There’s two iOS apps that I’ve been really happy with lately. The first is an iPhone/iPod touch game I found recently called The Impossible Game (Opens in iTunes). It’s a very simple game, but totally addicting. And at only 99 cents, it’s a great value. There’s really only two levels right now, but getting through them will take most people a very long time. You can check out a video of the gameplay here. It’s a great little time-waster, and the music is fun and upbeat. Give it a try.

The other app is for the iPad and called Penultimate (Opens in iTunes). This app is one of many free-form notes/sketching apps available for the iPad. What has always set this one apart is how smooth and responsive it is. It literally feels like you’re writing with a smooth pen on paper. However, Penultimate always suffered from a lack of features. But in the last two versions, this app has become vastly more useful with the introduction of different colors, three different pen sizes, a smart eraser that changes size automatically and really amazing palm detection. This last feature is my favorite, as it allows me to rest my hand on the screen as I normally would while writing with my pogo sketch stylus. It’s really great.
As a side note, the makers of the pogo stylus just showed a proof-of-concept video that shows an app with pressure-sensitive drawing using a standard pogo stylus. They’re releasing the code for free, so hopefully it will be implemented by Penultimate. The only problem is that it uses techniques that are currently prohibited by Apple, so it might take a while…

So check out these two cool apps, and let me know how you like them in the comments.

This afternoon, I installed the new iOS4 update on my 32GB iPhone 3GS and went out to dinner. When I got there, I found that my cellular data connection over 3G wasn’t working. I tried resetting the phone and resetting the network settings, but neither worked. I found this forum thread with many other people suffering from the same problem. It seems the only way to fix it is to restore to factory settings and then upgrade to iOS4 from there. Of course, you will lose all your data and settings if you do this. I was able to confirm this solution. Image by 160 over 90

If you have a lot of apps and data on your phone, I would suggest you wait until this issue is resolved. It seems like it only applies to 3GS models, but I wouldn’t take my chances with it. Let’s hope it gets solved soon. If you find another way to get around this problem, leave it in the comments.

I recently discovered a great app for jailbroken iPhones called QuickScroll. This small utility adds translucent scroll bars (seen in the screenshot) to any app on your iPhone. I had always complained about how difficult it was to scroll through long web pages and documents on the iPhone, but this program solved the problem perfectly. You can activate the scroll bars by a variety of methods, set how long they stay on the screen, and even disable them for certain apps. This is a remarkably useful little program, and it’s free from either Cydia or Rock. Give it a try!

From now until June 11th, Navigon is offering its three MyRegion GPS apps for only $14.99, a 50% discount. Image by App-Alooza

I originally bought Magellan, because I was impressed with the unique predictive keyboard, but I’ve since become unhappy with it. So far, I’m very impressed with Navigon. It has superior music controls and a cleaner interface than any of the other GPS apps available. At this price, I think this app is unbeatable, so I recommend you buy it soon. [via TUAW]

Several months ago, I finally broke down and decided to jailbreak my iPhone. I had avoided taking this step because of the complication it would add to my iPhone experience. I reasoned that Apple’s whole point with their phone was that it would just work, and I would never have to worry about it. This worked fine for over a year with my iPod touch and several months with my iPhone, but I eventually decided that having something “just work” isn’t always good enough.

Once I was sure there would be no irreparable harm done to my phone, I gave jailbreaking a try with the blackra1n utility. After a minute or two I was happily installing apps not approved by Apple. While some of the features of my newly-jailbroken phone were strictly esthetic, there was some great new functionality. Jailbreaking was great, but I would still rather have the functionality I want implemented by Apple.

With this in mind, I was practically giddy waiting for last Thursday’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. With all the rumors of possible features, I thought that I might be able to switch back to an unaltered iPhone. But while I was overall very pleased with the changes made for OS 4.0, I quickly decided that I will still need to jailbreak my phone, and here’s why:

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