There are thousands of free iPhone/iPod Touch apps, these are the 9 (non-game) Best.
Also included in this “top 10” list is one app so good it is worth the near $10 price and the inclusion in this listing. Also included in this article, ten other free apps worth an honorable mention, for a total of 20 iPhone / iPod Touch must-have apps.
The twenty apps mentioned here are not listed in any order of greatness—except that the first 10 are better than the “honorable-mention” listing. For this listing, we are not counting the apps that are included with the iPhone OS, such as Safari, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, iTunes, Notes, etc. Otherwise, the mobile browser Safari would easily be my number 1 app.
I personally use an iPod Touch, and do not have an iPhone, so this blog has an iPod Touch-bias, such as no pure-camera or pure-phoning apps made this list because the iPod Touch does not have a camera yet, and no phone. However, all of these apps work just as well on an iPhone. This article also assumes that you have not jail-broken your iPhone or iPod Touch—all these apps are available through Apple’s App Store.
Feel free to let me know where I “dropped the ball” and forgot some great app that should be on my list.
1. Dropbox—http://www.getdropbox.com/—A storage application and syncing service. Dropbox enables users to store and sync files online and between computers. It is simply the best and the easiest of the free cloud sync/storage solutions out there, whether on an iPhone/iPod Touch or any desktop/notebook computer.
A free Dropbox account offers 2 GB of storage. Users may upgrade to as much as 100 GB of storage by paying a monthly or yearly fee. The total amount of storage space of both the free and fee-based accounts may be increased up to 3 GB for free accounts and 6 GB for fee-based accounts by referring people to the service.
eBay Mobile—http://pages.ebay.com/mobile/iphone.html—Lots of features and functions for a mobile app. As a buyer and seller on ebay I use this app quite a bit. This app is almost as fully functional as the full eBay experience through a web browser.
“Using a streamlined interface that’s as elegant as it is practical, eBay members can search, buy, pay, and check their activity on the go. Now with alerts, buyers can sneak in that last-minute bid on a hard-to-find item without having to keep the app open! In addition, sellers can check on their sales and everyone can act on time-sensitive information on the spot without a computer; whether it’s leaving feedback, responding to messages, or checking out today’s Deal of the Day. eBay is open for business anytime, anywhere on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.” Ebay
3. Flickr—http://mobile.yahoo.com/flickr—Simple, clean app—to the point of lacking in features. This app is better for someone who already has a large, active flickr account and wants a quick and easy way to access it on a mobile device. If you need the other features of Flickr, one can always use Safari to access Flickr through a browser. Good app if for no other reason than because it is Flickr. I expect more functionality/features will be added to this app as it matures.
4. Google Mobile App—http://www.google.com/mobile/—To many things, too little blog space. A collection of Google’s Apps all under one icon: Gmail, Calendar, Latitude, Docs, Talk, Tasks, Reader, News, Book Reader, Orkut, Translate, Google Earth Maps, and even a YouTube App. All of these apps actually run through the iPhone’s built-in web browser, Safar. The implementation is done very well and one can barely notice they are operating any of these apps through the browser window. This collection is almost a mobile OS in and of itself.
5. Facebook—http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6628568379—The App is great. Lots of features, but not enough to get lost, like what can happen using Facebook through a web browser. I do not currently use Facebook (taking a Facebreak), but I have wasted enjoyed numerous hours in the past Facebooking. This app deserves to be ranked high on any iPhone app listing. (What about a Twitter App? Well, I don’t Tweet, and to pick one iPhone Twitter app over another is grounds for a brawl these days!)
6. Skype—http://www.skype.com/—This app is great, especially for people with “an iPhone without the phone” i.e. and iPod Touch. Sure, Skype does not exactly turn one’s iPod Touch into a phone, but you can make phone calls with it if you have a wifi signal. Driving around looking for a wifi signal is just like looking for a pay phone in the old days! But really… iPod Touch+Skype+budget “throw-away” cell phone…FTW!
7. Stanza—http://www.lexcycle.com/—What is great about this app is the access to over 100,000 FREE books and periodicals, including almost all the classics. What about Amazon’s Kindle app? The app is free, the content…not so much.
8. What’s On?—http://www.napkinstudio.com/apps/whats_on/2.0/ Sure, I still check out the boob-tube sometimes and this app is the best for boob-tubing information. Have you ever been on the go and wondering what time your favorite show is on or what will be on TV when you get home? Have you ever wanted to check what time a movie was playing at your favorite theater? Or have you ever wondered what your favorite actor is up to? What’s On is the perfect solution – a portable entertainment guide for your iPhone/iPod Touch! Packed with more features than you would think an app like this would have.
9. Photoshop Mobile—http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/ A perfect mobile companion to Photoshop.com, an online photo sharing, editing, and hosting resource. Simply drag your finger to crop, adjust color, apply effects—you name it: Crop, rotate, change color with just a touch; Give an extra glow with Soft Focus; Get artsy with Sketch; Apply one-touch effects like Warm Vintage and Vignette. This app just came out, and is somewhat feature-thin at this time. Still a great app. It’s Photoshop, and it’s on your phone!
10. Air Sharing Pro—http://avatron.com/apps/air-sharing-pro/— (Not Free—$9.99) This app does so much that many folks have written lengthy blog articles about it alone. Basically, this app allows you to wirelessly copy any files from a computer to your iPhone or iPod touch. Air sharing pro currently costs $9.99, and is worth every penny—I got lucky with this app’s price and got it for $4.99.
The bottom line: It wirelessly connects your computer to your iPhone/iPod Touch and has just about the best pdf viewer available for the iPhone. Here is the full list of features:
•Create a wireless hard disk
• Mount your iPhone or iPod touch as a wireless drive on a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer (on the same Wi-Fi network), or connect from any web browser
• Drag-drop files between your computer and Air Sharing Pro
• Host a powerful web server with WebDAV (just like iDisk)
• No special software required on your computer
• View documents
• Scrollbar for fast access in large documents
• Folder popup for jumping back to previously viewed folders
• Advanced auto-detection of character encoding in text files, using linguistic analysis
• View large PDFs that would crash Mail or Safari
• Supports password-protected and encrypted PDFs
• PDF Table of Contents (PDF bookmarks) for easy navigation
• PDF page thumbnails
• Go To Page for PDFs
• High-quality viewing of high-resolution images
• Slide show
• Save images to Photos
• iWork ‘09 and iWork ‘08 (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers)
• View zipped documents without manually unzipping
• Perform file operations
(Move, Copy, Paste Rename, Delete, New Folder Zip and Unzip supports password-protected archives)
• Print (via Mac OS X with Printer Sharing)
• Email (uploads to free drop.io server)
• Save images to Photos library
Supported document formats:
• iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) ‘08 or ‘09 (with or without Preview)
• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), using iPhone’s built-in Office viewer
• Web archives (web pages downloaded by Safari for Mac)
• HTML web page
• PDF (even password-protected with table of contents, thumbnails, Go To Page
• RTF (Rich Text Format) and RTFD (with embedded images)
• Plain text (many file extensions) with auto-detection of character encoding
• Source code (C/C++, Objective C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, XML, shell scripts, Perl,
• Ruby, Python, and more) with syntax color-coding
• Movies, audio, and images (standard iPhone formats)
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
(games allowed, but I am not a gamer so do not expect much in that department)
1.The Weather Channel (free version)—http://www.weather.com/mobile/pda/iphone/— Get weather conditions and forecasts for anywhere, alerts, radar maps, video forecasts. This app does what you would expect it to.
2. SpanishDict—http://www.spanishdict.com/iphone— There are many translators in the app store, this is one of the few which do not need a connection to the web to work. The SpanishDict app features a complete Spanish-English dictionary, talking phrasebook, interactive word game, and a word of the day. Use it as a handy reference or as a fun way to learn new words. This app is easy-to-use, feature-rich, and free!
3. The Wall Street Journal—http://online.wsj.com/public/page/iphone.html— (thinking-person’s CNN) Too bad they are charging for use after October 24th. On October 25th, you can effectively replace this app on my list with NPR News.
4. Ping—http://www.pingmessaging.com/—It is like both SMS and IM, but better. Message your friends and family for free, like Blackberry Messenger. This app was free for a while, but now it is $.99. This app woks with the iPod Touch, SMS only works with an iPhone. No need for logging in and out.
5. Bluetooth PhotoShare—http://iphonemart.net/application/bluetooth-photo-share/—transfers photos between two iPhones or iPod Touches over Bluetooth. No scaling-down or lossy compression like some other bluetooth photo sharing apps for the iPhone. Its free!
6. To Do’s—A great, simple, free “To Do” list app.
7. Pandorabox—http://app-zap.com/—helps sift through those 10s of thousands of apps. Great for finding apps that used to charge $, but then dropped their price to free!
8.Craigsphone—http://nextmobileweb.com/craigsphone— free app for Craigslist. Not the official craigslist app, but this one is free and works fine. Better interface than actual craigslist website on your PC! (not like that is too difficult).
9. Wild West Pinball—http://www.gameprom.com/—the only free iphone/iPT game that grabs my attention. This app was free for a long time and only recently started charging $.99—hence the large “improved” banner across its iTunes Store logo. Actually quite a fun pinball game—very addictive. It truly acts like a real pinball machine. (I am not much of a gamer, unless backgammon counts as a game….)
which leads me to the final iPhone/iPod Touch app in my roundup:
10. Backgammon Online —http://multimedia-go.de/bgonline/—I play a lot of backgammon, so a backgammon app is going to be on my list. The original release was terrible, the updated app works as it should. This app is not free, it costs 4.99, and is likely the most obscure app on my list. Worth an honorable mention because it is the only backgammon app that will allow one to play with other live opponents, in real-time, at FIBS—First Internet Backgammon Server—which has been up and running on the www longer than many of you have been alive! Not too many Backgammon players in this day and age… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBS
These (mostly) free apps may not be your top 10 favorites. These apps may not be perceived by many people as being worthy of any top 10 listing. These are, however, what I think are the best free (+ one paid) apps available for the iPod Touch / iPhone, to date. I only listed one paid app—Air Sharing Pro—because I think it is simply the single, very best application for the iPhone/iPod Touch available, at any price. Opinions ares sure to differ, let me know your favorite.
Also included in this “top 10” list is one app so good it is worth the near $10 price and the inclusion in this listing. As a bonus, this article also features ten other free apps worth an honorable mention, for a total of 20 iPhone / iPod Touch must-have apps.
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