As a national satellite provider, DirecTV’s foray into the iPhone app store was no surprise. Functionality might be limited, but the DirecTV app actually surpassed my expectations.

The DirecTV app has two central functions, to serve as a program guide and to record shows on your DVR. The program guide can be viewed in a multitude of ways, either by searching for a show, browsing by channel, and browsing by date and time.

Recording on the app is done very simply, by tapping on the ‘Record this Episode’ or ‘Record this Series’ buttons. The app connects to your DVR through your DirecTV account. There are miscellaneous other settings, such as the option to hide adult channels or hide SD duplicates.

For the most part, I have found that browsing the TV listings on the iPhone was actually more pleasant than the DVR itself. It makes me want to use the app as more of a remote with added functionality. It makes sense with the potential of the iPhone as the ultimate ‘universal remote’.

You can download DirecTV for the iPhone from the iTunes app store for free.

If you don’t feel like paying close to $400 for a Kindle, you’re probably not alone. Lucky for you, Amazon created the Kindle for iPhone app, which is free (if you factor out the cost of the iPhone).

Dubbed as a ‘wireless reading device’, the Kindle is an e-book reader with free, built-in 3G connection to Sprint for downloading books at the Amazon store. Kindle also comes with Whispernet, which is Amazon’s network for synchronizing your content across the web, your kindle, and other devices.

The Kindle iPhone app also uses the Whispernet technology to download your book library and track your reading status so that you can immediately pick up where you left off on your Kindle.

Many of the features of the hardware Kindle are retained in the iPhone app, such as the ability to view bookmarks, change text size, and the location bar at the bottom. However, the iPhone app can not add annotations, read aloud, or sync up with periodicals and other documents. It can change the coloring of text, which might come in handy for making the reading experience more comfortable. The killer feature of the Kindle is also available in the iPhone app – access to Amazon’s book catalog.

While the Kindle app is great as far as iPhone ebook readers go, it’s not a full fledged Kindle, but an accessory. It is available for free in the app store.

RSS Readers are used to retrieve articles, or posts, from frequently visited sites using an RSS feed. This typically includes online newspapers and blogs. Yet, most RSS Readers are boring. That’s where Times comes in, designed to bring the newspaper experience to the desktop.

Times is heavily graphics-based, with a design that mimics a physical newspaper. Instead of arranging feeds in a folder hierarchy, Times allows you to drag and drop them into a unique arrangement. Feeds are organized by giving them a specific place on the “newspaper”, and can be categorized into various “pages”, or sections.

Instead of the default, one-liner displayed in most other feed readers, Times will retrieve the text of an article and display it after clicking the headline. Times also uses many page curls and slides as transitions to boost the experience.

Other features include the ability to share articles to Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter, and any website of your choosing. There’s also a “shelf” for storing articles that you wish to view later. The shelf even supports ‘stacks’ for grouping posts together.

In many ways, Times is a fresh way of using a feed reader. In many ways, Times is the RSS reader that Apple would have concocted themselves. However, power users might find that all the flashy features obtrude on getting to the content quickly. It would have been nice if there was an included “list view”, that was reminiscent of NetNewsWire so that users could flip back and forth between views.

At $30 for a single-user license, Times isn’t terribly cheap, yet it is worth it for users wanting a simplified and beautiful RSS-reading experience. There’s also a free trial available for download from Acrylic.

One of the most popular Twitter clients for the iPhone, Tweetie, has been translated for the Mac OSX desktop. As a competitor of TweetDeck and Twitterific, Tweetie brings a slick interface and many new features to the table.

Similar to the iPhone client, Tweetie for the desktop allows you to post and read tweets from multiple accounts. For each account, you can view the tweets of followers, see @replies directed towards you, read direct messages, and perform searches.

Clicking on a user’s picture will display their tweets, allow you to see their @replies, favorites, and more information. The information screen allows you to see numbers regarding followers, updates, and favorites, as well as the location, link, and bio of that user. Under the user’s pane in Tweetie, you can also follow someone, see if they are following you, and send an @reply or direct message.

On the other hand, clicking on a tweet will show the conversation associated with that message. In simpler terms, Tweetie will find the @replies between the two users and group them into a conversation. Each tweet also states when the message was posted and has a reply button.

Some of the other nifty features of Tweetie include drag-and-drop uploads, keyboard shortcuts, a menubar icon, and built-in URL shortening. When posting a new tweet, images and videos can by added by either recording a video, or simply dragging and dropping an image into the tweet. It’s in the new message box that URL’s can be shortened within the app.

Tweetie is one of the most advanced and well-executed Twitter applications available. In fact, the only major flaw that I’ve noticed is not being able to see the “Twitter Trending Topics”, a task that you can complete in the iPhone client.

Taking a page out of the Twitterific playbook, Tweetie is offered in two versions, one free and one paid. The free version is ad-supported, and the paid version costs $19.95. Go ahead and download it now from atebits, it’s worth it!