Amazing iPhone Apps

In the year 2008 the Smartphones took the consumers to different levels and iPhone has been a revelation which was embraced by the masses. What is most striking in the success of the iPhone is the applications which are available on it.

Below are the top 10 iPhone applications.

1 Pandora Internet Radio

This application is available free with the iPhone and is all-time best for music lovers. You pick a song, album or artist and Pandora immediately builds a whole "radio station" around it, endlessly streaming complete tunes from top artists. You can even tweak your station by giving songs a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Music quality is amazingly good for audio and as far as I know the audio streams for free over AT&T's data network. The music library is solid for genres ranging from rock to pop to jazz to classical. It really needs some Indian Bollywood music, though.

2. AroundMe

Simplicity makes this app a must-carry for the road warrior. Like the name applies, it lists all the critical services around you i.e. banks, coffee shops, bars, gas stations, hospitals, movie theatres, restaurants and so on. Using geo-location, the app orders each service by its proximity to you by giving further details like how many yards away the bar is(I would be mostly interested in that). This apps is very much aimed at the traveller and like any other apps it maps out a route from here to there, if requested. It also creates a contact page for every entry, which you can save to your own contacts list.

3. Mobile News Network

The Associated Press's news-on-demand app is the gold standard. It gives you top news stories, as well as business, sports, show biz and other categories, which you can sort by most recent or most read. It even uses the phone's GPS chip to deliver up local news. Stories and photos load fast, look great and can be read offline. You can email or text the story to a contact, or save it in your own news archive.

4. Ocarina

Some genius figured out how to use the microphone on the iPhone as an air-flow sensor, as a result now we've got a virtual ocarina, albeit not potato-shaped. Hold the phone up to your lips and blow; four "holes" appear on your touch screen allowing you to play almost any scale (which you select under Settings). Share your tunes with other Ocarina players around the world, or just set the app to listen to their masterworks. The Ocarina app costs $0.99 in US from the AT&T network.

5. Wikipanion

O.K., so it's not always accurate. But if you need to understand the gist of something, there's no better reference tool at your fingertips than Wikipedia. While there are many Wikipedia apps for the iPhone, this one is the best of the bunch. It automatically searches while you type, which is cool as well as time-saving, and its rendering of the Wikipedia page on the touchscreen is as perfect as you'll find. By upgrading to the pay version, Wikipanion Plus, users can save articles and do offline browsing.

6. Adrenaline Pool Lite

Virtual pool has been around since the advent of computers. It wouldn't be surprising to hear that it was first played on the UNIVAC 1. And like everything else with a chip for a brain, e-billiards continues relentlessly to improve — this app being a case in point. Fire up Adrenaline Pool, log into a server, and you can play anything from eight-ball to snooker, against other anonymous iPhone pool sharks. The physics are so good; you'll want to take up smoking again.

7. Instapaper

Sign up at Instapaper.com for a free account then drag the "Read Later" tag to your browser's toolbar. Now, whenever you're sitting at your computer and stumble upon an article or blog post on the Web that you'd like read later, hit that button. Instapaper's app instantly stores it on your iPhone in a format that's especially readable.

8. NetNewsWire

There's no better way to keep up with your daily perambulations on the Net than via an RSS reader, which basically pushes content from any website or blog to your computer in a format that resembles email. NetNewsWire is one of the best free programs for computers, allowing you to easily subscribe to any feed and synchronizing what you've read across any computers you use. This app adds your iPhone to the party, allowing you to read perfectly formatted text on demand, as well as offline.

9. iTalk

A reporter's best friend, but also indispensable for anyone who wants to dictate memos or record other audible stuff on their phone. The app is little more than a big, red RECORD button on your iPhone screen; push it to capture audio in the high-quality AIFF format. What makes iTalk especially cool is the free, companion iTalkSynch app, which you download to your computer. That program can "sniff" the audio files on your iPhone and download them to your Mac or PC, via Wi-Fi. Now all we need is an app to do perfect voice-to-text translations

10. FakeCall

Because everyone needs a decent, iPhone party trick. Set up a fake contact and that person calls you, on demand. Great for getting out of dull business meetings, or impressing friends when Steve Jobs calls to ask if you really, truly think cut-and-paste would be a good thing to have on the iPhone.

Together with the above Apps there are so many programmers around the world who are busy in writing or developing some more interesting Apps on the apple i-phone Apps store. One of the most interesting I came across recently was a British-made iPhone program that allows the user to read the Kama Sutra.

Eucalyptus, a book reading application developed by Edinburgh programmer James Montgomerie, allows users to download and read thousands of classic titles from the library of Project Gutenberg, the respected website that hosts out of copyright books.But after repeated attempts to get Eucalyptus onto the iPhone's popular App Store, Montgomerie was told that his application was being rejected because one of Gutenberg's books happens to be Sir Richard Burton's 1883 translation of the famous guide to sex.

The link below from Guardian UK tells you more about the above story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/may/21/apple-iphone