Best apps for your new iPhone 5
You bought yourself an iPhone, you have activated it through iTunes so you are all set to begin using it. But owning a smartphone in today’s world is also about apps, because without the apps, your smartphone doesn’t have the chance to distinguish itself that much from a regular mobile phone (at least software wise). So you decide to get the best apps and put the ‘smart’ in smartphone to good use. There is however, a SMALL “problem”: what do you do when you have to choose from literally hundreds of thousands of apps? That is a problem (a delightful one, we might say, as opposed to having too few apps for example) that you are presented with when you visit the Apple Store.
That is exactly why we are making this guide for you, to help you choose the best ten apps that will make you proud of owning a smartphone. The total price of these ten apps will be ~$14 (not counting the GPS apps) but they are (at least in our opinion) must haves and in the end you will get your money’s worth. You might notice that we are not including apps for social networking, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Foursquare because you can get these without our help.
Developed by WhatsApp Inc., WhatsApp Messenger is a cross-platform instant messaging app for smartphones that recently grew in messages handled from two billion in April 2012 to ten billion messages per day in August 2012. If you can persuade your buddies to install WhatsApp you won’t need to send SMS messages anymore – you will be able to chat with your friends live for only $0.99 (£0.69 in the UK). We already mentioned it is a cross platform app so you won’t have to worry if your friends are using a BlackBerry or an Android based phone. Also, if use Wi-Fi, you won’t have to pay a cent for your conversations. To quote the Financial Times, “WhatsApp has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines”. Enough said.
Camera+
If you make a poll of the most widespread iPhone apps found in people’s iPhones, odds are you will find Camera+ listed many many times. That is simply because this app is really good. This little app comes as an alternative to iPhone’s standard camera app. It adds editing tools (both basic and advanced with special fx and lighting filters), image stabilization, the ability to set focus and exposure and a lot more other options. When you are happy with how your photo turned out, the app allows you to share it through Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. At $1.99 (or £1.49 if you live in the UK) this app is a bargain especially if you take into consideration that in May 2012, Camera+ was declared (by Apple) the 10th most popular iPhone paid app of all-time.
Infinity Blade
Infinity Blade is an action role-playing video game for iOS, made using the very powerful Unreal Engine 3 (it is in fact the first iOS game to run on this otherwise console-oriented engine). In the game you will fight a series of one-on-one battles, while journeying through a forsaken castle in order to find and kill the immortal God King. While not a particularly deep game, it does offer a lot of quality time and fully uses the iPhone’s 3D capabilities, offering an amazing experience for a mobile game. Even with a price of $5.99 (£3.99), which is pretty high for an iPhone game, Infinity Blade generated in excess of $23 million in revenue.
MultiConvert
MultiConvert is the kind of app that will come in handy in many different situations. It is a very thorough unit converter – more than 1800 units in over 70 categories, including length, weight, volume, currency (the currency rate being updated at every six hours from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Canada) and time zones. It is a must have app which will prove helpful on several occasions. Did we mention it is free?
Find My iPhone
This little app is very useful because it lets you track the location of your missing iPhone. Find my iPhone supports iOS 5 and later and it requires a free iCloud account, otherwise being completely free. If you own an iPhone, you need to have this app.
Hard Lines
Hard Lines is an iOS game reminiscent of an old game called Snake. Odds are that before owning an iPhone you owned a regular mobile phone so you must be familiar with Snake and how it plays. Perfectly suited to phones with its on-the-go gameplay philosophy, Hard Lines has simple to learn mechanics (it’s what you get if you mix the aforementioned Snake with Tron’s Lightcycles), can be played for a few minutes or a few hours and offers a pleasant and addictive experience. So addictive in fact, that you might not notice the minutes pass by as you play it. You can get it for only $1.99 (£1.49).
Instagram is a free photo sharing program (with over 100 million registered users as of September 2012), allowing users to take a photo, use a digital filter on it and share the resulted photo with other Instagram users. Instagram is among the best photo sharing programs available for your iPhone, allowing you to share your Instagramed photos also on Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. The app is free.
TomTom / MotionX GPS Drive
With the recent debate that was born out of Apple’s decision to not include Google Maps on its newest iOS 6, we thought we would recommend you some GPS apps. Google Maps is good if you only need it sporadically, but it is not the ultimate tool when it comes to navigational systems. There are two other options. TomTom has maps of countries and cities from all over the world. MotionX (which is the number one rated iPhone and iPad navigation solution) on the other hand, is only for the United States. TomTom’s tools are more expensive than MotionX so which one you will choose depends on how much you are willing to pay and whether you are from the United States or not. Follow the provided links for more informations and prices.
AppShopper
Made by the creators of TouchArcade.com, AppShopper is an app designed to keep you up to date with everything worth your time when it comes to App Store apps: drops in price for useful apps, free apps that are a must have etc. If you want to make sure you won’t miss a sale for an app you had your eyes on, we recommend you use AppShopper. Of course, it is a free app.
Angry Birds
Yup, Angry Birds couldn’t have missed from our top ten. The puzzle video game that became a world wide phenomenon was first released in December 2009 for iOS. Its gameplay mechanics are simple but very very addictive and we promise you will sink lots of hours into this game. The premise is simple: you have to use a slingshot to launch birds at various structures sheltering pigs. The game is physics based and pretty simple, yet very addictive, exactly how a game needs to be in order to become a hit. Angry Birds comes in many versions: Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio and you can’t go wrong with getting all three. For the low price of $0.99 (£0.69 for UK citizens) per version you will get a lot of entertainment value out of Angry Birds.
