My Favorite iPhone Apps

So seeing as how I have had my iPhone for a little over a year now, I figured I would note my top 5 favorite iPhone apps. These are the apps I use on a more than regular basis and of course, being the cheap bastard I am, are all free apps. So let's begin:

Living in the Pacific Northwest and a frequent user of public transportation I like to know before I leave the house or office as to whether I will be standing in the rain. The Weather Channel app is far superior than the weather app that comes with the iPhone, not to mention much more accurate. I have 3 favorites about this app, first I can check the weather by the hour or up to 10 days. Like I mentioned earlier, it is surprising accurate. This comes in handy when preparing for my day. In the PNW you can have sun in the morning and a down pour of rain by 5pm. Another great feature is the Alerts. It will let you know when the county/state have posted severe weather alerts. Probably the coolest feature would be the video. Press the video tab and each day you can watch a weather report. No more waiting for the news each night.

I probably do about 75% of my Facebooking from my iPhone. Being a transplant to the Seattle area, this is the best way for me to stay in touch with old friends. With the exception of Facebook apps, you can pretty much do anything on the iPhone you could do on the webpage. You can update your status, respond to others, view photos and even take a photo with your iPhone and instantly upload it. Way cool!

TwitterFon is a fairly new app for me. When I first started tweeting they didn't have a mobile option and I quickly fell away. Now with the iPhone app I can tweet anytime, even when I'm on the bus. I like that it shows me the new tweets in a different color so I don't have try and figure it out. Another cool feature is that you can enable a Facebook app that will update your status with your tweet. The nice thing about that is it can discern from a regular tweet and a reply to a tweet so that replies aren't posted. Now if they can only build in push alerts so I know in realtime when a new tweet has been posted.

The METRO Bus Tracker is actually a web app, but I mention it because it is very useful to me. I know there are other apps in the store that can do this but they cost money and the benefits, for me at least, do not justify the expense. The web app was designed by local developer Sofiane Hassaine. It taps into METRO's GPS tracking and gives you realtime data as to it's arrival time. You see, I spend almost 4 hours a day riding the METRO buses to and from work and this web app lets me search by intersection to find the times when the buses are going to arrive. This is handy because depending when that bus will arrive I may choose to ride a different bus. Thanks Sofiane!!

The Pandora Radio app is by for my most used app aside from email. With only 8gb on my iPhone I quickly begin to get tired of listening to the same music and constantly loading new stuff. This app saved me from all that and is now my exclusive music player. I have pretty broad tastes in music and at times I am in the mood for a specific genre. This feeds my music craving anytime and I can change genre at my whim. Pandora is a product of the Genome Music Project so it organically molds to the style of music you prefer to listen to. You can create multiple genre stations and you can even move music types into other stations. It even sounds good over the EDGE network, it could use a little more low end but good none the less. The biggest downfall to the app is that unlike the ipod portion of the phone, it stops playing when you exit the app. This means I need to stop listening momentarily to check email or do another function on the phone. I look forward to the update that fixes this.

Well, that's it. My favorite and most useful (free) apps for the iPhone. What are yours??