Terrific iPhone downloads

GIZMO GALLERY

If you are one those of few thousands who have bought the Apple iPhone then chances are you have already downloaded a slew of applications. With over 1700 applications, both free and paid on the India App store, the website is like a haven of sorts especially for gamers looking to doll up their iPhone.

Aurora Feint (Free)
This one is in effect Tetris-like game for iPhone but with a twist. The player dons a character and guides himself through the game modules. Game graphics look sharp and bright on the screen and it makes excellent use of the multi-touch interface and accelerometer.

It is a game where the player slides blocks to create matches of three or more, though one may only move blocks horizontally.

Aurora Feint uses the accelerometer of iPhone to turn the gameplay upside down if you so choose. This free application also comes with tools that consist of special blocks within the game, activated as part of a wildcard match.

Cannon Challenge (Free)
Cannon Challenge is a simple, but fun artillery game. Touch-screen sliders allow the player to set the angle and velocity and an onscreen fire button activates a non-line-of-site (NOLS) cannon.

Player aims with a limited number of rockets to hit targets in each round. It’s a fairly easy game, but there is some variation with changing backgrounds and some moving targets at higher levels. Great sound effects and vibrations when targets get hit make this a good free application to have on your iPhone.

Koi Pond ($0.99)
The iPhone lends itself to be the home of many peculiar applications. In Koi Pond, the user downloads a virtual fish pond for their iPhone.

This application is just something that one has to watch. User’s interaction is limited to changing the water colour, amount of fish, lily pads in the pond, the different animal sounds one hears and switching it from day to night.

You can shake the iPhone and feed the fish, tap the pond to scare the fish, or leave your finger in and watch them eventually swim up to you. That’s all this thing does.

The sounds are interesting but the chances of this being something you want to fall asleep while listening to are slim to none. It’s a great concept and it really does look cool. But the fact that Koi Pond actually costs and that you really don’t do much besides watch the fish, it’s hard to justify making the purchase.

Twitterfic (Free)
Twitterrific is an application for interacting with the popular social network, Twitter. Although there are arguably more Twitter applications than necessary on App Store, this one’s particularly the most popular. Opening the application, you’re presented a stunning representation of all the recent posts on twitter.com.

Your tweets are neatly and beautifully displayed, posting a tweet is extremely simple, as is updating any other information. One delightful feature is Twitterrific’s built-in web view.

Whenever you click a link, a sheet comes down with the full web page. This means that you’re not sent into Safari whenever you want to check out a link, which is a great example of how converged applications should be.

Bloomberg (Free)
For financial market news, Bloomberg is second to none. The iPhone application is an excellent resource for stock quotes and business news on the go and provides a template on how a good news service should be ported to the iPhone (you would need to have an active data connection or Wi-Fi to stream content)

Bloomberg pre-loads the content areas so that you can easily browse from the headline list view to the markets view without waiting.

Clicking on an individual symbol, such as the Nasdaq Composite index brings up additional information such as high, low and volume; and allows you to access the vast amount of historical data compiled by the Bloomberg service.

Linguo ($2.99)
This is a unique translation application that features 400 preset phrases in four languages (French, German, Italian and Spanish) with audio clips for each, custom translations in 20 languages and the ability to save translations for future use.

The user interface is simple and intuitive. Inverting the “from” and “to” languages can be done with a single click. At $4.99, it is costlier than Linguo and requires a Wi-Fi connection.

Recorder ($0.99)
Your iPhone isn’t going to replace a serious portable audio recorder but it might come in handy if unexpected interview opportunities arise when you’re not carrying your primary recorder. Cheap, clean interface and records with one click from the home screen.

This software is a fine barebones voice recorder if you don’t care about renaming or organising your files. Playback through iPhone’s built-in speaker is so quiet as to be useless but this works fine through the earbuds.