The iPhone Applications I Love

First, my response to E’s 5 Websites post from yesterday. I don’t know what 5 websites I’d pick, and the justification part just didn’t feel natural when I tried it for one or two of them. But, here are three sites that I strongly recommend:
1) Kissing Suzy Kolber - for the NFL fan with a sense of humor. My pick for the funniest site on the intertubes.
2) Engadget - All the best geek news. As Apple’s September product announcements draw near, this becomes all the more vital a site.
3) The AV Club - One of the best pop culture sites on the web. It covers movies, music, books, and etcetera with a great blend of intelligence and irreverence.

On to the purpose behind today’s post. It’s been a month and a half or so since the iPhone application store launched, and it seems like a fair time to evaluate just how well the developers are doing at creating applications good enough to justify a purchase. So, I’m just going to briefly talk about the applications that really do it for me…in that way.

Stanza - It’s an ebook reader. I think that 95% of people who really like books recognize that ebook readers are maybe not the greatest way to go about reading. You can’t take notes, you can’t dog-ear passages that you love, text on a monitor is hard to read, etc., etc. Some ebook readers, like the Kindle, remedy all of these problems. Even then, there’s something about a book. But, Stanza does a lot to overcome these shortcomings by virtue of being FREE. In the span of 3 minutes today, I had the following books downloaded legally and at no cost:
A Tale of Two Cities
Animal Farm
Paradise Lost
The Great Gatsby
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Time Machine (this was included with the program…)
Thus Spake Zarathrustra
Approximate cost on Amazon for the cheapest new copies of these books: $55.

So, yeah…I’m sold. I also downloaded Ulysses, but let’s be serious here. I won’t understand it even with a careful reading on a paper version. Though, see if that stops me.

Dial Zero - This program is essentially a phone book. You type in the name of a company, and it dials that company’s customer service department for you. Then, it enters the combination of numbers that lead you to a live operator, thus avoiding the annoying electronic systems designed to prevent you from getting real help. This is exactly what phone applications should aspire to be. Price: FREE.

Midomi - This program helps you figure out the name of a song. If it’s playing around you, just hold your phone up, and it will locate it for you. If you want to identify it by singing or humming, you can do that too. Finally, it allows you to search by artist, song or album. Once it finds the song, it has links to YouTube videos, to stream the song, and to purchase it on itunes. Truly an amazing application. Price: FREE.

MobileChat - A portable AIM, GTalk, and other program chat interface. It’s slick, easy to use, and by far the best solution for IMing on the go that I’ve found to date. Price: $2.99

BoxOffice / NowPlaying - Allows me to see what movies are playing in my area, their scores on rottentomatoes, what times they are playing, and provides links to purchase tickets online. It’s all you need for moviegoing. Price: FREE.

Pennies - a really simple, but totally effective program for setting a budget and keeping track of your expenditures. To date, by far my favorite program. Price: $1.99

There are plenty of other great applications out there, but these are the ones that really excite me, and they did so for a total cost of $5. This is why the iPhone is greater than the sum of its parts.