Last week my friend Davis Cabral asked me about some nice apps to install in his new iPhone. I have an iPod Touch and seldom if ever use it to listen to music. In fact, my wife and I called it “the house computer”. Davis asked the right person, and below there are my thoughts about some of my favorite apps.

Reading

After I finished reading all paper books I own, I chose to read some classic ‘virtual’ books using my iPod. A Kindle would be better (right Bruno?), but unfortunately it’s unavailable in my country. At least there are good reader apps for iPhone OS. I’ve already read the short-story I, Robot written by Cory Doctorow (what I started to read because I thought it was the Asimov’s book…) using the Stanza app and currently I’m reading Alice in Wonderland using the Classics app. The both are nice apps, each one with its own characteristics.

Classics has an impressive and beautiful UI with a virtual shelf, ‘page flip’ animation and bookmarks. There are twenty three available books so far. $0.99.

Stanza has a (bugged) UI with many options (colors, layout, orientation) and lets you browse many catalogs with paid and free ebooks like O’Reilly Ebooks and Project Gutenberg. And it’s not only that, there is a desktop app to sync your own files. Free.

Besides the usual books, I read comic books and there are some nice solutions for iPhone OS, eg.: PullLists, Comic Reader Mobi.

I’m using the Comiczeal what syncs with the ComicZeal Sync(for Mac and Win) and has a good file management, unfortunately only in the iPhone side. $0.99.

Games

When I wanna play some video game, there are two what I really like: Zenonia and Real Soccer 2009.

Zenonia is an old school RPG game… in fact, it is a fun RPG action game that mixes many cool features of some great RPG games. There are three classes to choose(paladin, warrior and thief) a lot of NPCs, items, weapons, monsters, active and passive skills and it’s a long game (I’ve already played 14 hours along about two months and I think I played only half of it). Free Lite version, Full $2.99.

Real Soccer 2009 is a soccer game(oh!) with nice graphics and gameplay. However, its best part is the intuitive controls that make it better to play than Pro Evolution Soccer for PC with a joystick! With just a direction pad and two buttons you get 17 moves. Sometimes I catch my wife playing it. $0.99.

In the next part I’ll write about apps in other categories: Productivity, Social Networking and Home Entertainment.

Photo by meaghan murphy.