Are our phones considered useless without apps or is it the contrary, let’s find out.

It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t own a phone in today’s age. We all have mobile phones or smart phones, it’s almost like a necessity to live like breathing. Also considered a necessity; Phone Apps. Having a phone is not enough; we need to have our favorite apps in the phone. The minute we fancy an app, we need to have it otherwise life isn’t worth living, at least for the phone. As soon as we get the app, it totally makes our day and soon enough we get bored of it, and look for some other app that will entertain us again. Of course, apps don’t come cheap; some are worth their price and some aren’t. There are a few free apps available out there but paid apps sound better. We feel cooler when we have apps on our phone and not forgetting, the fun that we have playing around with it. More apps are created for iPhones but lately, there has been a variety of apps for other phones as well. Today we’ll take a look at the top phone apps and whether or not, it’s considered a necessity to have phone apps. Note that the apps are randomly listed below.

Email & Web Browsers apps

There are several alternative web browsers that can be used instead of using what your BlackBerry, iPhone or other phones provide. The same can be said for email apps; a few options are provided to the users in the form of apps where better access to email is offered to them.

Email Apps

1. K-9 Mail
2. Gmail 2.0.6

Browser Apps

1. Opera Mini/Opera Mobile
2. BOLT 1.5
3. Skyfire
4. Dolphin

Media Players

Alright, so phones come ready-made with its own media players. Do we really need an alternative way to listen to music or to watch videos? Some phone owners seem to think so. To have a music player app doesn’t mean that it comes with the same functions as the one already on the phone. A music player app that can do a few tricks here and there, such as arranging your favorite tracks the way you want it or any other fancy features that you might like.

Music/Radio Players

1. Stitcher Podcast Radio 1.2.14
2. Slacker Radio for BlackBerry 2.0.91
3. Pandora Radio 1.1.2
4. TuneWiki 1.3
5. Listen 1.0.3.1
6. Midomi
7. DoubleTwist
8. MortPlayer

Games

A phone is not complete without games. What else are we going to do during our free time? There’s not one particular game that can be called a favorite, there are hundreds of game apps. In most situations, phone owners are not satisfied with the games that come on their phones; they want other options. The other options come in many other options that will only make our eyes grow bigger and bigger, not forgetting tired. Nevertheless, game apps are probably the best apps created as these apps are solely to keep us entertained and occupied.

Game Apps

1. Doodle Jump
2. Love Hurts
3. Missile Command
4. Tic-tac-toe
5. Panoramic Guitar Suite
6. Easy Locator for BlackBerry

IMs & Social Networks

This is a must for most phone owners as a lot of phones don’t feature the easiest apps for social networking. There are far better apps for social networking that can be obtained by paying for them or free than the ones provided on phones. Now, there are apps that feature all your social networking accounts at one shot. This is definitely easy for us without any trouble of login in and out.

IMs

1. Nimbuzz
2. Meebo IM 21
3. eBuddy 3.2.1

Social Networks

1. Bloo
2. Facebook 1.7.0.18
3. MySpace Mobile 1.6.2
4. Facebook for Windows Mobile 1.0
5. PockeTwit 76
6. Facebook 3.03

There you have it, the most popular apps categories for phones. It’s hard to say that we MUST have these apps on our phones but these apps certainly make our days better. One thing for sure, apps makers are really making money and the demand for more apps is growing even higher every day. Thanks to the popular demand, more apps are now being created in different and new categories.

This is a guest post from the guys on behalf of iGadgetLife.com.

Have you ever felt the need of seeing more than just a few snapshots of an App before you decide to spend some money to buy that App. Well, I like to see a video demonstration of iPhone Apps before I purchase one. Even if the app is free, it makes sense to know beforehand how it works and get a feel of it.

Many of the app developers have their websites hosted with a demo video of the apps on the appstore, bur for those apps which don’t have a video demo, you can look forward to a useful website called iPhone App Demos TV.

This website features demo videos and text reviews of many popular apps like :

• Words with friends
• Lemonade Tycoon
• Skee-Ball
• ShakeIt

to name a few. It provides star rating out of 5 stars for the apps as well as video and text reviews.

So next time you like an App, for which you  are not sure you want to buy or not, you can refer to the iPhone App Demos TV for a video review to make up your mind.

Source – Sites To Use – See Demo Of iPhone Apps Before Buying

With the release of iphone firmware 3.0 and higher iphone got its search comes as a default application integrated with in. When you slide the home screen in iphone towards right you get this default iphone search.

From a long time what my concern was when ever I used this iphone search, it used to search across my notes, sms, contacts, applications and emails. But I wanted to remove some options due to privacy concerns.

The option for customizing the search result is quite difficult to find out, here is how you can do it, follow the instructions with snapshots below.

Go to iPhone Settings >> General. Now tap Home text

Now tap over the Search Results.

Tap and select what do you want to include in search results and what not.

If you are not happy with any specific iPhone / iPod Touch app after you purchased it from iTunes and you have a strong point to prove it, you may get a refund for the app.

Although its not very easy, yet not very easy task. The refund process includes sending an email to iTunes Support desk, then contacting the developer and then following up and convincing the two why you should get the refund.

You will need the purchase reference number and a strong reason to support why you should get refund for the iPhone App. You will also need to delete the app from your iPhone for the same.

source – Just Another iPhone Blog

Theme simulator is a small and neat tool which allows you to test design and test theme on your computer without transferring it to your iPhone every time.

The customization of theme is provided through Winterboard App for jail-broken iPhones and theme simulator helps to simulate the same using a drag and drop mechanism to place icons, backgrounds and other elements on iPhone size simulator screen.

The testing process is fully manual and you need to place each icon by drag and drop on its place. This simulator gives you a wonderful options of actually visualizing how the theme will look exactly with the customizations you have done.

The simulator includes one set of test theme so that you can get familiar with the simulator even if you are totally new to it. Below is a YouTube video presentation of the same.

So if you have a jail broken phone with Winterboard Installed and you like iconography, then this is a perfect tool for you to visualize your creativity. The tool is currently available for Windows. I have tested it on Windows Vista and it has been tested by some others on Windows 7 as well.

[Download iPhone Theme Simulator | Alternative Link For iPhone Theme Simulator]

All In One is a free application available on cydia repository which allows you to access various online services like Maps, Weather, Yahoo Search, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, BBC News, CNN, N-TV, Wikipedia and Amazon.

In order to install this app you need to locate and install Cydget which is a Framework required to install this app, This Framework is from saurik for themes in LockScreen and to allow customizing lockscreen in iPhones.

Locate the app on Cydia by searching for All In One and then enable it under cydget – Select All In One for Lockscreen and then respring the phone to apply changes.

Here are some more screenshots of the app which I had took after installing.

Do you find it difficult to find iPhone apps of your taste ? If yes, then you are not alone, there are many people who may not know about the useful and interesting iPhone apps as they might not even come to know of it.

But not anymore, now you can find iPhone apps based on your taste with this Website called apptizr.

Apptizr will filter apps based on certain categories and keywords which you can select and it will find apps based on the keywords and categories to find the apps of your taste. You can register on this site and get the personalized app recommendations, else just open the website and browse through the categories and keywords based provided on the website.

For example I am interested in Photography apps, I can go through Photography section and then select keywords like Photo-editing etc.

Have a look at : Apptizr

Fast Reader is another paid but useful cydget for your iphone which is available for free on cydia for $1.99. and it allows you to customize your iphone lockscreen to read the feeds directly from iPhone lockscreen

You can either specify your own custom feeds or you can read twitter trends or google news on your iphone lockscreen. You just simply click the a news feed  item it will open up in safari iphone browser.

To Locate this app, search for the keyword Fast Reader under search section in cydia

NoCyfresh is a SBSetting addon which allows you to decrease the load time in cydia by disabling the refreshing of packages at the load time.

Note: Before installing this make sure you have SBSetting installed, after installing here is how you can disable refreshing of cydia packages – by turning on toggle NoCyfresh to green [ as shown in the image below ]

In order to locate this app, search for keyword NoCyfresh under search section in cydia