Loopt is a mobile service that allows users to track friends on a map and communicate with them. It's now available for BlackBerry users on Alltel, Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T, and it's coming to the iPhone, according to a report on InformationWeek last month.

Loopt will allow iPhone users to track friends on a map and communicate with them.
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You download the free program, set up a network of friends, and tag their locations and your own using the handsets' GPS. Loopt will alert you when a friend is nearby, you can post and share geo-tagged photos, read and maintain a mobile blog, and comment on others' uploads. Users can turn the services on and off on a friend-by-friend basis or all at once.

Loopt declined to comment for this article, so we don't know when the app will be available.

Qik And TomTom

Qik is a social networking application for sharing videos that you record yourself, it is available on more than 30 devices and Qik plans to support the iPhone. according to this video on the Qik Web site. Qik, however, didn't respond to requests for information on pricing or availability.

TomTom, the popular vendor of standalone GPS devices, is planning to sell a version of its software for the iPhone, according to a report on Reuters. TomTom wouldn't confirm that report. However, the company did confirm in e-mail that they've made their system run on the iPhone, and "it looks good and works very well. We will have to look more closely to Apple's strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us."

Enterprise Apps & Games

Now that's a weird juxtaposition, right? Enterprise apps are very, very serious, and games are, well, not. Enterprise apps help you get your work done and make the economy run, and games are what you do to get away from the drudgery of using the enterprise apps.

However, games and enterprise apps have a lot in common when it comes to the iPhone. Until now, the iPhone has been weak at both kinds of applications, but the iPhone 2.0 software will likely make the device a powerful tool for both work and play.

For enterprise users, the iPhone 2.0 now supports Microsoft ActiveSync, which means it can get push e-mail, calendar, and contact synchronization from Microsoft Exchange. It supports Cisco IPSec VPN and wireless network services with WPA3 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication. Enterprises can deploy applications privately to their own users, without having to make them generally available on the public Apps Store. And, for security purposes, the iPhone can be wiped remotely -- useful when an iPhone gets lost, stolen, or an employee leaves the company.

The iPhone will likely prove to be a great platform for gaming. It's got responsive hardware and operating system, a great display, the built-in accelerometer will allow for Wii-like action, and the network connection will permit multiuser gameplay. In a few months, we will likely see the iPhone not only as a market-leading smartphone, it'll also be competing with Nintendo and Sony devices as a top-tier handheld gaming unit.