Stanza is pretty much like the Kindle app in that you can buy, store and read books on your iPhone.

I was a tad dubious about this concept of book reading via the iPhone until I trialled it on holiday this year. I downloaded the Twilight series of books and found the app to be very readable. What this did for me was to allow extra space in my suitcase (where the 3 or 4 books would have gone) for presents and Ouzo. Yes I went to Greece.

The great thing about the Stanza app is that you can also get Stanza Desktop which is a small utility program that helps convert books of differing formats into the ePub format that Stanza likes. It also helps in transferring these books to your iPhone.

Another good feature of the app is the ability to click to page flip, to drag one finger down the screen to dim the page, the ability to invert text to be black on white and to resize the font size, which automatically reformats the book.

All in all a really good free app

This game, from Clickgamer, is of the Worms ilk of puzzle come destruction games that’s über addictive. The dirty, rotten, thieving piggies have knicked the birds eggs and holed up ‘over the way’ in various buildings and constructions. The overtly mad birds must fling themselves from a catapult, kamikaze stylee, onto the pigs to destroy them.

The simplicity and ease of play of the game makes this very easy to pick and start to enjoy and as I said quite addictive. The levels get progressively harder, but not too hard and new bird types are introduced as one progresses. The cartoon style is cutesy and slick, whilst the physics engine makes the game different virtually every play. This is a must purchase at 59p, ridiculously good, addictive fun.

Slap Happy is a must for every iphone owning, Happy Tree Friends fan. The app puts your very own Happy Tree Friend, Cuddles, in your pocket for you to knock about, maim and ultimately kill in a gruesome accident.

The graphics and sick humour are brilliantly realised. Watch your friends faces as, after they’ve said “arrrrhhh cute” upon seeing Cuddles and you slide your finger across the screen and slap him with a big smack sound. Then flip him up to the top of the screen and watch their faces again as he drops with a heavy thud to the floor. Give him a shake and listen to the “oooohh nooooo” from your now disturbed, laughing friends.

I’ll leave the rest of the delights for you to find out for yourself, but needless to say, it gets better.

If you have Sky+ this app is a must, it’ll be the best £1.19 you’ve spent. What it basically does is, after setting up an online sky account, be able to remotely record anything on your Sky+box. So if you forget to record a program you can search for it in the app, hit record and a request is sent to your box to record it. Perfect.

This is definitely one of the best apps I’ve downloaded.

This paid for app (£1.79) is a very good example of what fun things can be done with the iphone. Basically, take a photo, preferably face-on of someone’s face and pop it into pr-made masks to make and ‘old’ version of the person.

Here’s an example of one of the finished photos.

Here’s a demo…

Newton’s Cradle is another one of those apps that’s pretty useless as far as functionality goes but it’s just great fun. What does it do? It replicates the old 70’s office toy by using real world physics and clash detection to make a very realistic Newton’s Cradle. Cool!!

Ohhhhh and it makes good use of the accelerometer too.

This app doesn’t really do much except roll a number of dice, that’s it, but it does this beautifully. The animation and real world crash detection is simply sublime. Just shake your iphone and watch the dice roll around and come to rest on your score. You can choose how many dice and from a number of different patterns. This is the lite version of a poker dice game by the same company which I guess will be excellent. As I don’t know how to play dice poker I won’t be partaking in this app, I’ll just sit mesmerised, looking at the beautiful rolling dice for an hour or two.

This app is great if you want to convert from one unit to another. It covers all constant categories Area, Energy, Temperature, Length etc and a very useful feature which is Currency. This would be great for those holidays abroad, though watch your data transfer rates. I suppose this is one of the apps shortfalls, if ya could store what the exchange rate was when you bought your currency and not go online to get the latest exchange rates, it would be extremely useful.

Aside from this niggle the app works wonderfully and is great when watching the olympics to find out what those powerhouses are lifting in lbs in the clean and jerk or just how tall that 2.1m guy is slam dunking the basketball.

Simple to use, useful and free a perfect combination.

Here’s my second offering on the useless iphone app front, kaleidoscope. It simply replicates the effect of the toy that ya used to put to your eye as a kid and marvel at changing colours as you twisted the end and watched the coloured sand swirl into different patterns.

To interact with this version ya can either touch the screen and change the patterns or use the accelerometer and turn the screen.

It may seem useless, but for 5 or 6 seconds a day it brings a little colour and a smile into your life.

After using the iphone for over 2 weeks now, I thought I’d hi-light a recent app I’ve added…

This weeks is ‘Wooo Button’. What does it do? It makes a Wooo sound when you press the button. That’s it. A totally useless application that I’m guessing will bug the hell out of anyone near me when I use it.

If I get punched I’ll report back.