With skimpy content and slightly watered-down gameplay, Command and Conquer: Red Alert is good – but not great.

NBA Live by EA Sports is everything that I thought it would be on my iPhone. Unfortunately, I had pretty low expectations.

Rock Band on the iPhone is exactly what you’d expect it to be… pretty and polished but somewhat lacking in fun. There’s only so much delight you can get out of a rhythm game on the iPhone.

FIFA 10 has a poor interface, a strange glitch, a high price tag, and average graphics, but delivers where it matters – gameplay, thus becoming the best soccer experience on the iPhone yet.

Are you ready for some football? Madden 10, the latest in the biggest selling sports game franchise is here, and it’s here for the iPhone.

WritePad Pro is ultimately a wannabee jack of all trades, but it’s a master of none. There are better productivity tools out there.

Real Racing has taken a little longer than anticipated to reach our anxious little hands. The extra time was used to fine tune and perfect the game. It appears from the time I’ve spent with the game that it was well worth it.

Things is a powerful app for managing your to dos, honeydos, and projects. Whether you’re using it as a simple task manager, or as a full-blown project manager, you’ll get your money’s worth out of this powerful little tool.

Rolando 2 manages to surpass even its legendary predecessor with more exciting graphics and an added element of pizzaz that was lacking in the first. $9.99 is a small price to pay for a game of this caliber.

This is not the DOOM you remember. Though it’s a bit short, DOOM Resurrection is an incredibly engaging and fun “on-rails” shooter that contains some of the best graphics seen yet on the iPhone.

Pi Cubed isn’t really a calculator; it’s much better! The chalkboard-style interface is conducive to building equations, and it easily beats out other scientific calculators. Just don’t expect it to replace your graphing calculator.

Is this one of the full-featured games that us gamers are looking for? Maybe not quite. But it’s still one of the best games I’ve played on the iPhone so far. Get away from life and control someone elses.

This is an app that is really well organized, easy to navigate and packed with features. There’s Video tutorials and new recipes weekly which makes it useful both in the kitchen and when proving how good your iPhone is to your unconvinced friends.

Gas Cubby is an intuitive, well designed application that offers many customizable features for logging fuel efficiency, vehicle information and maintenance. Whether you are a bit detail-oriented like me or simply love your vehicles, it’s time to organize the glove box!

FlightTrack is an application that allows you to track flights in real time and real location. Pulling data from FlightStats and FlightView, it elegantly compresses everything into a screen that is easy to understand and follow.

Need For Speed: Undercover is a groundbreaking example of how the larger developers should treat the iPhone. This game has been given very special attention to make it entirely unique to the iPhone, using the accelerometer and video playback capabilities to provide an amazing gameplay experience. Kudos to EA.

First Look: Need For Speed Undercover Now Available

EA Mobile really likes to surprise everyone with the releases of their iPhone apps. No release dates, just bam, there they are. That happened again today with the release of one of the most hotly anticipated iPhone games, Need For Speed Undercover.

The game which has been delayed more than once, was first seen last year in early forms has finally arrived. You can grab it now via this link. It will show up in the iTunes App Store indexes after they are next refreshed.

This game had also been mentioned as a possible launch title for the rumored Premium App Store — guess this puts that rumor to rest, for now anyway. The game was released for $9.99, not the rumored $19.99 point. Pinning $9.99 as the top price point for games for the iPhone.

The game features a story mode like all of the recent Need For Speed games. Luckily all of the movies can be skipped so that you can get to the racing. And the racing, at least in our initial tests, delivers good and smooth, performance. There are multiple race types and of course multiple cars to unlock.

We’ll have a full review for you soon. But so far this is shaping up to be a pretty good racer.

For full app description and some more screen shots, check after the jump.

Continue reading First Look: Need For Speed Undercover Now Available »

Tiger Woods PGA TOUR is an excellent golf sim that would be amazing if not for a few flaws. The gameplay is quite fun and the sound is great, but the lack of WiFi multiplayer kills me in the deepest way possible. “No Tim, I don’t want to play hot-seat multiplayer with you, your hands smell like cheese… I want to play on my own phone.”

Assassin’s Creed on the iPhone is a fun, but utterly frustrating experience. The game has the mythological “it” factor, with somewhat charismatic characters and vibrant graphics, but I have a hard time getting past the grey hair inducing platform jumping. If I fall off of just one more platform I think that it will be the loony bin for me.

Spreadsheets on the iPhone are always a bit of a compromise. Still, there are those who would like the option to edit and, yes, even create simple spreadsheets from their phone. Mariner Calc is an ambitious effort to remove the boundaries that have been imposed on spreadsheet users.

In a couple of the cases I was genuinely surprised how well the software worked. Text that I could barely make out was interpreted perfectly. Conversely, perfectly legible text in standard fonts was not transferred at all.

From the makers of… baseball, comes the best non game app that I have on my iPhone. Not only can I keep track of every game with pitch-by-pitch coverage, but I can also listen to my favorite radio broadcast, streaming from any teams broadcasting team that I want it from. Stomaching the Astros losing night after night has never been sweeter.

PCalc RPN Calculator has an optional RPN mode and a plethora of conversions built-in, a two-line display, undo and redo, and just about everything else one would expect from a scientific or engineering calculator. Its display is fully customizable and includes themes, various color options, landscape/portrait mode, and more. It’s an expensive calculator but it has an exhaustive set of features.

I’m not a scientist or medical professional so I can’t attest to all of Papers’ merits, but I can tell you that it appears to be a robust app that comes with a fine pedigree: The OS X version of Papers won a 2007 Apple Design Award for best scientific application for the Mac. Since Papers for the iPhone syncs with the OS X version, it allows you to leverage scientific research already in hand and also includes several search engines so you can not only take your research library with you on the go, but also add to it.

Appigo Todo is a task management app with a streamlined user interface. It includes ways to tag and otherwise set todo items apart, robust search and filtering, and is augmented by several synchronization options as well as tight integration with Appigo Notebook, a note taking app available from the same author.

Instaviz is a graph visualization app. It is based on the open source software Graphviz, which is available for the Mac, Windows, and Linux. With Instaviz you can easily draw shapes such as circles, ovals, squares, and triangles, label each, and then connect them to one another. You can then export these to a number of different services, including MobileMe.

iSpend can seem pretty bare bones at first, but you dig a little deeper and what you find is an app that can track expenses and export them to Google Docs or even e-mail them as comma delimited files. You can create templates, each with their own custom categories, and the interface is well designed and intuitive, usually only requiring a few taps to complete most tasks.

One of the most hotly anticipated games for the iPhone, and likely the last big release of the year is finally here. Rolando the rolling ball platform game has finally hit the App Store virtual shelves. It’s about time.

A fantastic all-encompassing synthesizer for the iPhone

Best Guitar Hero type game for the iPhone!