Web-based Twitter client Brizzly has three major developments to report: a new free iPhone app, a new Brizzly Guide (which gives trending topics on Twitter their own hub pages as permanent resources for information on the top Twitter discussion items over time), and the acquisition of WikiRank.

The Brizzly Guide is a user-editable area that fleshes out the backstory and adds contextual information to Twitter trends. Loading up the Guide shows the top 10 current trending topics at the left, and either a description of that topic or a prompt to be the first to explain the trend.

Taking cues from wiki-style user-editable sites like Wikipedia, the Brizzly Guide encourages users to curate the landing pages that will act as resources for current and past Twitter trends over time.

The free Brizzly iPhone app is available now in the App Store, featuring multiple account support, lists, photo uploads, saved searches syncing, classic-style retweet functionality, and support for the new Brizzly Guide with user-editable trends and news topics.

Further evidence of Brizzly’s adoption of wiki-style philosophy comes with the announcement of the company’s acquisition of Wikirank, an app that visualizes Wikipedia data and will soon, presumably, help visualize Brizzly data and build out a more robust Brizzly Guide. Wikirank displays popular and trending pages in a clean and easy-to-use interface. CEO Jason Shellen said of the acquisition, “We will be integrating Wikirank technology into the Brizzly Guide over the coming months,” so we should expect to see more from the Twitter client surrounding trending and data visualization in the near future.

Are you a Brizzly user? What do you currently use to monitor Twitter trends?

A couple of days ago Foursquare’s iPhone application disappeared from the iPhone App Store due to “hiccup”. If you doubted that was true, worry no more, as the application is back in the store.

Here’s the official explanation of what happened: “Last week, Foursquare accidentally released to the App Store a new version of its app before it was totally ready. It was pulled shortly after, unfortunately, many users had already went through the update, and were left stuck with a non-functioning app.”

The version currently available is 1.6.1, but the folks at Foursquare say that the redesigned 1.7 update should appear in a few days.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting story about the absence of certain iPhone apps – Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos – on the iPad.

It seems that these apps, when scaled up to iPad’s bigger screen, simply didn’t look good enough to Steve Jobs, so he decided to scrap them. Writes Gruber:

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps.”

If true, it would be a pity, because these are quite basic, no brainer apps that everyone uses, especially Clock, Calculator, and the Weather. On the other hand, if these simple apps don’t look good enough scaled up, how will all those thousands of third party apps look? As far as apps go, the iPad experience (at least in the beginning) might turn out to be something that Apple otherwise struggles to avoid: good enough, but far from perfect.

One of many upcoming tablet alternatives to the Apple iPad, HP’s forthcoming Slate device was teased briefly by Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s CES keynote earlier this year. HP and Adobe teamed up to offer a couple of video demos of the HP Slate (embedded below), with an emphasis on showcasing its Flash and AIR support.

Punctuating even further Adobe’s row with Apple over the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad, both videos lay it on thick with emphasis on how Flash support lets you “access the full web and not just a part of it.” The first demo video below shows off photo-sharing and editing, interactive crossword puzzles, Flash games, and more as well as the on-screen keyboard and other elements of the HP Slate user interface. The second video is a 30-second marketing reel showing off the HP Slate in action.

We still don’t have any more solid details about what’s under the hood, when the HP Slate will be released or a target price, but these videos are another milestone in the brewing year of the tablet. The HP Slate has the distinction of being one of the few we know about that will run Windows 7. Are you excited about the new tablet form factor, and do you have any favorite in mind that might earn your hard-earned dollars? Will it be the iPad, the HP Slate, the Courier or something running Android? Let us know in the comments.

HP Slate Adobe Flash and AIR Demo

HP Slate Commercial

The iPhone and iPod touch app for the popular location check-in service Foursquare has temporarily dropped from Apple’s App Store.

The Android and BlackBerry versions are still available, but the iPhone is by far the most popular platform for Foursquare users. This is just a temporary technical setback, though. Foursquare tweeted the following.

Earlier this week, the new 1.6 version of the Foursquare iPhone app was accidentally added to the App Store before it was ready. The problem was corrected, but now people who have 1.6 are unable to use the service. They’re being directed to the app store to download the regular version, but it’s not there.

Foursquare is in the middle of unveiling new features and deals so these technical issues could have come at a better time, but it won’t be a major setback. Don’t worry, Foursquare fans; you can keep looking forward to the new features in version 1.6 this week.

Apple announced on Friday that the Wi-Fi versions of its long-awaited iPad will arrive April 3 in stores in the United States. The models that can tap into AT&T’s 3G wireless data network will be available in late April.

Customers can pre-order the iPad on Apple’s Web site beginning next Friday.

Apple’s tablet computer is expected to ship with 12 new applications designed specifically for the device, and it will run almost all of the more than 150,000 applications available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Apple has been aiming the iPad squarely at e-book readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle. And in its news release Friday, Apple said that an updated version of its iBooks app that will include Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download on April 3 in the United States, with additional countries to be added later.

The company has been aggressively recruiting personnel for the new iBookstore, listing a variety of iBook-related job openings on its corporate job board — including “Manager, iBooks Asia Pacific & Canada,” “Independent Publisher Acct. Mgr., iBookstore” and a “Merchandising Manager, iBookstore.”

Apple said that pricing for the device will be the same as it initially announced in January:

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the United States for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the United States through the Apple Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

Apple said the iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, with more countries added later this year.

Instead of fixing Apple’s odd and often unfair application approval process, Apple is just getting weirder and weirder about what apps are allowed in the store. The latest example is the sudden disappearance of several Wi-Fi stumbler applications from the app store.

Cult of Mac noticed that Apple has removed apps such as WiFi-Where, WiFi FoFum and yFy Network Finder. These apps scan Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity, which is not very different from simply going to the Wi-Fi Networks menu on your iPhone.

However, according to a post on WiFi-Where creator’s website, the app was removed from the App Store for “using private frameworks to access wireless information.”

The odd thing about this is the fact that some of these apps have been available in the App Store for years. Removing them now will make iPhone app developers even more uncertain about the future of their apps, as it seems they can be arbitrarily removed at any time, for vague reasons.

In a self-promotional moment reminiscent of the Apple chief Steven P. Jobs, Robert Eckert, the chief executive of Mattel, is celebrating one of his company’s own products as “the hottest toy for the 2010 holiday season” — even though it’s not even on sale yet.

I give you the Fisher-Price iXL Learning System, which has all too inevitably been hailed as the iPad for the fresh-out-of-diapers set.

The iXL is a tiny computer that opens like a book. It has fat, colorful icons on the right side and buttons and a speaker on the other side. As you might expect, there are apps for the new product: Story Book, Game Player, Note Book, Art Studio, Music Player and Photo Album software.

And, my goodness, this gadget even has a touch screen.

The product should go on sale in July and start at $79.99. It’s Mac and PC compatible with an SD card slot and a U.S.B. port.

“We have invested more research and development dollars into iXL than any other product in our 2010 Fisher-Price product line and it definitely shows,” Mr. Eckert said in a statement.

Somebody buy that man a black turtleneck.

The iXL seems to have more visual pizazz than the Family Story Play system from Nokia and Sesame Workshop (the people behind “Sesame Street”). Oddly, Nokia opted for a wood case for its device, which has a pair of screens and a book holder.

Nokia has been pitching the Family Story Play, which remains a concept device, as a way for children and, say, grandparents in a far-off place to read stories together via video conferencing.

The Windows Phone 7 news kind of threw us a bit this week. It had almost no mention about how it would serve the enterprise. It almost seemed like Microsoft had given up.

The Blackberry is the leader in the market.Android may become the biggest rival to the Blackberry with its tight integration into Google’s enterprise suite and the ability to use multiple applications at the same time.

I’s the iPhone that looks a bit vulnerable. Without a doubt, the iPhone is showing success in the enterprise. Apple had a robust earnings report for the fourth quarter thanks in good part to sales of the iPhone to people who use it for work.

But here’s the catch. We really have not seen any bona fide use of mobile collaboration tools as of yet across any device. People are using smartphones to check messages and use applications. The applications they do use are services like Twitter.

When mobile collaboration does find its place in the market, it’s not going to be a one application world. It will require the ability to mashup data, pulling information from multiple sources. Our daily work requires us to use multiple applications simultaneously. That’s not possible with the iPhone. And it will not be possible with the iPad. This issue will become even more pronounced as more enterprise applications enter the mobile market.

In comparison, Windows Phone 7 is an information centric device. Information is stored in hubs and you can view the different hubs as a panorama on the device screen. That makes it potentially better than the iPhone or the Nexus One, which do not have that capability.

People want to see the information without having to go from application to application. A panorama is more akin to the experience we get on a device like a laptop. That’s far more suitable for the enterprise.

Gizmodo:

“Out of the box, this information is organized into areas called hubs, which follow the user’s areas of interest. Accessible through live tiles in the home screen, the Me (the user), people, pictures and video, music, and games–plus the omnipresent search–hubs give views into several data sources, connecting and presenting them into an interweaved panoramic stream. These hubs dig heavily into many databases, both locally and into the cloud.”

Ironically, Microsoft often get labeled as a company that creates silo environments. From our view, the mobile applications of today have a certain silo effect. Windows Phone 7 and its hub structure means that it can draw from deep databases from on-premise and the cloud. That to us seems like a powerful combination that is well suited to an enterprise world.

The long-promised Meebo IM app for the iPhone and iPod touch [iTunes link] is now available in the App Store, and it’s both free and awesome.

Meebo is a primarily web-based IM client — a place you can go in your browser to access almost every IM network you might want to use: Google Talk/Jabber, Yahoo!, AOL Instant Messenger,MySpace IM, Facebook — you name it.

Meebo demonstrated its app in the main presentation of the Apple event last March when iPhone OS 3.0 was announced, which finally added push notification support to iPhone apps. Meebo’s app looked fantastic, and folks got really excited about it, but after a couple of weeks of hype it faded away from the public eye. Apart from a web-based version of Meebo for iPhone, nothing happened. But now the promised native app is finally here.

First Impressions

Meebo is arguably the best IM app for the iPhone because it’s lightweight and easy to use, and because it supports almost every network under the sun. Scroll to the bottom of this post for a complete list of supported networks; we’ll bet you didn’t even know that many of them existed.

Push notifications are unsurprisingly part of the feature set. But other cool things include syncing chat logs (and everything else, really) with the web app and the ability to move between active conversations by swiping from side to side with your fingers.

Mostly, though, we were impressed with the simplicity and speed of the app. Other solutions like BeejiveIM and IM+ seem bulky by comparison and their prices are comparatively bulky, too: $6.99 for the former and $4.99 for the latter for all the features. Meebo is totally free, and though it does lack a couple of the more advanced features that its competitors offer, most users won’t notice their absence.

Here are some pics of the app in action: