Dave Cullen has a new iPhone. He told us so! And marytkelly has one;  Julie Delio loves hers!  Since Dave called us OS Mac fanatics out  (in a good way for pushing him over the cliff), I thought I’d return the favor. So, Dave (and other new iPhone or iPod Touch Users), here is a brief overview of My Must-Have  apps* for your new hand-held productivity tool (uhhhh…phone, uhhh…toy!)

Oh sure, you could go to the Apps Store and browse for hours (days, even!) and you will; you could read all the reviews and learn by trial and error. I’m sure there are other lists on the web. Lonnie, feel free to jump in here! But, this list is special.

It’s customized already for discerning tastes. And, well hell, it’s mine.

^{*Note: I have an iPod Touch rather than an iPhone (for now) so I don’t have some of the cool apps that utilize the iPhone’s GPS, camera/photography or recording capabilities.}

One of the coolest things about the iPhone/iTouch is that it allows you to have up to 9 different home screens. This may seem like too many (or too few), but it is helpful for borderline-OCD folks like myself to organize things into groups, screens, or to use a very-non-technical word, pots.

So, pot 1 – your basic, factory installed Apple provided features. The only things I’ve added are Google and the Facebook for mobile app. Well, yeah.

Pot #2 – Information & Reference

First, the boring, but expected stuff. Some of my favorite news sources have iPhone friendly direct apps – the NYTimes, Washington Post, Salon.com, & NPR news. Into the Reference bucket goes Wikiamo, WorldWiki, a decent dictionary WordBook, and White Pages. Finally, I stuck Joost and YouTube here.

Next come two of my absolute favorite apps for the Touch.

Pandora Radio – this is the ultimate cool Internet app. It uses the music genome project to create a customized playlist based on any artist or song. Yep, you just put in the artist’s name – say Beck or Bowie or Shakira – or type in a song, say Mile Davis’ “So What” and it will stream radio based on similar musical structure. You can even search or pick a genre, like “Zen” or “Calm Meditation”. And, oh, did I mention it’s Free.

Stitcher Radio – a very close second. Like Pandora, but for news, sports and other talk radio. You can stick to the Stitcher picks, browse categories, or create a Customized Favorites list. Mine, of course, includes Rachel Maddow and NPR Hourly News Update. Also,  the Onion and BBC news.

Most of the apps in this category are free, with the exception of World Wiki+ and WordBook, which were $ .99 but have free Lite versions.

Pot #3 – Games

My screen doesn’t reflect all the games I have downloaded. I like to rotate them (they backup to my laptop). Also, I tend to be into repetitive mindless games or Word Games. I’m not into RPG or the web-based shooting  games, so I’m no help there. Of the puzzle games, Collapse is my favorite, although I solved the Collapse Quest and it’s not so much fun anymore.  Brain Challenge is pretty good for a variety of math, logic, and memory puzzles. And wurdle is strangely addictive.

I downloaded and tried a couple of the Crossword and Soduko games, but found I much prefer to do those in paper and pencil.

I haven’t yet sprung for the $4.99 versions of Scrabble or Tetris.

Pot #4 – More Reference – but Lifestyle Ref & not as frequent

The AllRecipes spinner is kind of fun. Drink and Cocktail Recipes are a must-have. Score is a simply tallying app that I use for keeping the kids’ virtual jelly beans in a jar, but I suspect most people use for playing games. Flixster is an easy to use movie app.

iMantra kinda sucks, but I keep it anyway - the pictures are cool and it's ok for reference, but the chanting voices are pretty awful.

Pot #5 – Utilities

Currency Exchange & Multi-convert are both useful conversion apps. The latter does all sorts of units, including basics like volume, weight, temperature, shoe sizes, and currency. It also converts pixel lengths, color codes, and time, and has some quite obscure things I will never need like torque, capacitance? (flux capacitor, anyone?), and  luminous emittance.  The Currency Exchange Rate app just does currency but does it simply and well. 

There are a whole host of travel and language applications and translation dictionaries. Pick a city, pick a language and off you go. These are all new for me, so I can’t comment yet.

One caveat: The Multi-Dictionary is kind of lame for tourist use (for example – it gives me three different verb translations for “please” in Spanish. None of them “por favor”.) So I’ll be looking for another. Most of the others require web access, which should be okay for iPhone users, but need wi-fi for us lowly iTouch owners. Recommendations are welcome!

Well, that’s it for my apps.

Some of the cool apps that I’ve heard about for the iPhone that I don’t have on the Touch are:

Shazam Radio – hold your iPhone next to the radio and it identifies what’s playing. Cool!

Ocarina – cool flute-like application. Blow into your phone and make music.

Color Splash – cool photography app that lets you convert a photo to black & white but keep parts of it in color. Fun to play with.

Vihgo – a free photo app, lets you edit and add special effects/filters to your photos.

Ok, OS Mac fanatics, tell us what’s on your iPhone or iTouch.