Hey, iPhone gamers, I received a press release just yesterday that plenty will be excited about: Real Racing 2 is coming soon for the iPhone. As one of my favorite games for 2009, the original Real Racing might be the best in its class for graphics, gameplay, and realism (as the name suggests) among auto-racing games on the iPhone.

Though there is no information beyond the announcement (here is Firemint's cryptic info page), I'm personally hoping for new tracks, new cars, and maybe even an accelerometer-based motorcycle racing mode. I admit that last wish is probably far-fetched, but it never hurts to dream, right? It almost seems impossible to improve upon the original, so I'm excited to see what Firemint will add in the sequel.

Though I can only guess at a release date, the timing of this press release seems to suggest that we could have this product on our iPhones in time for the gift-giving season. I'm crossing my fingers!

This week's apps are both arcade games: an advanced Astroids-like title and a game where you play as a man-eating giant worm.

Space Miner Blast (Free) is a slimmed-down arcade version of one of my favorite games on the iPhone called Space Miner: Space Ore Bust. The original game included a storyline in which you tried to keep your uncle's space-mining company afloat by mining various sectors of space and using the ore to make money so you could upgrade your ship. Though I still recommend the original as a more involved and unique game, Space Miner Blast takes the basic gameplay mechanic (flying around and shooting asteroids) and makes it into a fun challenge on its own.

Space Miner Blast tasks you with battling your way through wave after wave of asteroids and spaceships, all while grabbing power-ups to add to your firepower. Similar to the arcade classic Asteroids, Space Miner Blast uses a control scheme that lets you control your ship on the left side of the screen with your main fire buttons and thrust on the right. You'll need to shoot large asteroids to break them up into smaller pieces and blow away the remaining rocks by following the blue arrow indicators around your ship. As you progress through the game, harder enemies like UFOs and mines will make your job more difficult, but fortunately you can find shields as you play, and you can upgrade your ship in between levels for more firepower.

Space Miner Blast is an ad-supported free game. To get rid of the ads you have the option to buy one of three advanced ships for 99 cents each or you can allegedly by the Blast Pack of all the ships for only $1.99. As of this writing, I was unable to locate the Blast Pack in the menus, but hopefully the developers will fix this soon so you don't have to buy all three ships at 99 cents each.

Part of what made the original Space Miner: Space Ore Bust such a great game was the classic Asteroids game mechanic. With Space Miner Blast, you get a game that the developers say "Brings asteroids into the 21st century!" and I can't help but agree. Anyone who liked the original game or the classic Asteroids will love this shoot-'em-up action game.

Death Worm (99 cents for a limited time) is a lot like a game I reviewed not long ago called Super Mega Worm and is the original game that Mega Worm was based upon. Already a widely acclaimed indie title, Death Worm is a great fit for the iPhone and iPod touch screen. The control system involves a directional pad on the left and buttons for nitro and firebombs on the right. The object of the game is to take out as many humans as possible as you worm your way underground and breach the surface to create havoc against a military onslaught. As you progress, your worm will level up, letting you add more nitro power, better fireballs, and stronger skin.

Death Worm is an excellent time waster, but not terribly challenging in the early levels, leaving you wondering just what it will take to bring you down. But as the game goes on, you'll be challenged by tanks, cars, rocket-launcher-wielding soldiers, helicopters, and more. In later levels, you'll struggle to stay alive long enough to level up, giving you full health to continue on.

Overall, with 45 levels to play across three themed locations, 30 enemy types to contend with, and enough explosions and carnage to satisfy the most serious shoot-'em-up gamers, Death Worm is a great addition to your iPhone game library.

What's your favorite iPhone app? How do you like the arcade action of Space Miner Blast? Which game is better: Super Mega Worm or Death Worm? What do you think Firemint will add to Real Racing 2? Let me know in the comments!

While the Big Five browsers duke it out to see which one can come up with the best mix of speed, compatibility, and add-ons, social networking bruisers Flock 3 (Windows only) and RockMelt beta (Windows | Mac) have taken off the kid gloves to beat each other senseless over Twitter and Facebook integration.

This isn't a fair match by a long shot. Chromium-fueled Flock 3 has been available since June 2010, and claims 500,000 users. (Just as a point of comparison, the Mozilla Gecko-powered version 2 of Flock has 8.5 million users and has been on the market for three years.) Flock CEO Shawn Hardin pointed out that Flock version 2.6 is the most popular nonmobile app on Facebook, and Flock version 3 is the sixth most popular nonmobile app on Facebook. Just by virtue of the time that Flock has had the market practically to itself could prove a difficult hill for RockMelt to climb.

CNET has learned from a Flock representative that the company plans for a major update on December 1. The Mac version of Flock 3 is expected to debut, several months off its original due date in July 2010. LinkedIn support will be added, and the release will upgrade Flock 3 to the Chromium 7 base, which will patch numerous security holes, make bug fixes, and introduce Chromium 7's faster browsing speeds to Flock.

Currently, both Flock 3 and RockMelt 0.8.34.833 beta are built on Chromium 6.

User numbers aside, RockMelt plays David handily against Flock's Goliath. First off is the login procedure. RockMelt access is based on your Facebook login. You download it, you use your existing Facebook username and password, and you're ready to get your social on. Flock doesn't require you to create a new Flock account, although you have to be able to synchronize your data across computers. Both browsers synchronize your data to the cloud, so there's no hassle to use either one on multiple computers, but RockMelt wins this round for cutting out the registration process.

However, RockMelt is currently restricted by invitation. The browser offers a simple sharing method to help you distribute the invites allocated to you among your Twitter followers and Facebook friends, but that undercuts the otherwise fast registration process.

Supported accounts are a major area of contention. RockMelt only supports Facebook and Twitter, while Flock 3 works with both of those plus YouTube and Flickr. Supporting accounts is not enough for these browsers, which are basically Google Chrome with souped-up social networking extensions. How the accounts and their features are exposed is immensely important, with the major difference being that RockMelt maintains a single-serving update of one friend per service at time, while Flock creates a unified stream of all supported services.

RockMelt emphasizes its connection to Facebook. The "Friends Edge" on the left is dedicated to your Facebook friends, showing who's online, filterable by favorites, and a Show All Friends button. The right sidebar, the "App Edge," is where you can toggle social networks, providing one-click access to your Facebook news feed, your Facebook profile, and your Twitter account. An indicator will tell you when you've got new updates. Chrome extensions that you install will also live here, although they don't always work. The search box has been improved, too, with hooks into your Facebook friends' lists.

RockMelt has tweaked the RSS feed subscription process into a more obvious notification. When you land on a page with an RSS feed, the browser will autodetect it and provide a one-click button for subscribing from the App Edge.

It's undeniable that RockMelt has polish that Flock lacks. The edges utilize the mobile-app style rounded-box icons and real-time update indicators. Flock's sidebar doesn't work well when narrowed down because you lose access to the filtering features at the top and it cuts off status updates. You can hide it with a toggle on the right side of the browser, but then you must actively reopen it to see what's going on.

While those are solid hits from RockMelt, Flock's overall feature set is far more robust. You can edit your contacts, merging contact info and creating groups to organize them. These groups can then be applied to your contact stream, which lives in the right sidebar. RockMelt allows you to "favorite" friends in the Friends Edge, but it doesn't support the powerful sorting that Flock has. Where RockMelt only searches for Facebook contacts, Flock will search all of its supported services for your friends' updates from the location bar. Both browsers do allow you to share currently viewing sites to supported services with comments, a key feature.

So which one is best? That still depends on what you're looking to get out of the browser. Because of the tight integration with your friends and the slick design, RockMelt will give you the strongest Facebook experience of the two browsers. Since Twitter searches aren't supported from the location bar in RockMelt, along with the support for grouping and other social networking services in Flock, Flock is the better browser for a cross-discipline, unified social affair. And as noted, Mac users will have to wait until the OS X version of Flock 3 comes out.

No iOS update yet today, but Apple did release an update to iTunes for Windows and Mac.

iTunes 10.1 is out now, and with it comes AirPlay, the new feature that will allow videos to be streamed to an Apple TV. Apple introduced the feature at its digital music and content event in September.

AirPlay is also supposed to allow streaming of audio and video from any iOS device--iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad--though that feature won't be turned on in those devices until the long-awaited iOS 4.2 update is released.

Earlier this week it was rumored that today would be the day we'd see 4.2, but now there are whispers that a Wi-Fi bug in the software is holding up its release.

Apple didn't give a specific day that 4.2 would arrive, only that it would come sometime in November.

Originally posted at Circuit Breaker