What could possibly be cooler–at a trade show or swap meet–than processing credit card payments via your iPhone or iPod Touch?  Engadget reports that a company called Square is developing just such a solution–with a magstripe reader that plugs into the headphone jack, yep the headphone jack, of the iPhone. It’ll even capture signatures that look like they were written with those fat preschool crayons.

Tags: card reader, credit card, merchant, payment, processing, swipe

Like to shoot?  Like to shoot from a distance?  Well, Knight Armaments offers a custom-built iPhone application that can make all the necessary calculations for just the right “special delivery”.

Obviously, this type of application is being used to court attention from the armed services and military manufacturers (especially with the sweet ruggedized iPhone case and rifle mounting hardware seen here), seeing as how sniping isn’t a sport and the likeliest use for this technology is either battlefield or covert assassination. This particular app is $11.99 at the app store, and is intended for use with Knight rifles only.

A more generic sniping application is called iSnipe, and it sells for half as much.  Supposedly, it works with many different guns, not just Knight’s.  Happy hunting.

Tags: appstore, guns, iphone, isnipe, knight armaments, rifle, shooting, sniping, software

Gizmodo’s got pictures of the new Android-based G2 phone, this time with a 3.2 megapixel camera and no hardware keyboard (ie, just a touchscreen like the iPhone and Storm).  Apparently the device is thinner than the iPhone 3G, but we’re still bothered by its lack of symmetry.  Meanwhile, it’s been reported that Android device sales are not biting iPhone sales in the slightest. Check it out.

Tags: 3g, android, apple, business, g2, google, iphone, photos

Seadragon, a photography application that demonstrates the graphics acceleration of the iPhone is available now. While this puppy won’t allow you to send MMS messages with your photos, it does provide a nifty alternative to the iPhone’s already excellent photo-browsing capability. Download it from the app store.

The app was created by Microsoft’s Live Labs group, a creative research arm of the Seattle giant whose purpose has been, since 2006, to accelerate Microsoft’s development efforts online. Previous accomplishments of the group have included creating Seadragon support for Ajax, a standards-based web development technology that dominates LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) development, but has yet to surface in the walled garden of Microsoft platforms.

Look for more from Microsoft on the iPhone, including advanced speech recognition technology, in 2009.  Pic provided by TechFlash.

Tags: appstore, camera, microsoft, photography, seadragon, software

Making international long distance calls on your iPhone just got a whole lot cheaper, courtesy of those clever cats over at Truphone. Interestingly, while this new iPhone app does use minute-stealing to connect calls at a cheaper rate to overseas destinations, it apparently does NOT steal minutes using VoIP or 3G on the iPhone itself. Instead, calls are routed to a local phone number operated by Truphone first, and once inside Truphone’s network, are routed to the international destination using Voice over IP.

Truphone users will be prompted, at the time they dial an international number, whether or not they’d like to use Truphone to handle the call. Very clever.

Tags: 3g, services, truphone, voip, wireless