IPhone users love their video games

"When he's not playing on his Xbox 360, he's playing on the iPod," said Furrier, a 43-year-old entrepreneur and blogger in Palo Alto.

Apple Inc.'s iPhone is a cellphone, Web-surfing gadget and digital media player rolled into one. The iPod Touch is the same, minus the cellphone. But to many people's surprise, one of the devices' most popular uses is as a hand-held video game system.

Games have become the fastest-growing and most popular type of application for iPhone and iPod Touch owners, outpacing all other categories available on Apple's App Store. As of Friday evening, 7 of the top 10 selling applications for the devices were games.

"This was an amazing surprise to us to see how much games have taken off," said Stan Ng, Apple's senior director of product marketing.

Game developers have taken to the platform, creating nearly 1,700 games since the online App Store launched in June. That's more than twice the number available in the store's second-largest category, entertainment, which includes music and video.

Neil Young liked his iPhone so much that, in June, the 43-year-old gave up a lucrative job as a senior executive of Electronic Arts Inc. to start a small company that develops games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

"I found that my iPhone was never very far away from me," Young said. "I was constantly checking e-mail, downloading apps, playing games, browsing the Internet. My personal usage was measurably different from any phone or game machine I've ever had before. It led me to think that there was a dramatically new market opportunity for gaming on a unique mobile device."

With funding from Maples Investments and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Young founded Ngmoco:) Inc. in San Francisco. The strangely named start-up recently launched two games and is developing a dozen others. Its two titles, MazeFinger and Topple, are among the App Store's 10 most-downloaded applications.