My Top 5 iPhone Apps (and more!)

I've been asked a number of times what my favorite iPhone apps are, and rather than telling everyone over and over, I thought I'd just share them here.

1 – Google Reader – Web App
This is the only item in the list that isn't actually an application. I'm aware of exactly one RSS reader that will use Google Reader as a source on the iPhone. While I'd love to list it as a favorite, it is really short on features. The author has promised a far better release at the end of the month. Until then my favorite RSS reader (made for iPhone) is still Google Reader. It stays perfectly in sync on my phone and desktops (platform independent) and ties to my Friendfeed as I share items.

2 – Twitteriffic
I may have 15 applications open on my computer at any given time, and one that is consistently open is Thwirl. What that means more than anything is that Twitter has become a very important part of my communications world. Since there is no Twhirl for iPhone (yet), I've had to try other things. Twinkle is fine, and was the best on a jailbroken phone, but things have changed. I'm not at all a fan of the colors, or the foul sounds in Twinkle. Neither of them can claim stability, but I pick Twitteriffic FTW! For those that care, I bought it for $9.99.

3 – Loopt
Location based services are a huge business. In Boulder we have Brightkite, but they have yet to release an iPhone version. If they had, there are enough users in the area to make it quite useful. As it is, many of my friends are now on Loopt making it my winner. I use it a bit differently than most in that I leave the update text to “Loopt update” then just have it update my location when I open the app. I'll leave Twitter to do what Twitter does best. On a side note, I've heard that Facebook and MySpace are integrating location based services soon. When that happens, it is likely that all of the players around now will quickly disappear. Everyone I care about is on Facebook, so I'll have no reason to use anything else. Get on it Facebook!

4 – Evernote
Until the iPhone 2.0 software was released, I had been using Google Docs for all of my “cloud” word processing. Now I have Evernote which has the advantage of having stand alone applications for Mac and Windows, as well as the web interface for portability. The iPhone app isn't simple read access – but provides full on editing too! The best thing of all, is that they all stay perfectly in sync from environment to environment. This entry was written using Evernote on my laptop.

5 – AOL Radio
Many of you love Pandora, but I' have yet to create an account (no name calling please). While this app isn't something I use a lot, I listed it here because it really is a game changer. This, combined with apps like Pandora and Last.fm are changing what “radio” means. Having these things in your car in a useful way was unheard of two weeks ago. Today, all of my friends are tweeting about it. Watch out old media. Oh, I almost forgot, AOL Radio uses Location Services to find streaming terrestrial radio around you. It works on EDGE, 3G, and of course WIFI.

Here are other cool iPhone apps that I didn't list: Facebook (super interface to Facebook), Remote (a great replacement remote for the AppleTV that give you a “real” keyboard or interacting with the AppleTV), Mocha VNC Lite (for controlling other computers remotely), Movies.app (for finding movies and details near you), Trism (an interesting accelerometer aware chicklet game), and Restaurant Nutrition (nutrition information on several of the more popular restaurants.

In addition, here are a few great iPhone/mobile formatted web apps that I use all the time: Calorie King/The Daily Plate (for finding nutrition information on just about anything. I use these *in line* while ordering), Amazon (duh), Powerset (searches Wikipedia and formats the results perfectly), and Seeqpod (for finding and listening to music on the fly. It isn't peer to peer, or made for pirating music).