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What a difference a year makes. Although nearly invisible in Handango's 2004 tally of applications consumers bought and downloaded to their smartphones and PDAs, multimedia jumped into the top ten last year, ranking seventh overall: Behind category leaders utilities, productivity, business & professional, games, entertainment, travel, and ahead of communications, document management, and personal finance software.

MP3 and music players; DVD/video converters and viewers; and ringtone managers topped the best seller lists for each of the major platforms. Top titles included Ring Tone Megaplex for BlackBerry, Ringo Pro for Palm OS, Pocket-DVD Studio for Windows Mobile Pocket PC and SmartMovie for Symbian OS.

Three of the top ten searches - MP3/music, 'ringtones, DVD/Video - were for multimedia applications as well.

No matter what type of software people bought, they were willing to pay more for it last year as well. Handango reported the average selling price for content rose from $16.96 in 2004 to $20.03 in 2005, with each category of software seeing an overall increase in average selling price.

Because the wireless market changes so rapidly, only four 'handhelds' from 2004 - the Palm Treo 600/650, O2 XDA, Sony Ericsson P900/P910 and Palm Tungsten T Series - made last year's top ten list. The top new models in 2005 were, not surprisingly, Motorola's uber-hot RAZR V3, as well as RIM's BlackBerry 7100 Series and BlackBerry 7250/7290. RIM was the top-selling PDA vendor last year, according to Gartner.

Handango's BlackBerry catalog increased by 462 applications, up 67 percent from 2004. Document Management was the top category, accounting for 17 percent of all sales.

Top BlackBerry Apps:
1. Ring Tone Megaplex
2. WebViewer
3. Aces Texas Hold'em - No Limit
4. IM+
5. Acrobat PDF Graphical Attachment Booster
6. CryptMagic + PC Desktop
7. Sol Mania
8. Ascendo Photos
9. Requwireless Value Bundle
10. PocketDay Professional Edition

With no platform update in sight, until PalmSource announced a concrete new Linux OS this week at 3GSM, Palm developers were left dangling in the wind last year, and it showed. Although they uploaded 2,125 new applications to Handango in 2005, that number dropped dramatically by 89 percent from the year before.

Top Palm OS Apps:
1. Agendus Professional Edition
2. Treo Voice Dialing
3. AOL for Treo 650
4. Agendus Standard Edition
5. PocketMirror Standard Edition
6. Diet & Exercise Assistant
7. SplashID
8. KeySuite
9. SOLITAIRE PACK
10. Ringo Pro

Windows Mobile gets split into two categories, Pocket PCs and smartphones. Although both are used in handsets, Windows Smartphones don't have touch screens and Pocket PC Phones often, though not always, have QWERTY thumb-keyboards nowadays. Windows Mobile is expected to take over the smartphone category from Symbian by the end of the decade.

Top Pocket PC Apps:
1. Spb Pocket Plus
2. Battery Pack Pro
3. Agenda Fusion
4. Pocket-DVD Studio
5. SBSH PocketBreeze
6. Microsoft Voice Command - US Edition
7. Pocket Informant
8. eWallet
9. Pocket Controller-Professional
10. Spb Weather

Top Windows Smartphone Apps:
1. SmartphoneNotes
2. ClearVue Suite
3. SBSH Papyrus
4. Game Pack 1
5. Battery Pack Pro
6. Resco System Toys
7. Trick SoccerB 8. Photo Contacts
9. Jeyo Mobile Extender for Outlook
10. CodeWallet Pro

According to Handango, Symbian OS device users showed the most interest in multimedia content. It is likely because those types of handsets are popular in Europe and Asia where 3G services, which support multimedia the best, are the most mature. Almost ten percent of the Symbian best sellers list was multimedia titles, which accounted for eight percent of all Symbian OS sales, the highest across all platforms.

Top Symbian Apps:
1. SmartMovie
2. Handy Day 2005 Professional
3. WorldMate Professional Edition
4. Quickoffice Premier
5. Remote for UIQ
6. WebViewer
7. HandySafe
8. HandyTools
9. DateMateb
10. SKY FORCE for UIQ