• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, November 10, 2011

If you are old enough to remember the first generation of hairless G.I. Joes and light-bulb-powered Easy-Bake Ovens (ouch! I still have the scars), then you may recall the thrill of seeing the Sears Holiday Wish Book arrive on the doorstep before Thanksgiving. The mother of all retail catalogs was a compendium of the toys TV had been teasing us with throughout the year. We kids circled items, dog-eared pages, tore whole sections from this Bible for the Church of Our Lady of American Consumption to ensure our parents knew what we wanted to receive for the holiday.

Mobile media are trying to replicate some of that lost thrill in a flurry of app releases this month. Apple, Disney, Walmart, Kmart and others all have dropped apps for smartphones and for tablets that tug at those Wish Book memories. I guess for kids, “forwarding” is the new dog-earing.

Leading the charge is Apple itself, which recently revised both the look and functionality of its Apple Store for iOS. The push to drive retail is now a part of Apple’s game plan, as the new app offers in-store pick-up of items ordered on the phone. In fact the usually cool Apple even offers a mobile Holiday Gift Guide this year that has a bit of the old Neiman Marcus chic Christmas books of old. The Apple guide features sexy items like an RC Ferrari that uses an iOS device as the controller. And of course there’s also the new Disney Cars 2 “AppMATes” toy cars that are placed on the iPad screen itself. Hot Wheels just got digitized.

Speaking of the world’s greatest merchandiser, the Disney Store’s app is the usually sharp piece of programming and marketing. It appeals first to kids with a turnstile interface that lets a child find new toys by tapping the right Disney character. Yeah, there is a whole section just for princesses.

One of the cool things about the Disney, JC Penney and Walmart iPhone apps is that they have much more lush iPad versions for lean-back browsing. These iterations really do invoke the Wish Book vibe of old. Each makes great use of the interface to bring forward the depth of selection at each store, as well as zoom into lush depictions of individual items. If you want to know why e-commerce metrics on tablet are through the roof, try one of these apps.

And this is where a newer aspect of the iOS ecosystem and iCloud comes into play. If you turn on automatic downloading of apps across devices, then an app you installed on an iPhone will show up in its tablet form on your iPad. This feature could prove remarkably powerful, since the two devices often capture the consumer in different places and modes. Some of these apps are designed for near-store and in-store use on smartphones, but the iPad versions capture the leisurely catalog browsing mode. The Wish Book just grew a brain.