5 favourite iPhone & iPod Touch applications

I recently bought an iPod Touch to replace my very cool, yet aging Palm T|X. The iPod Touch does­n’t yet ‘fit me like a glove’ but I’m sure after time it will, and I’ll doc­u­ment my exper­i­ences with it here.

Pre­vi­ously I’d writ­ten that I was rather unim­pressed with the ‘WiPod’ as I called it then. The fea­ture set looked lim­ited and the price was rather high.

My how much dif­fer­ence a year and a half makes. This is a very func­tion­al device that I’m begin­ning to really appreciate.

But today, I thought I’d share my five favour­ite iPhone / iPod Touch applic­a­tions. Even though I’ve had mine under a month, be assured that I’ve been scour­ing the iTunes Applic­a­tions store over that month. You may not agree with me, or maybe I’ve missed YOUR must-have applic­a­tion; please let me know in the com­ments below.

But, since I found that app store so handy, it has to be the first applic­a­tion on my list:

1. The iTunes Applic­a­tion Store: Here’s where you pur­chase your iPhone & iPod Touch applic­a­tions. The store is search­able, and breaks the avail­able applic­a­tions down by cat­egor­ies, as well as rank­ing them by pop­ular­ity and ‘new-ness’. But you don’t have to spend a lot to get more func­tion­al­ity on your device; many applic­a­tions are only $0.99 (in your loc­al cur­rency!). And, there are often ‘lite’ free ver­sions avail­able too. A must have applic­a­tion, and since it’s shipped with your device, you’ve no reas­on to not explore it further.
2. Flight Con­trol: Cur­rently one of the hot­test cas­u­al games for the iPhone & Touch. Decept­ively simple…aircraft appear at the edge of your screen; simply touch them and drag a ‘flight path’ to guide them to a safe land­ing on the appro­pri­ate run­way. But wait,another plane has appeared, and now anoth­er! As you can guess, your air­space quickly gets com­plex. A very simple game to play, but much more dif­fi­cult to mas­ter. Well worth the $0.99 it’s cur­rently priced at.
3. Ever­note: A very cool applic­a­tion that mates up with the PC/Mac part­ners. Basic­ally, Ever­note lets you clip any­thing to an online stor­age vault. You can then view your docs via any browser, or through OS spe­cif­ic desktop applic­a­tions. Unlike social book­mark­ing sites such as Del.icio.us, Ever­note actu­ally clips the web page, pre­serving the state of the page at the time it was clipped. A rather gen­er­ous free account is avail­able, as well as a paid one offer­ing more stor­age capacity.
4. Google Apps: Since I tend to do a lot of my work ‘in the cloud’ Google Apps is the applic­a­tion suite for me. The iPhone / iPod Touch imple­ment­a­tion is quite effect­ive at get­ting me access to my ‘office suite’ of tools. Mostly I use it to dis­play and review doc­u­ments I’ve cre­ated and stored there. Since it’s browser based, it uses Safari, which is great for dis­play­ing and manip­u­lat­ing text, but is a pain for text entry.
   
5. Safari: The default browser. For me this is an essen­tial tool, for what is the point of being con­nec­ted and not being able to surf the web? The browser works as expec­ted. Depend­ing on which ori­ent­a­tion you hold the device on, pages can be rather tiny, but a simple multi-touch zoom makes them eas­ily read­able. But don’t get me star­ted on key­board entry for pass­words and oth­er logins…I must have fat fin­gers as I’m always mis-typ­ing my logins. For text entry, it’s barely func­tion­al. I hope the recently announced 3.0 OS upgrade will address this.

Giv­en that I’ve got over 70 apps cur­rently installed, and I appear to have a vora­cious appet­ite to down­load and try out new ones, I’m sure I’ll be mak­ing anoth­er post like this one in the future.

Now these are just my cur­rent top five. What have I missed? What are your favour­ite iPhone apps? Please add yours in the com­ments section…I’m always look­ing for some­thing new to down­load and play with 🙂