Whether you have the latest iPhone 5s or an older Apple handset, we've picked the best iPhone apps on the App Store.
From social-networking clients, to fantastic games, to alternative browsers for your iPhone, we have them all - and links to download them directly from the App Store.
Fantastical 2
No, we don’t get why you’d call a calendar app Fantastical either, but if you can forgive the hyperbolic name, this is a cracking little organiser. The app not only pulls together your various calendars (Google, Exchange and Apple’s own), but merges to-do lists and calendar events to give you a clear breakdown of the days ahead.
With the iPhone in portrait orientation, Fantastical shows a list of upcoming events, with the option to flick between daily and monthly calendar views; flip the phone into landscape orientation, and you’ll find the weekly view, with appointments plotted in the diary.
Best of all, however, is the ease with which you can enter appointments using natural language commands. Type "lunch with Tim at 2pm on Friday" and it’s popped straight into your diary. You can even speak the diary entries, provided you’ve got a data connection.
Nimble Quest
A halfway house between Snake and Gauntlet, Nimble Quest is another of those 8-bit parodies for the iPhone, but it’s a dangerously addictive one. Your task is to guide a "conga line" of mini-warriors around various stages, attempting to avoid collisions with a variety of harmful critters and making sure you don’t run into the walls.
Each of your little fighters has different weapons and skills, and it takes some time to work out how to best deploy these against the various foes that cross your path.
While the game itself is free, you’ll need to pay £1.49 to open the online arena section of the game, which you can only access after completing at least four levels of the game. It aggressively pushes in-app purchases for weapons and warrior upgrades too, so be careful if you’re handing this one to the kids.
Launch Center Pro
Launch Center Pro is described as a "speed dial for anything you do with your iPhone", which might be pushing it a touch. Instead, it’s a handy shortcut creator for various tasks, such as adding the last photo taken with your phone’s camera to Facebook, or sending a text message to a particular contact.
Its greatest strength is that it’s not only capable of working with the default iPhone apps, but a decent range of third-party apps too, so you can create a one-click button to call a certain contact in Skype, for instance, or search Spotify for a particular artist. It’s one of those apps that you’ll quickly find indispensable.
ArtStack
A more high-brow alternative to Pinterest, ArtStack lets you share works of art that have caught your eye with the wider world. Submissions range from sculptures to paintings to photography, and it largely seems to be used as means of showcasing upcoming talents, rather than another means of browsing through Monet’s portfolio. The app encourages you to take photos of artworks using your iPhone camera – which could land you in strife with gallery security guards, and isn’t exactly the ideal means of preserving the quality of fine art – but most people seem to source images of the artwork from the web before uploading.
Letterpress
Letterpress is an addictive hybrid of Boggle and Othello, demanding that users form words from a 5x5 grid of letters while retaining dominance of the board. Like the classic board game, Letterpress initially appears to be insultingly simple, but actually requires first-class wordsmithery and a decent appreciation of the game’s tactics to prevail (our advice: guard corners jealously). It’s an online multiplayer game, so there’s no chance to while away five minutes while you’re on the Tube, and the lack of any kind of statistic-gathering grates, but it’s a genuinely innovative addition to an oversaturated genre.
Click here to download Letterpress - free (£1.99 in-app purchase to play multiple games simultaneously)
vjay for iPhone
A sister app to the popular djay, vjay – as those with an IQ higher than their shoe size may have already worked out – allows you to mix together video footage on your iPhone. This can be done using a combination of pre-loaded commercial videos/music stored on your iPhone, videos you’ve recorded yourself, and pre-prepared footage provided within the app. The app includes a smattering of smart-looking special effects, allowing you to transition from one clip to another using two sides of a cube, for example, and there’s advanced tools such as automatic beat- and tempo-matching for those who don’t have the requisite timing. Beware that any exported videos containing commercial video/music tracks are likely to be booted off YouTube for copyright infringement, and that this app devours the iPhone battery.
Mailbox
Until its recent acquisition by Dropbox, downloading Mailbox involved nothing more than a tedious, weeks-long wait to get to the front of the queue and start using the app. Now, seemingly with greater server muscle behind it, everyone can get up and running with this minimalist take on inbox management.
The aim of Mailbox is to clear your email in tray, either by swiping right to archive the message, or swiping left to deal with the message at a point in the future. You can defer the message until "later today", "tomorrow", or the rather wooly "someday", at which point it will darken your Mailbox once more. Messages can also be replied to or forwarded in the normal manner, or sent to lists such as "To Read" or "To Buy".
You’re rewarded for clearing your inbox with a picture of the day, which is far less of an incentive than the sheer satisfaction of knowing you’ve dealt with all your email, even if some of it has merely been kicked into the long grass. Alas, Mailbox works with only Gmail accounts at present, which is a shame since this refreshing approach to inbox management would be perfect for a work account.
DailySpank
DailySpank is far less salacious than it sounds. It is, in fact, an iPhone photography competition, in which you’re encouraged to submit photos on the theme of the day. Recent examples include "take a photo of something exotic", "take a photo of what’s on your shelf", and "take a photo of something you’re wearing".
The photos with the most votes – or Spanks – rise to the top; the standard isn’t as intimidating as sites such as 500px or Flickr; and there’s an active, friendly community of commenters on hand to offer encouragement. It’s a bizarre but strangely compelling daily diversion.
Yahoo Weather
There are so many weather apps for the iPhone that the season would change before you’ve tried them all, but there are few more elegantly presented than Yahoo Weather. The app makes good use of the Yahoo-owned Flickr photo library to provide beautiful backdrops of the city in question – although that rather depends on whether you live in a town big enough to be on Flickr’s radar. The backdrop for our editor’s home town of Burgess Hill showed crashing waves lapping at the shore, even though it’s a good ten miles from the coast.
The Flickr wallpaper isn’t the only neat touch. Animated wind turbines that whizz faster in stormy conditions, live satellite imagery of your location, a graphical five-day forecast, and a swooshing infographic that reveals sunrise/sunset times and the name of the moon phase, all add up to an app that blows Michael Fish and chums out of the water.
Photoshop Touch for phone
Introduced on the iPad and Android tablets last year, Photoshop Touch has now made its way to the iPhone. It certainly offers more editing power than any other iOS photo app we’ve come across, although whether you’ll want to be fiddling with features such as layers, lasso selections and such like on a 4in smartphone screen is debatable. The range of special effects filters is excellent, however, and the ability to swipe to adjust the colour and intensity of filters is more than most of the Instagram clones offer. Options to apply gradients and fades, or warp and transform images, provide even greater creative control. Photoshop Touch pushed our test iPhone 4S to the very limits, and consequently took a heavy toll on battery life, but if you’re bored with the identikit photo filters that arrive with most iPhone apps, this is a cheap way to take creative control.
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