight or so video clips of the day’s highlights (they look great on a Wi-Fi connection but woefully choppy on AT&T’s 3G network).

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Nintendo’s global president Satoru Iwata is humble enough to admit that even he had been surprised by the epidemic-like success of the Wii console.

He told BBC News: “It was so fast. We knew the Wii was the right direction for the company. But the question was always how many years it would take to find success.”

The answer was two years. In that brief time Nintendo has dramatically altered its fortunes in the home console business, while at the same time maintaining, and even improving, its dominance in the handheld gaming space with the DS.

Play time

The change of fortunes began when Mr Iwata took over as president of Nintendo in 2002, only the fourth man to hold the position since the company was founded 109 years ago.

Speaking to BBC News at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) In Los Angeles, he said: “Five years ago when I was appointed I thought that if we didn’t do anything but took the same route there would be no bright future for the entire industry.

“So we decided we needed to increase the number of people gaming.

“We started thinking about people who weren’t playing games and asked ourselves why they were not interested. And why had some people stopped playing despite playing in their youth?”

The solution was not a rush towards a high definition games platform targeted at the hard core gamer but remembering the simple pleasures of playing with family and friends.

The Wii console introduced a mass market of gamers to motion-sensitive play, replacing the button-laden controller with a wand that could direct action with the flick of a wrist.

Within weeks of the Wii’s launch people were taking their new console around to the homes of friends and family, and word of mouth quickly spread.

“It was so fast because those who appreciated the new attractions of Wii must have been those who used to play video games. And these people were telling friends and family about the console.

“People who first started playing with the Wii were so excited that they had to spread the news.”

History lesson

The success came after the perceived disappointment of the GameCube, which finished its lifespan behind the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in terms of global sales, selling 22 million units over seven years.

Nintendo had tried to compete directly with Microsoft and Sony and failed.

Nintendo’s GameCube came a distant third in the console rankings

Its resulting and ultimately successful move was to realise that the market of people who could play games but were not was much bigger than the market of those already playing games on a regular basis.

“It was somewhat out of the boundaries of common sense for the time,” said Mr Iwata.

“From the perspective of people from outside the industry it might have looked like a gamble. But I do not think it was a gamble at all.”

One of the original criticisms of the Wii at launch was that the underpowered machine would increasingly suffer in comparison to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as the machines went through their lifecycle.

But Mr Iwata dismissed talk of a console lifespan as nonsense and somewhat irrelevant.

“After all, the primary concern is not to let consumers purchase hardware but to enjoy software,” he said.

Future fun

But that did not mean Nintendo was not already thinking about life beyond the Wii.

“However hard our software developers try to create new and unprecedented titles with great ideas eventually there will be a day when devs will say they have no more means with that hardware.

“That’s exactly the time we need to introduce people to new hardware. We do want to be flexible about this,” he said.

Wii sports games will get a boost from the new add-on

“We just don’t want to decide upon a fixed lifecycle of any platform.”

Addressing another criticism of the Wii, Mr Iwata said it was a “misunderstanding and misconception” to say that the console was struggling to attract support from developers outside of Nintendo.

“The number of third-party titles for Wii is actually more than what is available for other platforms.

“And in the initial launch platform period for any platform, the third-party software titles for Wii are outselling any of the third-party titles for other platforms.”

Nintendo remains the home for some of gaming’s most enduring franchises and icons, from Mario to Zelda and the success of the Wii has ensured they will remain part of the landscape for some time to come.

But there were no details of any new Mario or Zelda titles given at the recent press conference held by Nintendo to highlight its plans for the months ahead.

“At this E3 we had to focus on software for the mass audience and software that will be sold in this year or next.

“This one of the rare opportunities to reach out to mass audiences around the world.

“In order for us to create a new Super Mario game or Legend of Zelda game that can cater to the strong demands of core gamers around the world it takes two to three years.”

While its competitors battle to become the multimedia hub for the digital living room Nintendo is determined to continue on its course of “putting smiles on people’s faces”.

He said: “All we have got to do is carry on. People are going to get tired of new proposals. We have to offer them new proposals before they do.

“We really want to keep surprising people,” he said, then added: “It’s not easy at all.”

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