Following on from Bed’s Top Five Essential iPhone Apps, here are my top five useful iPhone Apps. These aren’t used on a daily basis – but are useful to have around for when they may be required.
IM+ Lite
Its always handy to have an Instant Messenger application around. While I don’t need always-on-push instant messaging on my iPhone – having the ability to log on and talk to someone quickly can be useful. Just the other month I was relaying technical support to a work colleague while in a busy loud shopping mall. It was much easier via IM than trying to talk on the phone through all the noise. IM+ Lite isn’t fancy, but it supports pretty much all IM protocols (AIM®/iChat, MSN®/Windows Live™ Messenger, Yahoo!®, ICQ®, Jabber®, Google™ Talk and MySpaceIM) and is free.
AroundMe
This App has been shown on the Australian iPhone tv ads. It uses the GPS to help you find stuff around you, banks, petrol stations, restaurants, etc. It can then take you straight to google maps to give you the directions to get there. The potential usefulness of this is just fantastic – this is what future connectivity is all about. Its also free (it is funded by some very small ads that stay out of your way and are easy to ignore).
Starmap
Starmap is really only useful if you like gazing at the sky at night. It uses your current GPS location to find out where you are, and then presents a sky to you with all the stars, planets and universe objects in the right positions. This sky is rotatable and zoomable. You can search for particular objects (such as a particular planet), and turn on or off objects like deep field galaxies. The other weekend I went camping and we noticed two stars looked particularly bright. “They must be planets”, I thought, so I took out Starmap and within a few seconds had verified that we were looking at Jupiter and Venus (this was a few weeks before they teamed up with the moon to form a smiley face as they did last week). When I get a chance to do more star gazing with my telescope – this application will be well worth the price tag of AU$14.99. This has been the most expensive App I’ve bought – but the functionality is well worth it in my opinion.
Trails
Trails is a simple GPS tracking application. You turn it on and it will track your co-ordinates and elevation. Once you’ve been where you need to be – you can view your trail on-top of google maps services or email the trail file, which can be imported into Google Earth, or any other application that supports GPX files. This works well for visualising hikes, rides or adventures. Trails costs AU$2.49.
Wikipanion
There’s nothing extraordinary about Wikipanion. You can ultimately achieve the same end result by opening Safari, navigating to Wikipedia and doing your search. But the accessibility and speed of utilising Wikipanion (along with the price tag of FREE) make it useful to have. Just the other month I was in a discussion about what the various colours of urine mean (dehydration, asparagus etc). There was some debate on some colours, so I quickly looked it up with Wikipanion and we had our answers. For all of those times you’re in a conversation and can’t remember something – Wikipanion comes in very useful.
See also… Bed’s Top Five Essential iPhone Apps, Bed’s Top Five Jailbroken iPhone Apps
Still to come… Bed’s Top Five Useless iPhone Apps and Bed’s Top Five iPhone Games.
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