It won’t work in the U.S. outside the Silver State — the only place where sports gambling is legal — but its technology is sophisticated enough to let visitors from other states conveniently place bets while they’re here, even if they’re not inside a casino.

American Wagering Inc. is launching the program for BlackBerry devices in time for the start of college football and the NFL regular season. The public company, which operates nearly 60 Leroy’s Horse and Sports Place sports books throughout Nevada, plans to launch new apps for iPhones, Droids, and Windows-based phones soon.

“I’m all-in on this,” said Vic Salerno, American Wagering’s chief executive. “We’ve reinvented the company entirely.”

Salerno said it took 14 months to develop the application and get it approved by Nevada gambling regulators. Each version for other phone operating systems requires separate approval from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which will scrutinize their security systems and other features.

The application requires bettors to appear at a sports book in person just once, when first creating their account with Leroy’s.

That allows the company to verify a person’s age and tie their account to one specific phone. When that person then logs into the system, a combination of GPS and cellular tower coordinates verify he or she is within Nevada’s borders before allowing them to place a bet.

Placing bets on sports through phones isn’t new in Nevada, said John English, the company’s senior vice president for business development. A beeper system, affectionately known as a “wager pager,” lets gamblers call in their bets and verify their position through a code sent to the beeper from a limited-range tower, he said.

Salerno and English said custom versions of the apps will likely be offered in future years to major gambling operators like Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., MGM Resorts International, Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Wynn Resorts Ltd.

The 3G iPhone push means that other smartphone manufacturers (RIM BlackBerry, Nokia, Windows Mobile) will now have to keep pace with iPhone and release similar devices which means in the near future the market should become flooded with powerful mobile devices that can support rich client interfaces and engaging game play rather than a humble SMS, because it’s not very exiting to spend money for a text that says, say, “[3H,5H,8C,QD,KD] you loose, try again”.

One day soon we’ll be able able to gamble and bet on sports from an interactive mobile client that will be a pleasure to use.

If Apple is able to launch a 3G iPhone capable of such speeds, the days of wandering around looking for Wi-Fi hotspots would be over. It could also mean even more innovation opportunities for the application developers. Ideas such as full casino clients with video and graphics running on the iPhone can become as real possibility. As we mentioned earlier, one of the three things holding back mobile gambling is graphics and user interface of phones and connection speeds to deliver a great user experience.

Of course, as we’ve seen with the EDGE network, theoretical speeds and actual speeds are two different things. Any next-gen network will only be as fast as the infrastructure AT&T builds for it. According to AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson, the 3G iPhone will launch in 2008. He didn’t say how much it could cost admitting that Jobs and Apple “will dictate what the price of the phone is.”