How I survived a week with only my iPhone (Essential Apps)

I spent last week in Walt Disney World, and while it certainly is the place where dreams come true, it’s not the most tech friendly place. I’ve come to expect every hotel and restaurant I’m at to have free WiFi available, but not Walt Disney World. You can buy access for $10 a day, which after three days would pay for your 3G access from AT&T for a month with a 3G iPad. Or, you could rough it with just that iPhone. I chose the latter, and these G3 friendly apps helped me do so without shaking in the corner as a result of my Internet addiction. I call them “My Essential Apps.”

Reeder – $2.99

This is the single most used app on my iPhone. It’s an RSS feed reader that syncs with Google Reader. I used to be a big fan of Byline, which has almost the same feature set, but Reeder has proven itself more useful to me. I know not everyone is like me, following about a hundred feeds with thousands of articles daily, but if you follow more than one site (beyond Appletell, Gadgetell and Gamertell) then you might find a feed reader to be extremely useful.

Google Reader is a feed reader that allows you to read the newest stories from your favorite sites when they are posted. It only displays the newest stories, so you never have to sort through the same stuff twice. Plus, it can be used on just about any Internet enabled device. This means you can read some stories from your Mac, some from your iPhone and some from your iPad without ever seeing the same article twice (unless you want to). I won’t go into any more detail on that now, because RSS feeds and Google Reader are big topics on their own.

The Reeder app accesses Google Reader and formats all of the articles in an iPhone friendly fashion, giving a nice feel to all of your news feeds with its slightly off-white color scheme. It’s almost paper-like. You can also do all the normal Google Reader stuff like starring articles or sharing, plus you can do other useful things like sending certain articles to Instapaper to be read later, forwarding them as emails to your friends, posting them to Twitter, or performing various other similar tasks.

The main reason that I prefer Reeder to other Google Reader enabled apps on the App Store is because it seems to sync faster than all the others. You can sync manually whenever you are done reading the current set of downloaded articles and you can have it sync every time you open the app. If you’re on a WiFi signal, you can download whole articles with images so that when the Internet is gone, you can still experience the whole article. And you can also have the app pull all of the articles through a mobilizer, which scales graphics down for quicker downloading.

This app really is great, especially for anyone who reads a lot of RSS feeds, like I do, or even someone who keeps track of a few. I’ve somehow convinced my whole family to use Google Reader, so if my mom and sad think it’s useful, you might want to give it a try. And trust me, Reeder is currently the best app available for checking Google Reader (I do it about once every 10 to 30 minutes).

Buy Reeder

Navigon’s Mobile Navigator – $79.99 (for US & CAN)

Still hands down the best GPS navigation app available on the App Store. I wouldn’t have made it to Orlando, Florida without this one. The base app will get you from point A to point B very well, and there are some extra features you can purchase should you wish to do so. The first and most useful is Real Time Traffic. This will reroute you around traffic jams, and it rerouted me several times on the way to and from Orlando. This single feature makes Navigon useful even in places that you are familiar with.

The newest feature that Navigon has added is a 3D terrain view. This makes mountains and valleys more easily identifiable on the map. It’s less useful that traffic data, as it is purely cosmetic. Plus, you’ll need some pretty righteous mountains for them to show up on screen. Still, if you have some money burning a hole in your pocket, this is a fun feature when you’re going through some nice mountain ranges. But it’s pretty flat where I am, so it’s kinda boring most of the time for me. All that said, I trusted Navigon to get me around Florida. The whole time I had no idea where I was, but I knew I was going the right way. If you’re driving anywhere unfamiliar, you really should at least consider a GPS app, and I doubt you’ll find one better than Navigon’s Mobile Navigator.

Buy Navigon’s Mobile Navigator

Tweetie 2 for iPhone – $2.99

You can’t be on the internet without having a Twitter account. The best way to access Twitter with an iPhone is Tweetie 2. I’m not saying that because the company that created Tweetie wasbought by Twitter, but that should say something to you about the quality of this app. It formats everything in a clean fashion, allows me to post images with ease, and keeps me up to date with all of the people I follow.

It’s not free, but it’s worth the price of admission for any avid Twitterer.

The only thing wrong with this app is that it hasn’t been updated for iPad yet.

Buy Tweetie 2 for iPhone

Facebook – Free

Yes, you might know I don’t much care for Facebook, but everyone else I know seems to. As such, I need to have the Facebook app installed on my iPhone, and I’m sure you do too.

This is the official app, so there really isn’t much to talk about here. It’s the best way to access Facebook on an iDevice (except the iPad).

And it’s free.

Download Facebook

iTeleport – $24.99

As easy as Mac computers are to use, I always find myself servicing various Mac machines from afar. If you’ve ever serviced a computer over the phone, you’ll know how hard it is to really “see” what’s going wrong. iTeleport gets around this by letting you actually see and control the computer from anywhere with an internet connection and the right settings.

This app is expensive, but it’s been so useful to me for so many reasons—from changing something on a computer at home to fixing a setting on my parents’ computer to sending a file from my machine at home to my iPhone via email. I can’t enumerate all the things you can do with this app, but it’s indispensible to me. There’s even an iPad version.

Buy iTeleport

Tetris – $4.99

I spent a fair amount of time waiting for buses and some time away from AT&T coverage, so, to kill some of that time, I played Tetris. It’s an old game, but it’s still my favorite for wasting a relatively short periods. I used to be a big fan of the now unavailable app Tris, but Tetris has really won me over.

The only bad part about Tetris is that it’s not universal, meaning you’ll need to buy both the iPhone and iPad versions separately. Both are great games, but I don’t see why the more expensive iPad app can’t be universal. You can buy Tetris for iPad for $7.99

Buy Tetris

And that’s about it. Well, I used the built-in Apple apps like Mail, Safari, Weather and Clock (for alarms), but that goes without saying. What doesn’t go without saying is that I was on my honeymoon, and limited access to the Internet for a week was probably a good thing for the wife and me. We’re both pretty addicted, but neither of us went through any withdrawals and the only Internet we had was on the iPhone.

So, those are my most used apps. How about you? What apps can you not live without?