We’ve posted a fair amount about mobile technology in a range of contexts. There’s a reason for this: personal mobile devices are an active and dynamic frontier for social and information technology. There’s a reason for that too: these devices have opened up to realms of human activity to technological innovation. It’s only until recently that someone could ask themselves “what type of mini Web application might someone need while they are waiting at a bus stop?” or “how can we make our tool is the one people use to figure out what to do when they discover the movie is sold out?” Google’s recently released voice-based search application for the iPhone is a good example.

O’Reilly Radar has two recent posts specifically about the iPhone and the applications for it. They note that it’s been 5 months since apps for the iPhone have become available and that there are now 10,000 of them. That’s a lot. It’s enough to start drawing conclusions about the market by looking the information Radar offers about their breakdwon:

Games are the leading category, accounting for one in four of total applications. This reinforces Apple’s recent marketing campaign around games.

$0.99 is the most common price point, although one in four applications are free.

The most expensive application currently for sale is iRa by Lextech Labs for $899.99. This is video surveillance application that integrates with a number of CCTV systems.

The entire iPhone App Store catalog could be purchased for just over $30,000, although there’s only room to fit 129 of them on your iPhone or iPod touch at any given time (148 apps in total, but that includes the default applications from Apple).

Some helpful graphs let us go a bit deeper on those first two points:

Not only are games the most common category and $0.99 the most common price, the overall population of applications is skewing that way further as time goes on. Meanwhile, the proportion of free apps is decreasing.

There’s something really interesting here: people are selling software for a dollar a shot. Users of mobile application platforms are willing to spend a dollar to play one of a couple thousand games as many times as they like. How many of them are waiting at bus stops? How many of them are people who would otherwise be playing a game on a dedicated gaming device like a PSP and how many would otherwise not be playing games at all? Could games be leveraged as a way to build critical mass for mobile social applications?

But to come back down to earth, money is changing hands here. That means the developers of these games have found a viable value proposition on this new, mobile computing platform. Lots of other people are worried about doing that, asking how advertising will work on phones for example. Maybe there’s room for ads embedded within games. It’s only been five months so it’s probably too early to say anything for sure, except that a lot of people are going to be watching to see what happens next and a lot more who probably should be.