My Favorite IPhone Apps for Everyday Use in a Modern Professional's Life

So the iPhone's been out since 2007, and the 3GS has been out since June, so we've all gotten a great taste of the apps and utilities we have available to us. But for those of us who don't want to spend hours pouring through the app store, there are a few questions to be asked.

What are people actually using after all this time? What are our real favorites? Well here are a few of mine;

First, let's consider that each and every one of us have a different life, different job and a different need for apps on our phone, so we won't get into the most technical of apps like the stuff I use for music, only the ones that appeal to the masses. I don't want to make a top 5, or a ranking of any sort so these are in no particular order. I just want to talk about a few of my favorites.

I Am T-Pain - No one today could possibly write a list of their favorite apps without mentioning this one, and I Am T-Pain has got to be the whole world's favorite app right now. Sing into it, pick your scale, pick a backing song and record your musical adventure to share it with your friends. So simple, yet somehow so captivating. You'll honestly be surprised at how many of your friends secretly want to sing like T-Pain and his typical Auto-Tune style. Even as I'm writing about this, I'm reading it into the app a la "Auto-Tune the News." At $2.99, you know you're going to get it and you know you're going to have way too much fun singing like T-Pain. As absolutely annoying as he may be, it's fun when you do it.

Jaadu VNC - Formerly known as Teleport, Jaadu VNC is in my opinion the best VNC (Virtual Network Computing) app available. You can use your iPhone as if it were your Mac or PC, including support for multiple screens. You can launch apps, write documents, send e-mails, access files and perform pretty much any function of your computer from your iPhone. I've even played a few shooter games through VNC just for fun and besides the few seconds of delay between your screen and your phone it works great. You can connect through Wi-Fi or 3G and Edge networks and enjoy every bit of juicy VNC deliciousness from across the globe. I use this every day, to check up on my website stats and send emails with attachments that I never could have on my iPhone before owning this. Very useful, the only drawback is the limitations of the iPhone, when running multiple programs through VNC, the phone starts to bog down a bit. Nothing too bad, but can be mildly annoying considering that both my computer and phone are the latest and greatest iterations from Apple. Either way, it's a great app to have for those sticky moments where you may have forgotten something at home, or you need to send that email to the guy who's address you have saved on some Stickie somewhere on your desktop.

Pandora - Who could forget about the best free music app to hit the iPhone, ever? Play internet streaming radio through your iPhone with stations that you build. You choose an artist, an album, or even a song to use to build your playlists, then as the songs come up you rate them and Pandora changes the playlist based on your ratings. How awesome is that? The only thing I've noticed that I don't like about this app is that if you choose an individual song to use to create a playlist, it almost never plays that song. I know this is due to copyright issue and whatnot, but I'd at least like to hear the song sometime on my playlist. Oh well, Pandora rocks and that's a minor thing that can easily be dealt with. Straight up, unlimited music. Get it, love it, use it, you know you want to.

Midomi - Sing into your iPhone and find the song you're looking for on iTunes. Pretty awesome right? It's $2.99 for Midomi and actually you can do the same thing if you are hearing the song on any speaker, you can even hum to try and find the song. This can very quickly turn into a game that you play with your friends. We turned it into a round-robin type of game where one person sings a song and if it was recognized, the next person had to sing the second suggestion for what the song could be. Hours of fun, and useful for getting music that your hear on the radio or in someone else's car at a stop light. Also see Shazam, they accomplish a nearly similar task. The downfalls; crowded rooms or noisy environments can easily throw off the way the application hears the song. It's pretty good at guessing, but it's not perfect and like anything else, it has it's limitations. All in all though, amazingly functional.

Wordpress - Thank God for making a free iPhone WordPress client, actually thank WordPress because they did a killer job making this app simple and effective. If it wasn't for this app, I would probably only update my blog once a month when I'm actually at home and have time. Instead, I can post with full functionality from my iPhone and not have to worry about logging into the dashboard and blah blah blah just to make a new post. For a free app, it has a surprising amount of features including attaching photos, links and videos as well as being able to paste code from other sites since the OS 3.0 update. It also has support for multiple blogs, post-dated publishing, public/private and most things you'll need to post to your blog. The only thing you can't do is log into your dashboard for full admin tweaking, but honestly, you shouldn't need to with this app at your side.

Facebook - Normally, I wouldn't really mention Facebook's app for the iPhone since I think it should be a standard but since the recent update it's interface has become a lot more clean and it feels more like a native iPhone app than ever. It has actually sparked me to be on Facebook, on my iPhone, more often. Which is more than a lot of apps can say for their sister site's. *cough*RememberTheMilk*cough*

These are my current favorite downloadable iPhone apps, every one if them is currently on the App Store. I didn't choose all of these solely based on how much I like them, I chose them based on how much I use them. I think that there is a big gap that exists between apps we would like to use that are fun and cool, and apps that we actually use everyday to accomplish things. Each app serves a great purpose and turns your iPhone into much more than just a fancy toy with phone calls.