We still don’t know what the fabled Apple Tablet actually looks like, or if it even exists, really, but this concept magazine reader from Condé Nast gives us a glimpse at what to expect from tablet apps.

Turn down your volume before hitting play, loud techno music awaits. Down? OK, good. Now let’s look at what we’ve got here. It’s about what you would expect from a tablet magazine reader. The big screen lets you soak in the magazine layout without zooming, and the graphics are big and interactive. In a nutshell, it looks like a hi-res iPhone app.

According to the source, Condé Nast doesn’t want to take any chances, and the app is a precautionary measure to make sure they’re ready if/when the device comes out. So don’t take this to mean that launch is imminent. Take it as a sign that even if the tablet doesn’t exist, it should, because a lot of huge publishing companies are more than willing to throw their weight behind it. [Wired]

Voices: There are a few voice modulation apps on the shelves of the App Store, but none has captured Jesus’ heart like Voices: Retro tape recorder and microphone, cute icons, simple touch interface, and sharing via Twitter, Facebook and email, so you can spook everyone with that infernal Reverse Voice effect. For just $1.19, it’s impossible to resist.

Zosh: Signing things over email: a thing that is dumb. Zosh: a thing that makes that process much easier.

Zosh is a $4 app that allows you to sign attached documents on your iPhone. Basically, you forward the emailed document to Zosh from the iPhone’s mail app, then you open the Zosh app to sign it (plus you can add a date and stuff).

I especially like this one because it’s not just a good way to sign documents on the iPhone, it’s a good way to sign documents in general. I mean seriously, who wants to scan their signature or jitter one out in MS paint? One catch: it only supports PDFs for now, so convert or die.

CatPaint: Negative space, as defined in the eminent McFairlyshire Encyclopaedia of Artistic Principles (1904): An area, perimeter or measurable expanse that lacks cats. And one of the first thing they teach to you at any good art school is to fill it up, with cats. Facts! Enter CatPaint:

Cats can be added to pre-existing photos or cat-scarce shots from the iPhone’s camera, and either saved to your camera roll or sent via email. Using it takes a while to get used to: Once you’ve selected a cat from the app’s animal palette and set the slider for size, each tap on the photo instantly splashes a new cat at the point of contact, which can’t be edited, save for a temperamental shake-to-delete function.

It is the best thing, this app. $1.19.

Knocking: Live Pic Sharing: Uses server-side galleries to let you view photos in sync with other people, which you can send or flip through by “knocking”. Ideal scenario: You’re talking to your friend over the phone, you want to show him a gallery of pictures, you tell him to jump onto Knocking, and suddenly you’re in control of his viewing experience. It pretty much works like that. Free.

Blower: Real Air: Can you guess what this one does? Really, no? Then you’re probably a good candidate for spending money on it. For what it’s worth — something? — Blower explores the iPhone’s absurd novelty potential in a completely new way. From the reviews, a perfect description: “It feels like an ant blowing on you.”

Call of Duty: The control scheme isn’t perfect, and the price ($13) is high, but it’s tough to argue with a Nazi Zombie shoot ‘em up with the Call of Duty name. Pro tip: Switch to the tilt controls, because the overlaid joystick is not good. (They never are!)

Fit or Fugly: Rounding out our cr-appier selections for the week, an app that purports to measure your beauty according to some kind of mathematical equation. It’s not a good way to actually tell if someone is attractive, nor is it a particularly well-executed app. It is, however, a good excuse to tell your friends that their faces are asymmetrical, which evokes surprisingly intense responses. Try it! (The face thing, not necessarily the app.)

Google Earth 2.0: You can create and store your own customised maps in the desktop version of Google Maps and save them to your account — this is great for keeping running routes, sharing driving directions and the like. You can view them in the new version of Google Earth for the iPhone now, which is useful and also sort of hilarious since you can’t even access them in the official Google Maps app. Sound silly? Welcome to the iPhone, y’all!

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us your first-hand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favourite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Finance director for the company, Alexandre de Rochefort, says that even a company that’s done extremely well on the iPhone can have trouble breaking even on Google phones:

We have significantly cut our investment in Android platform, just like … many others … [The Android Market] is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue.

That’s the essence of the App Effect: High volume, customer pressure and nudging from Apple drive iPhone app prices down break-even levels, which gives app developers two options. They can either charge higher prices for equivalent apps on Android, for which they will be crucified by customers, or they can match their prices and hope that enough of Android’s comparatively small, fragmented user base just happens to stumble across said app in the barely navigable App Market. An attractive business proposition, I say!

So what needs to happen? Either Android adoption grows (which it’s doing), the App Market gets much easier to navigate (a desktop app, maybe?), or you know, both. [Reuters]

Is it just what they’re showing us? A Flo TV app, that requires some kind of accessory to tune into broadcasts? That’s possible, but given how well the iPhone can stream video over 3G, it’d be a hard sell, even with Flo TV’s cable-like channel selection. It would also help if said accessory wasn’t larger than the actual iPhone.

Or is it to foster excitement over the idea of native Flo TV hardware support in the iPhone, like in the HTC Imagio? Because that will never, ever happen. So again, why? [Electric Pig]

In 2007 I whined and whined asking for an iPhone Software Developer’s Kit. Back then I asked for five apps. It took two years, but today I’ve got them all. The last one just came in yesterday.

It’s not Voice Candy, but Voices looks as good, if not better: Retro tape recorder and microphone, cute icons, simple touch interface, and sharing via Twitter, Facebook and email, so you can spook everyone with that infernal Reverse Voice effect. For $1.19, it’s impossible to resist.

[iTunes App Store — Thanks Juanlu ]

Are you still missing a favourite?

Here’s the letter he sent:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

And Steve replied:

Change your apps [sic] name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

So they changed the name of their app to iRip. Fair enough! [CrunchGear]

Every time I receive an emailed loan agreement for a product review, the process of signing it becomes a complete pain. I either have to print, sign and scan the document, or paste a signature in Photoshop. No more!

Zosh is a $4 app that allows you to sign attached documents on your iPhone. Basically, you forward the emailed document to Zosh from the iPhone’s mail app, then you open the Zosh app to sign it (plus you can add a date and stuff).

Testing the app, the signing process actually worked pretty well. Maybe the neatest component of the interface is that the signature line auto tracks your finger, meaning that if your signature goes larger than the iPhone’s screen, it’ll just pan over.

However, there’s one MASSIVE catch. You can only sign PDFs at the moment, not text files like .docs. For me, that’s a dealbreaker (ladies), and hopefully one that will be remedied (through simple auto-conversion or something) in later versions. [Zosh]

Before we get into the new stuff, a refresher from our original review:

The Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen records your notes two ways: it creates digital copies of everything you write by hand while recording audio at the same time. It also goes one step further and links the two together, so you can quickly access audio by tapping parts of your notes. All of this is uploaded to your computer where the Livescribe software archives and makes your notes fully searchable. In addition, it offers features like a calculator, [demo] translator, and a paper piano that plays a mini piano you draw on paper.

That last part, at least at the time, felt like a bit of a tease: the ability to tap on a flat, printed paper calculator or a piano that you’ve drawn yourself and get accurate feedback was plenty cool, but didn’t amount to much more than a tech demo. More to the point, it gave an extremely vague sense of potential since the functions, translator aside, were obvious implementations of a technology that could clearly do much more complex things. But what, we had no idea. Enter the application store:

As far as the mechanics go, this is a straight mobile-app store from top to bottom, from the web interface to the (not yet finalised) 35 per cent skimmed off the top. As far as apps go, this is new territory. Remember — the interfaces for these apps need to be drawn on paper by the users or printed on special cards.

This may sound like more of a nuisance than a feature, but in the demos I saw it wasn’t much of an obstacle. In the translation app, for example, you simple draw a series of buttons to serve as translation triggers, and no matter how sloppy or lopsided they are, they just work. The video poker app, which displayed adorable little cards on the pen’s screen during play, demanded a slightly more complicated paper interface, which worked seamlessly as well.

The trick will be for app developers — and Livescribe says there are thousands interested — to come up with novel ways to use this bizarre new interaction model. I mean, the way the Pulse can precisely read and distinguish marks on its dot paper means that a developer could theoretically design any interface they wanted, from the playful and literal — I was shown a crudely sketched guitar that could play back various chords — to the abstract — users could simply be asked to draw and assign their own buttons in whatever style they want. This, combined the the Pulse’s audio recording, text recording and handwriting recognition, makes for an unfamiliar, but potentially very powerful, set of tools. Speaking of which, back to the store:

It’s in beta now, but it’s launched with a healthy selection of apps to sample, mostly ranging from free to about $US10. (With one $US100 exception.) Apps are run in a Java virtual machine and built using a spanking new SDK available for free here. Anyone who has a Pulse can access the store now, though you may need to upgrade your pen’s firmware. [Livescribe]

Sometimes the best apps are the simplest, and CatPaint is nothing if not simple. Cats can be added to pre-existing photos or cat-scarce shots from the iPhone’s camera, and either saved to your camera roll or sent via email. Using it takes a while to get used to: Once you’ve selected a cat from the app’s animal palette and set the slider for size, each tap on the photo instantly splashes a new cat at the point of contact, which can’t be edited, save for a temperamental shake-to-delete function. But seriously, not the point:

See?!? $1.19. [iTunes via Macworld]

At last, after being blowed a billion times, it’s the iPhone’s turn. Believe it or not, there’s a new application for the iPhone that uses its speaker to blow air. No peripherals. No attachments. Check the video for yourself.

The developers say that you can use it to “blow out candles, herbs and refresh your skin during hot summer nights.” I wonder how many candles you can extinguish before your speaker breaks from all the vibration. [iTunes App Store]