My favorite new apps for the Phone

From last week’s PCMike NBC-TV report (see video over on the right)… The iPhone is cool. The apps are cooler.

The apps, short for applications, are programs that Apple released for the iPhone on July 11. All of the programs work on both the new iPhone 3G and the older iPhones. But since many of those programs also use the Web for various functions, it is with a 3G connection that they shine the most.

There are now more than 2,000 iPhone programs available on Apple’s new App Store, many of them free, a great many others between $2.99 and $4.99.

Let me share my favs.

Let’s start with new GPS location-based capabilities of the iPhone. A whole bunch of programs are making very creative use of that function. Here are five:

Loopt — This is perhaps the most controversial of the bunch. Some people will holler that it’s too invasive. But what it does is allow you to set up a network of friends and, at just a click, see exactly where they are, pinpointed on a Google map. Its creators call it a “Social Compass,” and that’s a very good description. You can opt in or out on being traceable, use it to share photos, enter in map details, recommend places and it works across multiple carriers. My wife and I use it, she on her Verizon phone, me on my iPhone. We saw that we were both not that far apart yesterday noon and quickly arranged a lunch date. On the iPhone, it’s free. On Verizon, it costs $3.99 a month.

OneTap — I want to see the “Dark Knight” Batman movie. Will Smith’s “Hancock,” too. But where and when? OneTap is a $1.99 program that uses my current location and returns a list of the nearest movie theaters, along with the movies that are being shown, and what time they start. Click on an icon and you get the video trailer and you can search for details about any movie through a link to the International Movie Database.

YPmobile — This is a free app from Yellow Pages that uses your current location to find just about any business you’d want. There are restaurant ratings, reviews, details on store hours and a map that gets you there. What I have found most appealing is its event listing, which displays, by date, concerts, community programs, festivals, cultural happenings, fireworks displays, art shows and the like.

UrbanSpoon — This free program finds nearby restaurants, based on your location. Ever puzzled over where to eat? You can filter this by neighborhood, cuisine or price, and get a list of the restaurants closest to your location. But the coolest thing is the ability to use the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. It detects screen movement. You give your iPhone a shake, the display shows a bunch of slot machine-like wheels that spin and land on a restaurant. Not happy with the results? Spin again until you find one.

Weatherbug — I use this free application on my desktop, and the iPhone version is even more handy. Select your cities, as many as you want, and it pulls up local forecasts. I really like the live radar display. You can zoom in, on a Google Map, anywhere in the country to see current radar images. My wife and I took the dog for a walk last night. The sky was very dark so, using this application, I called up Detroit-area radar, tapped the screen to zoom in on my part of Oakland County and saw that if we went where we had planned to walk, we would have been drenched by a fast-moving storm.

We used YPmobile to find the closest DQ instead. And yes, we gave the dog a baby cone.

Okay… those are my fav GPS apps… Now, to another category: Music.

Thanks to a bunch of new programs downloaded from the App Store, my iPhone 3G now has become a music lover’s dream machine, letting me listen to live radio, identify songs I hear or even hum and, on the fly, build me a playlist of my favorite artists or genres.

Here are five of the coolest music-themed programs I’ve found so far:

AOL Radio – Hands down, this is the coolest of the cool. It streams live radio broadcasts directly to your iPhone from over 200 stations across the country, spanning 25 different genres of music from pop to classical to Christian to talk. Some 150 CBS radio stations can be tuned into with this App including WWJ NewsRadio 950 am, WYCD Young Country, Oldies 104.3 WOMC and smooth jazz V98.7 WVMV here in Detroit. You can pick and choose stations from anywhere and the location-based GPS functions of the iPhone will detect your location and display local stations near your area. You get great sound, can grab a song you like and make it a favorite and them should you want, jump over to iTunes and buy the song right on the spot. AOL Radio is free.

Pandora Radio – This is another free streaming music application. Enter in the name of a favorite artist, a song title, a classical composer and Pandora creates a virtual “station” for you, playing their music and more like it. Just for fun, I entered the Beach Boys. Seconds later my new “Beach Boys Radio” station started blaring out “Let’s Go Surfin’ Now…” The program includes other artists and songs of a similar nature, chosen, it explains, because they feature “interweaving vocal harmony.” After “Surfin’ USA,” the oldies group The 4 Seasons’ “Sherry” started playing. After that came “I Saw Her Standing There” by the Beatles. You get full album art on the iPhone screen, too, and, natch, a link to buy the track from iTunes.

Shazam – Verizon has had song recognition software like this on its handsets for some time but on the iPhone, Shazam, also free, identifies music from anywhere… the radio, TV, a movie or even elevator music in a store. Hold the iPhone to the music and within seconds, it tells you the artist and track name.

Midomi – Suppose you have a song rattling around in your head? Maybe a snatch of lyrics? Just hum it. Seriously. This is so cool. Even off key, hum a few bars and it searches a data bank of 17 million of song samples, artists and bands and identifies it for you. I tried humming a four-second snippet of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and it returned a list of about 30 possibilities. One of them was right. You need to hum at least 10 seconds to get a better match. When I did that it was right on. You can also say a name or song or type part of the lyrics. It links to iTunes and even YouTube music videos. It’s also free.

MooCowMusic Band - This app costs $9.99 and goes far beyond listening to other people’s tunes by providing a collection of virtual instruments that lets your iPod actually create music, using the iPhone touch screen to “play” drums, piano, bass guitar, blues guitar and even the crowd noise. You can play in real time, record the tunes, overdubb them and mix them together into a song that you can save for playback.

If you play the piano or guitar, if you are a would be DJ, their are a whole bunch of other music composition programs you can download, most about $9.95, that also let you compose melodies.

Just a note on the live streaming radio apps. They really eat up the iPhone battery, especially if you are on the 3G network. You’ll want to have a AC or car charger with you if you plan to do a lot of listening while on the go.

Finally, here are five more apps I really like:

eWallet: I’ve resisted getting this program for the desktop or other mobile phones I’ve had, but finally, for $9.99, downloaded it to my iPhone this week. It is as its name implies, an electronic way to provide secure storage for passwords, usernames, PINs and the mundane, easily forgettable bits of data we need to get by every day, like lock combinations, phone codes and credit card numbers, verification codes and expiration dates. It’s encrypted and, if you can remember the password you choose to run it, the handiest way I’ve yet found to manage all those digits I need in today’s information society. I’ve had it for three days now and am spending about an hour a day entering in all the info but, even after such brief use, I’ve found it a great convenience. Now if I can just not lose my iPhone. The developer promises a way soon to sync it all with the PC or Mac. That feature is needed ASAP.

NetNewsWire: This is a news reader, an aggregator of feeds from the blogs and Web sites that I’m most interested in. It’s free and a great way to stay informed. Natch, most of the feeds I subscribe to are tech-related. But whatever your business or hobbies, you can stay connected and up-to-date with reading material about your interests. It’s like having a constantly updated stream of news-for-me anywhere, anytime.

Voice Record: This turns your iPhone into a high-quality dictation machine. There are a bunch of similar programs, but at 99 cents, I really like this. You can record interviews, grab audio notes from a lecture or sermon and make voice memos. They save to the iPhone but can’t be easily exported, a feature that would make this the perfect application because then they could be embedded in e-mails and blogs. But even without that, it’s a very cool app.

Yelp: This is another one of those free location-based services that automatically, by the iPhone’s built-in GPS capabilities, determines your location and returns a list of businesses and services. But it has some nice features not found on the competing apps. Say it’s 3 a.m. and your gas tank is empty. You can filter results by searching only for nearby stations that are open. It finds restaurants, coffee shops, banks, drugstores, whatever. Just type in a category. For example, bicycle, clothing or ice cream. It shows you what’s nearby and how to get there from your current location.

Absolute Fitness: This is the most expensive program I have on my iPhone at $14.99, but I’d pay twice that. It lets me log every bite I eat, returning a calorie count and the nutritional data for the food. Plus, you can log your exercise. It helps you lose weight and get in shape by setting customized weight goals. The app tracks your daily progress so you can see what you need to do to get where you need to be. It has a great iPhone interface and shows you the actual nutritional labels.

So there you have it. Please use comments below to share what’s on your iPhone.