Seriously, I’m in love with this phone (let alone the camera :). It’s amazing! Granted, I upgraded from a 3G, so on performance alone I was bound to be bowled over, but WOW. It’s a life changer, I’m telling you! :)

Anyway, recently a friend put a call out for a list of recommended starter apps for new iPhone owners, and as you can imagine… I have a few things to say on this topic! So wanted to post them all here, for anyone else interested. Note most all of these are for any iPhone, not just iPhone4. Many are also available for iPad, too. When you have your iPhone plugged in & the apps tab open in iTunes you can see there which ones work on both iPad & iPhone.

Best photo apps

• Camplus – http://campl.us/ I’d love to take the time to link all of these but probably won’t right now. However there are apps out there called Camera Plus that aren’t the same! This one’s the absolute best. The only thing it’s missing is rotate. I wish there were a desktop version. It’s brilliant! It does hipstamatic style and cross process (my fav), among many, many other cool features. It’s clearly my desert island camera app, but because I have like 14 (!) different iPhone photo apps, I’ll name a few more good ones…
• CameraBag – almost don’t need it because of Cam+, but I am a huge fan of the Magazine filter.
• TiltShiftGen – most excellent at improving any photo!
• QuadCam – take several shots in one photo – here are some of my quadcam shots
• Incredibooth – especially fab on iPhone4 where you can see yourself while taking it
• Diptic – see my recent Ali + Todd diptic
• PixelPipe – I just recently set this up which allows you to upload your photos to several different spots all at once (or simply several to Flickr all at once vs the limit of 5)

Social apps

• Twitter (of course), previously Tweetie2
• I recently downloaded Hootsuite, and I was surprised at how great it is, too. Great to use when you want to quickly post to several of your profiles at once, too.
• Foursquare (of course)
• Facebook
• Boxcar (alerts you of mentions on both Twitter & FB, but hasn’t been working for me lately. grr)
• Hot Potato

Entertainment

• Rdio
• Movies
• PhoneFlicks (view your Netflix Queue)

Games

• Doodlejump
• Quordy
• Fruit Ninja
• Hangman (surprisingly difficult/entertaining on your own)

Other fun

• Big Words – send a simple banner message across a loud room
• Sketchbook – best drawing app, if you’re into that kind of thing. ;)

Business/Productivity

• Things – I keep meaning to post about how I use this on my desktop & iPhone, in effort to not have my inbox be a to-do list!
• Evernote – just started using this, excited about it though

Alright, beyond the above it just gets into things like Finance (Mint, Chase, Paypal, Tipulator), local resources (like Yelp, Where, etc), Travel apps (TripIt, Routesy, Nextbus, etc), and a bunch of other random ones that I personally love (1Password, AstrologyZone, Pastebot, C25K) — but who knows if they’ll be useful or of interest to others. So to make it easy, I’ve simply taken screenshots of all of my pages & posted them on Flickr.

• Flickr set of the apps on my iPhone 4 (slideshow below)
• Flickr set of the apps on my 3G

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”willotoons” id=”72157624669261340″]

I’d love to hear all about your favorites, too!