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My Favorite Free iPhone Apps

July 23rd, 2008

One huge feature of the iPhone is application support. The best apps add a new dimension to the iPhone. Music apps bring more music to the iPhone beyond what the 8 – 16 GB storage allows. Location-aware apps strive to use GPS with social networking. Some use motion detection in entertaining ways. This party is just starting – I have a feeling to coolest apps are still to come.

I’ve been playing it relatively safe at first by only installing free apps. I pinged a few folks to ask them what free apps they’ve found worthwhile. After some enjoyable testing, here’s a list of my favorites:

NYTimes: Displays top headlines and articles from The New York Times. Navigation is simple, the icons are cute, and the text is a comfortable size to read. You can browse stories by their photos. The app occasionally take an oddly long time to update.

Bloomberg: Business news, a world market chart, and a stock finder that links to news about that company. A summary of Yahoo! Finance in your pocket.

Mobile News: Lists AP news stories with an interface similar to the NYTimes app. Especially neat: click on a story with a photograph, click All Photos, and you’ll be in a photo browser for that article. Click on “i” to get the caption for each photograph. AP videos are also accessible.

Shazam: Records an audio sample of a song and tries to identity it. After a song is identified, you get links to iTunes and YouTube videos. Actually did an amazing job with songs played from one iPhone to another, but not so good with music playing over a restaurant loudspeaker. A killer use is to identify soundtrack tunes while watching a movie – I tried this during Dan In Real Life. Answer: Sondre Lerche.

Midomi: Sing a song to your iPhone and Midomi tries to identify it. Did an okay job with Happy Birthday, Close To You (Carpenters), and the Star Wars theme, but not so good with Walking On Sunshine and a tour-de-force of ABBA tunes. Relies highly on the user’s vocal ability, and as such might make a good drinking game – can you sing well enough for Midomi to work?

Pandora Radio: Enter an artist and you get a playlist of similar music. Pandora has been on the web for a while now, and this app brings the website experience to the iPhone.

AOL Radio: Internet radio. Despite your feelings about AOL, there’s a long list of genres and even specific radio stations (KCRW).

Last.fm: Music discovery service based on songs you like. Activity within the app (I love this track) bubbles up to FriendFeed – way cool.

Remote: Use your iPhone to control iTunes or the Apple TV. The interface looks like the iPod app without Cover Flow. There’s search, too. A must-have for anyone who uses iTunes.

More Cowbell: Add more cowbell to your favorite songs. Play a song on your iPhone, launch this app, and bang away. I found this way more fun than I should have.

Google Mobile App: Search results appear as you type. A real time saver for those of us getting used to the iPhone keyboard.

Yelp: Tons of useful reviews on Yelp, all available based on your location – each result gives you the distance away in miles. Venues are located on a map for you. Most useful for restaurant reviews, but you can also look up banks and gas stations.

iWant: A grid of icons gives you access to services (restaurants, bars, groceries, shopping, movies, banks, gas stations) near your location.

Graffitio: Sets up “walls” in a location on which anybody near that place can leave a note for others to read. This could be really cool – imagine restaurant reviews or gossip going on at a gathering. But at this stage, there isn’t enough content to make it super useful, and what content there is, resembles scribblings on a toilet stall.

Movies: Displays show times, maps, tickets, links to IMDB, and trailers based on zip code. This program beat out other free ones with movie trailers.

Urban Spoon: Shake it to get restaurant recommendations near you. Links to reviews. Map feature needs some work, however.

Twittelator: Basic Twitter client. You can transmit your location or upload photos taken with your iPhone camera to TwitPic. Twitter plus mobility is very addicting and fun.

WordPress: Allows posting to a blog running on WordPress, including uploading pictures. Downsides: no copy and paste or adding links. I can’t imagine this will work for longer posts, but if you’re out and about and absolutely must post, it will suffice.

Phonesaber: A virtual light saber using the iPhone’s motion detection. Swing it around to get the distinctive humming sound, and if you really whack at something you can make the imaginary sparks fly. I find this highly amusing, but our cats hate it.

Morocco: A free Othello game. I get my ass kicked most of the time.

So that’s my list. Any cool free iPhone apps you’ve discovered?

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folder Categories: Apple, Technology, iPhone Apps :: ::

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  • Good list. I'm enjoying this Jibro Match game. Mainly because my daughter loves to play it. I find that when I'm driving her in the car or when we're at a restaurant waiting for food, she'll ask to play. It's a great way to occupy a kid for a short period of time (wait...am I being a bad parent?).

    I'm also enjoying using the iPhone optimized websites out there. I've found a few good lists from other bloggers, but it would be fun to know your list of iPhone websites at some point (meebo for instance, has turned out to be very useful, and there are multiple iphone optimized versions of nextbus that i'm messing with too).

    I love the local apps like urbanspon, yelp and iwant. I find myself now wanting an app that will tell me how full a restaurant is (for example, if i'm going to a cafe...are there tables/seats available?). I know, sounds ludicrous but now that I have all this info at my fingertips, I'm getting greedy and want EVEN MORE DATA.
  • Cool, I'll check out the Jibro games. Yeah, I think having an idea of a wait
    time at a restaurant would be awesome - maybe really popular joints could
    install a web cam that one could take a peek at using an iPhone.
  • I love NetNewsWire. It references my Newsgator account so my read/unread feed status remains synced across the iPhone, my Mac and web. However, the only reason it's "better" than google reader is the post to blog feature on the Mac app. :/

    I love BoxOffice, but I'll give that Movies one a try... wouldn't mind checking out trailers and such.

    Did you try Aurora Feint? http://aurorafeint.com/
  • Cool, more recommendations. I haven't tried out NetTewsWire or Aurora Feint
    - the latter one showed up pretty recently. I can dig a good game. Gee - I
    may have to do a follow up post after more free app testing.
  • Andrew_Stone
    Glad you like Twittelator!

    We sent Apple Store Version 1.1 which has some GREAT new features - which you can read about here: http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/Twittelator_Ne... and see Screenshots here: http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/Twittelator_Sc....

    Oh - here's the Twittelator icon that you can scale any size for your blog: http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/images/twittel...
  • Thanks for the info. I'm liking the way apps update on iPhone, without
    needing to be synced to a computer - very handy.
  • jcieplinski
    I like the auto-update as well. But be aware, sometimes the updates don't get there as quickly as you might think. I found that iTunes on my Mac finds several updates that the iPhone itself doesn't. Maybe there's a delay before they get pushed out to the mobile AppStore? I don't know.

    So I downloaded all the updates on my Mac, and then synched them to the iPhone. Not nearly as elegant as it should be.

    I also hate how it ignores my organization on the home screens and just downloads the updates into the next available slot.

    I find the Talking Phrasebooks in various languages somewhat useful. Good for picking up common usage phrases, anyway. And they're free. Might be enough to get you by when traveling. The nice feature is that you get recordings of the phrases being spoken, rather than just the text.

    I keep wanting to try out G-Park, but I forget to mark my spot at the time I'm parking. I imagine this is a very useful little app for those of us who forget where we park all the time.

    I agree that the best is most certainly yet to come.
  • Hmmm, yeah, you're right, I just checked via the iphone for updates
    and saw one, but through iTunes there were about six. Time to sync.

    Since you're mentioning annoyances, some of these apps sure crash
    often. I was using Last FM and every couple of songs or so it would
    hang and I'd have to quit and start over. The other day, the NYTimes
    seemed frozen - never updataing, and Twitterlator crashed my whole
    phone once.

    Yeah, G-Park was that app you were telling me about earlier. It's a
    buck, so I'll add it to my list of paid apps to get. Thanks for
    commenting as always...!
  • Andrew_Stone
    Here's my sadness around the updates at the AppStore - we submitted a new version of iGraffiti ( http://tinyurl.com/igraffiti ) about 9 days ago - and it's STILL not updated. Twittelator went in about 4 days ago ( http://tinyurl.com/twittelator )
  • Hey, glad you like Urbanspoon! We've put out a fix for the map issue you were seeing. Hope that helps!
  • fastmama
    Are more cities being added...like New Orleans?
  • Nice to hear from you that there are this much of application for Iphone. Thanks for the post
  • Very nice, all of these.
    It is a shame that apple made it harder to get to the free apps in the appstore.
  • My fav is the Mint app. It allows me to always see what is going on with my money. I also use the NY Times everyday.
  • golfman_story
    What a useful and great info !! Tq very much..

    Cheers!
  • Pukkap
    Great set of apps and post, I would add shopshop which is a simple free app that makes shopping easier (well for me anyway!). Check out my blog www.appertunity.com for more of my fav apps, Jas
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