iPhone apps for the new addict

A dear, dear friend of mine has just got herself an iPhone and I thought of putting together a list of must-have apps for her. I discovered I have 76 applications downloaded, but I end up using only a handful of these. But it's a large handful and the list got so long, I decided to blog it instead. 

In doing so, I reveal my inner soul, I guess. And the sorry depths of my addiction. So be it.

Descriptions are mine, prices are as in the US store as in December 2009

So here goes:

Games - Naturally, that's what you do most on a phone, no?

I prefer the no-pressure, minimum motor skills kind of stuff - logic, word and brain-dead games.

The ones I return to time and agame.

Bookworm - $2.99 - Word game to flex those little grey word cells

Bubblewrap - Free - Mindless workout for the thumbs; deeply satisfying, nonetheless

Drop7 - $2.99 - Tetris-like but surprisingly strategy-oriented, great fun, time flies

Marple - $1.99 (Free Lite version available, if you want to try it out) - logic game, addictive

Sudoku - $1.99 - Need say no more, except that there are lots of versions available. I use the one from Electronic Arts because the interface is sexy and dead simple and the puzzles are coherent and require no guessing

Touch Poet Lite - Free - d-i-y haikus for the rest of us, wonderful

2Across - $5.99 - crosswords on the go. The most expensive of my games but worth every cent, with downloads of crosswords available from 4 or 5 newspapers, so you never run out. I only do cryptics but quick crosswords are even more plentiful. And a great interface.

The others I have and either dabble in occasionally or intend to try out one day are:

PuzzleManiak - $4.99 - collection of logic puzzles, some very satisfying, some very okay. Interface has improved over versions.

Labyrinth Lite - Free - iPhone version of those little puzzles I had as a kid where you guide little steel balls into the centre of a maze. A whole new ball game with the accelerometer!

Paper Toss - Free - Chuck the ball of crumpled paper into the bin. Fabulous graphics.

Pac-Man Lite - Free - An old favourite from the age of monochrome monitors and late nights in office

Myst Free - er, Free - Another old mind-bending classic from my PC days, as far as you can get from Doom and Quake et al.

Books: I now do all my reading on the iPhone and no longer buy dead trees. I am green. I save the planet. I jump tall buildings with a single bound.

eReader - Free - my favourite reader. Connects to my bookshelves on fictionwise.com and ereader.com and allows me to carry my collection of 243 eBooks (and growing!) on my iPhone 24/7. Wish I could do the same with my 1500+ dead tree ones.

Classics - $2.99 - Collection of 20-or-so public domain never-go-out-of-style-or-become-irrelevant classics packaged in a great UI. More promised via free updates.

Kindle - Free - Haven't tried this yet since I haven't bought any Kindle ebooks because of copyright restrictions in selling outside of the US. But may become useful in the future now that the Kindle is being sold internationally.

Stanza - Free - Looked promising but it kept locking up on me. Others have good reviews, so maybe it's just me. YMMV.

News:

Netnewswire - Free - Spiffy RSS reader that syncs with your Google Reader account

NYTimes - Free - Access to the latest and greatest of the New York Times. Good UI.

WSJ - Free - Access to the latest and greatest of the Wall Street Journal. Good UI.

Streaming Music: Sure, there's the built-in iPod, but you know you always need more music, right?

ConcertVault - Free - Internet radio stations are all over the place, but where do you go when you want to listen to entire concerts by the biggest names in rock? There's only Wolfgang's Concert Vault - http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/concerts/. The site itself is an incredible cornucopia and the app puts all of that on your iPhone. Technology rocks. Literally.

Utilities: Can't live without these.

Convert - $1.99 - aka Convert the unit calculator - easily convert kgs to lbs, kms to miles, C to F and many more such indispensable aids to transnational communication and global integration. Also forex currency conversions. Plus, an object lesson in iPhone UI. They should give this one the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dropbox - Free - www.dropbox.com is the best file sync solution out there. It just works - between my laptop, home machine, daughter's laptop, wife's laptop, friend-I-want-to-share-file-with. And now my iPhone.

Box.net - Free - access to my box.net shelf should I need stuff from there. Occasionally, I do.

Evernote - Free - Access my notes and web clippings from anywhere

Remote - Free - Controls iTunes on my home iMac and everything on my Apple TV so I can couch my potato and keep watching/listening.

Zenbe Lists - Free - Syncs browser-based to-do lists at www.zenbe.com across my laptop and my iPhone

Emoji - Free - Emoticons to the max to incorporate into my SMSes and Pings and Notes and wherever I can type

1Password Pro - $7.99 - Yes, steep, but who can remember all those passwords and PINs and girlfriends' names? I can't. And this helps me keep them safe.

Communication: Proof you can communicate via phone without opening your mouth.

Echofon for Facebook - Free - Haven't actually tried this out yet, but the UI looks fast and its Twitter sibling is sexy and hey, it's free. 

Facebook - Free - Duh.

Echofon for Twitter - Free - Does everything you need to Twitter. In style. And now that they have a free Mac version I no longer need to read the same tweets on my Mac and my iPhone, this little babe syncs the two. Neat.

Skype - Free - Works like a charm on WiFi and helps you stick it to the Telecom Man.

Ping - Free - Hands down the smartest way to SMS a fellow iPhone addict. And with emoji, it's sexy too. With a data plan and/or WiFi it's basically free international SMSes between iPhones. Keeps me in touch with my daughter in Singapore and my wife in touch with her family in the US. All for f-r-e-e.

I also have a bunch of other stuff that I use occasionally or specifically, e.g., city Tube maps, city guides from Frommers and the Collectorz suite of apps for tracking my collections of music, books and movies. But that's specialist stuff.

It's pretty amazing that the most frequent word in this entry is Free.

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