Hi, I’m Grace Smith

20 Essential iPhone Apps I Can’t Live Without

I’m an iPhone owner at last. I know….it clearly goes against my fangirl status to be so late to the party but honestly, I’ve always thought they were just too expensive.

After my contract finished recently I decided it was the right time to upgrade and decided to go for a lovely White 32GB 3Gs and skip ‘antennagate’ iPhone 4!

The best thing about the iPhone is of course – the apps. However with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, it gets pretty difficult to find the ones that will suit my needs.

Without further ado, here are the apps that I’ve found essential, thus far:

1. Twitter

It’s been my pick of the Twitter apps both on my mac and iPod Touch since it was released and it’s just as efficient on the iPhone.

2. 1Password

Perfect for secure mobile browsing, as it saves my web usernames and passwords, has a browser built-in and syncs with 1Password on my Mac.

3. WordPress

This is an essential app for any blog owner, it allows me to moderate, edit, or reply to comments as well as easily composing posts.

4. Flickr

As a passionate amateur photographer, Flickr is a site I visit pretty much everyday. The ability to post straight to Twitter is pretty fly.

5. Reeder

I’ve tried many RSS readers on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but Reeder is the best of them all. It’s elegant, minimal interface is stunning.

6. Ego

I’ve been using Ego since it was released, it gives me one central—and lovely—location to check web statistics and RSS numbers.

7. TaskPaper

The ultimate in Task Lists (IMO), this syncs perfectly with my Mac version and provides a beautiful and unobtrusive interface.

8. Dropbox

Allows me to access my Dropbox files on the go with the ability to view files offline and share links. This is another essential app as it syncs with my iMac.

9. Fring

Free video calls, calls, live chat and IM make Fring one of my most useful apps, especially as it centralises all of my networks in one place.

10. NTRConnect Viewer

This is perfect for when I need to reach files that are on my office iMac, I can easily move items into my Dropbox folder and then retrieve them on my iPhone.

11. The Guardian

This gives me my daily fix of news with the latest stories, galleries and audio from a respected Newspaper.

12. AroundMe

An indispensable app that allows me to quickly find out info on the facilities close to my location.

13. PayPal Manager

As a small business owner who uses PayPal for nearly all transactions, this is an extremely useful app for quick management of my account.

14. FTP On The Go

You wouldn’t think you would have much need for an FTP client on the iPhone, but i use this quite often. I can edit files directly on the server, with a handy built-in browser.

15. iStat

This nifty app lets me monitor all the vital statistics on my Mac including CPU, fans, memory, disks, uptime and more.

16. Downloads

This is a recent app I’ve discovered, it acts as a fully featured download manager and basically allows me to access the iPhones file system, which is invaluable.

17. Analytics

Gives me instant, mobile access to Google Analytics with detailed reports at a glance and support for multiple accounts and sites.

18. Instapaper

Essential for anybody that works on the web, this lets me save web pages for offline or later reading.

19. Pastebot

This is a powerful clipboard manager that stores text & images copied from my iphone and much much more.

20. Stanza

A wonderful app that I use to read e-books, but also allows me to drag and drop PDF’s into the File Sharing section in iTunes.

It wouldn’t be a proper list without a bonus:

21. Google Mobile

I love the search by voice function, but find the links to other Google apps like Calender and Docs to be extremely useful.

So after one month’s use, those are my favorite iPhone apps so far. Do you have any particular apps you could recommend? Then please leave a comment and share your picks.

Don’t forget to check back on Wednesday for my Top 20 iPhone Games!

Grace Smith is owner of the small but perfectly formed web design studio Postscript5, in Northern Ireland. To keep up to date with the latest designalicious content, then please consider subscribing.