Bragging rights

Jan. 5: So your cellphone has a brushed-metal shell, can flip and slide four ways and has more buttons than an airplane cockpit? Big deal.

The new status symbol is what your phone can do — count calories, teach Spanish, simulate a flute, or fling a monkey from a tree.

With the advent of touch-screen technology and faster wireless networks, the new competition and cool factor revolves around thousands of fun, quirky (and even useful) programmes that run on the phones. The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft.

“Just having the iPhone a year ago was special, but now you have to exceed that,” said James Katz, executive director of the Centre for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers. “The apps are a wonderful, wild and woolly world of interpersonal bragging rights. It’s status for the rest of us.”

Since July, Apple has posted more than 10,000 programmes to its App Store, and nine out of every 10 iPhone users have downloaded applications. That’s more than 300 million overall, though those include software updates and repeat downloads.

Some applications are free (like Stanza, which lets you download and read books) while others typically cost $1 to $10.

The other major cellphone and software companies are getting into the app act. Google recently introduced the Android Market, selling applications based on Android, its operating system for cellphones. In the spring, Research in Motion plans to introduce an application store for its BlackBerry devices.

Palm is thinking of retooling its software strategy, while Microsoft is creating its own store for phones running Windows Mobile. Users say some programmes can genuinely help productivity, but more often than not, they are time-wasting and sometimes jaw-dropping.

One popular application called Shazam lets users hold the phone up to a radio to identify within seconds what song is playing and by whom — and then gives users a way to buy it on Apple’s iTunes Store, of course. The current most popular download, which costs 99 cents and has an impolite name, lets the phone simulate the sound of flatulence.

The applications have also become a form of social currency, as users compete to find the latest quirk, show off to friends or best one another with their discoveries.

Peter Szurley, a San Francisco lawyer, used his phone at a meeting two weeks ago to break the ice. At an Italian restaurant, he started the meal with a new client by pulling out his iPhone, putting it to his lips, blowing into the microphone slot and moving his fingers across the touch screen. From the phone emanated the sounds of a flute.

The application he was showing is called Ocarina. A 99-cent programme that turns the phone into a digital flute, Ocarina is one of the most popular applications, having been downloaded by more than 400,000 iPhone owners. “He was just blown away,” Szurley said of his lunch companion. “He had a BlackBerry. You can’t do that with a BlackBerry.”

Ian Mackey uses a programme called Labyrinth, in which the user tilts the motion-sensitive phone to carefully to guide a ball through a maze and avoid holes. He also has a helicopter-shooting game and an application called iBeer that lets him tilt the phone back to make it look as if he’s guzzling a frosty cold one.