A reporter’s best champion, but also indispensable for anyone who wants to dictate memos or memorialise other audible stuff on their cell phone. The app is little more than a large, red RECORD button on your iPhone screen; push it to capture audio in the high-quality AIFF format. What makes iTalk especially cool is the free, companion iTalkSynch application, which you download to your computer. That program can “sniff” the audio files on your iPhone and download them to your PC, via Wi-Fi. Now all we need is an app to do perfect voice-to-text translations.

9. SayWhere
You get used to typing on the iPhone after some time, but punching in addresses to locate directions is by far the biggest drag. DialDirections was the first to introduce speech-recognition capabilities to the iPhone with SayWhere, which translates users’ speech into queries for Google Maps, Yelp, Traffic or Yellow Pages. It’s a nifty app, especially for keeping drivers’ eyes on the road rather than the iPhone’s virtual keyboard.

8. Tweetie
Twitter, a new form of micro-blogging, became more legitimate when it broke the news of the deadly Mumbai attacks. And Tweetie is the best app we’ve found to follow your Twitter friends. The app neatly separates Twitter feeds into categories, and the interface resembles the bubbly iChat interface that most of us have come to love. It even lets you search Twitter and save those searches for later.

7. Ocarina

Some genius figured out how to use the microphone on the iPhone as an air-flow sensor now we’ve got a virtual ocarina, albeit not potato-shaped. Hold the phone up to your lips and blow; four “holes” appear on your touch screen allowing you to play almost any scale (which you select under Settings). Share your tunes with other Ocarina players around the world, or just set the app to listen to their masterworks.

6. Shazam
Everyone’s familiar with this scenario: You hear a really catchy, unfamiliar song on the stereo and you have no idea what it’s called. You hum it to yourself repeatedly and attempt to remember the lyrics, only to forget it after slamming a few shots at the bar. Shazam will never leave you struggling to recollect these thoughts again: Hold the iPhone up to a speaker playing the unknown tune and the app will identify it album, artist and song title just like that.

5. AP Mobile News Network

The Associated Press’s news-on-demand app is the gold standard. It gives you top news stories, as well as business, sports, show biz and other categories, which you can sort by most recent or most read. It even uses the phone’s GPS chip to deliver up local news.

4. TapTapRevenge
You’d have to be living on a different planet (or a retirement home) if you haven’t heard of Guitar Hero, the game that gets players to twitch their fingers compulsively along with the beat of their favorite songs. Developer Tapulous took the same idea to make an extremely addictive rhythm game called Tap Tap Revenge. Tapping blinking lights on a screen to catch songd isn’t exactly the same as rocking out on plastic guitars and drum pads, but it’s still highly addictive. And Tap Tap Revenge is so popular it’s even offering the option to download new tracks to tap to, similar to Guitar Hero and Rock Band’s music stores.

3. AroundMe

Simplicity makes this app a must-carry for the road warrior. Like the name applies, it list all the critical services around you banks, coffee shops, bars, gas stations, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants and so on. Using geolocation, the app orders each service by its proximity to you how many yards away and, like other apps aimed at the traveler, maps out a route from here to there, if requested. It also creates a contact page for every entry, which you can save to your own contacts list.

2. Pandora
Pandora’s alternative music distribution made this happen, and the app is cool as hell on the iPhone. Add a station for an artist you like, and the app will play that artist’s music as well as similar tunes you might like. What better way to find new music with the wealth of new bands out there?

1. Google Earth
When Steve Jobs called the iPhone “Your world in your pocket,” he probably didn’t expect Google to deliver the world in your pocket. Well, virtually. Displaying satellite imagery around the world in a 3-D globe, Google Earth is one of the most accurate, mind-blowing apps that truly show off the powers of the iPhone. If you want to impress your grandmother with a demonstration of just how far technology has come since she was a girl, this ought to do the trick.

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