The Best iPhone Apps

We cut through the fart machines and virtual lighters to uncover the top iPhone applications developers have to offer. Here is what we rank the best.

Check out Best iOS 4 Ready Apps for multitasking capable apps.

It’s now been over a year since we first gazed upon the well-stocked shelves of the iTunes App Store. While our Top iPhone Apps were tough to choose the first time around, the task was even tougher a year later, with over 65,000 apps now cluttering up the marketplace. Even for a specific task like calculating your blood alcohol content after a night of drinking, you can find over a dozen apps that fit the bill. That’s a lot of apps. Which ones belong on your phone? We scoured the App Store yet again to deliver our favorites in five different categories.

Categories

• Productivity

  EverNote, Free

  Evernote’s “Remember Everything” mantra sums up this clever little app quite nicely. It turns your phone into the ultimate digital archive by collecting snapshots, written notes and voice recording, then making them all available with a simple search – from your phone or your PC. Character recognition performed by Evernote actually makes the text in photos you shoot, like a concert poster or business card, into searchable text, no typing needed. For those of us cursed with a decidedly non-elephant-like memory, Evernote makes a killer digital substitute.



• Games

  Doodle Jump, $.99

  Any app with four and a half stars from 2,700 reviews and counting has to be doing something right. Such is the case with Doodle Jump, which earns its hallowed place on the list with ultra-addictive gameplay that you’ll learn seconds and won’t be able to put down for hours.



• Video & Music

  Pandora, Free

  If you know anyone with a 16GB iPhone that has absolutely zero music loaded on, you can probably blame Pandora. The ultra-popular music app mimics the functionality of Pandora.com by spinning one artist or song into a never-ending playlist of similar tunes, which you can vote up or down along the way to further tune it to your tastes. To our amazement, it even works when you tread outside metropolitan 3G coverage into EDGE zones, meaning you really have to head off the beaten path to lose your tunes.



• Utilities

  The Weather Channel, Free We’ve combed through every free weather app out there, and this one takes the cake for usability. A simple interface makes it so painless to view the current, hourly, 36-hour or 10-day forecast in a hurry, that we usually dig out the iPhone to do it, even when we’re in front of a computer. You can even view accurate weather maps superimposed over the Google Maps interface, zoom in as far as you care to, and animate the radar data. Ads do provide a bit of clutter, but that’s the cost of free


• Fun

Fandango, Free Cut to the front of the theater ticket line (without being rude) by whipping out this app and buying tickets online before the next person in line even gets up to the window. You can also find out more about new movies, view trailers, showtimes, and find theaters close to you.