With the release of the iPhone 4, a lot of people are making the leap and purchasing an iPhone. After they get it set up and are finished admiring it, now what? What makes the iPhone so great are the thousands of different apps available on the App Store. Here are a couple of apps that I think are must downloads when you first unwrap your shiny new toy.

Facebook

This one is obvious. Not only is it everyone’s favorite social network, it’s actually a very well designed app. It’s logically laid out and it makes it easy to post pictures, look at your news feed and stalk your friends.

Cost: Free

Twitter for iPhone

After Facebook, this is probably the next social network everyone wastes their time on. This app actually started out as Tweetie and I thought it was the best Twitter client on the iPhone by far. Apparently the guys over at Twitter thought so as well and bought atebits, the company that developed the app, to use as their official app on the iPhone. What makes this app so great is that it’s simple enough for the casual Twitterer to understand but has the features a power user needs. It can handle multiple accounts and it supports retweets, geolocation, Twitter lists and uploading pictures and videos to the service of your choice.

Cost: Free

BeejiveIM

It’s a shame Apple doesn’t ship an IM client with the iPhone. Luckily developers have stepped up to fill this void. The best IM client on the iPhone by FAR is BeejiveIM. I’ve tried plenty of solutions, even jailbreak apps from back in the day such as Palringo and ApolloIM, but none of them have the simplicity combined with the options of BeejiveIM. It supports practically all the IM services out there. Of course it keeps you online after you’ve quit the app and pushes new messages to you as you receive them. At $10, it’s not the cheapest app but this is truly a case of “you get what you pay for”. Easily the best app I’ve purchased so far. If you’d like a free client, Meebo is a respectable alternative.

Cost: $9.99

Remote

This Apple developed app is very underrated and I always use it to demo what you can do with an iPhone, iTunes and/or an Apple TV. Once you link up the app to your iTunes library, you have an iPod like interface to control your music library. It’s even more impressive when you have your computer connected to speakers or have an Apple TV with a home theater system. It’s dead simple but still impresses people whenever I show them for the first time.

Cost: Free

Pandora

Everyone has heard of Pandora but it reaches its full potential on the iPhone with the arrival of background audio and multitasking in iOS4. You can, of course, load your own music and listen to it through the iPod app but sometimes I don’t want to search through my library to find something to listen to. When I’m feeling lazy, I launch Pandora and just choose a station I’ve created. What’s great about Pandora is that it will play music from an artist you choose but also plays music from similar artists. I’ve discovered new artists and rediscovered old favorites via Pandora.

Cost: Free

The Register:

Start-up airline Virgin America has decided HTML is “good enough” for animating online content on its brand-new website, which went live Monday, dumping Flash.

My contribution to the My Day, Yesterday pool.

I actually picked a good day to do this. I did this Thursday, Oct. 15 which is still a work day but unofficially the start of my weekend. I made my rounds to clients in the morning, worked at a coffee shop in the afternoon, the world was captivated by Balloon Boy and barhopped around Orange County at night.

I shot it with my iPhone 3GS and screen capture with Quicktime X.

"Yesterday, in video. Shot throughout the day, put together and uploaded today. You should do the same. And when you do, put it in the My Day, Yesterday group. Don’t add any music or anything, only what’s recorded via the camera."

There’s a saying that the best camera is the one you have with you. That means the best camera I have is my iPhone. And with the 3GS, the camera has a decent megapixel count, records video and can upload to the Internet immediately because of my 3G signal. Every once in awhile, I run across stuff in my daily life that actually inspires me to take a picture. Here are a couple of my favorites from the past few months.

I’m obssesed with people’s computer set ups, what gear they use and how they use it all to get things done. As an extension to this, I’m also fascinated by what apps people have on the home screen of their iPhones. Luckily someone else has put together a nice website showing the iPhone home screens of “some of the best and brightest developers, designers and tech writers.” I obviously don’t fall into either of those descriptions so I decided to share with everyone my iPhone home screen on this site.

Starting off with the “Dock”, the only change I made was to place the Messages app into the dock. I text WAY more than surfing the web so that was a no brainer. A nice small side effect is that Safari is now in the upper left of the home screen, which if there were a Fitts’ Law for iPhones, makes it easy to get to since it’s at one of the four corners. The first two rows are made up of apps the iPhone comes with. I use Calendar to keep track of work appointments and stuff I have to be at during the weekends. I keep Photos next to the Camera app because it only makes sense. With the 3GS, I find myself taking even more photos and videos during my everday routine. I keep Clock on the front page because I use it a lot, not just for waking up in the morning, but for setting up timers for random things, naps and it also makes a good hard boiled egg timer. Settings because I’m constantly tinkering with the settings on my phone.

The next two rows are mostly apps I’ve installed from the App Store. Beejive is probably the paid app the I use the most and easily the best purchase I’ve made on the App Store. It’s the best IM app available for the iPhone (whatever happened to Meebo?) and once push notifications were enabled in 3.0, it’s an almost perfect app. I used NetNewsWire for my RSS reads but it seems that developement has stagnated so now I’ve switched to using the mobile version of Google’s Reader. Flickr for uploading pictures and videos I’ve taken while out and about. The new native app is a little slow, but is gorgeous. Facebook because, I’m not going to lie, I’m addicted to it. I’m always interested in what my friends are doing. Contacts is there because I couldn’t think of another app to stick there. Tweetie is hands down the best Twitter client available on the iPhone. Does everything I need and nothing else. Latitude now takes the place previously occupied by Loopt. Loopt pretty much died and while Latitude isn’t poised to take over, it’s always fun to know where your friends are. And finally Things. This app is the newest addition to the home screen because I was intrigued with what everyone is saying about it on the Interwebs. I’ve decided to try to integrate the app and its desktop version into my daily workflow.

The other pages of my phone are somewhat organized into a media apps page, a news/information apps page and a games page. Some notable apps on the other pages that I use are Ego, foursquare, Remote, and since football season is here, CBS Football. Ego and/or foursquare is getting enough use that it may crack into the home page sometime soon.

So a week ago my MacBook Pro fell victim to the nVidia video problem that nVidia has openly admitted. I brought it in to an Apple Store where they told me I’d be without my computer for a week. A WEEK. That’s like telling someone you won’t be able to use your right arm for a week. Not only is this my personal laptop, but also my laptop which I use for work. I figured this has to be done plus I have an assistant back at the office to help me out with all the heavy lifting at work. Everything else could be done on my iPhone. I was about to see if I could survive without my laptop for a week.

So how did it go? About how I expected. As far as work, keeping up with email was no problem. The only problem came when I needed to do work using work software. Having an assistant REALLY helped me out here. Without him, I’d have to borrow someone’s computer every 10-15 minutes doing selections which could get annoying fast. Without having a desktop, I found myself having Yung forward me emails with files attached which I tried to do most of the time. When he wasn’t available or just too busy, I had to use a fax machine. I never found myself using one so much in the one week without my computer.

As for the personal side, having the iPhone really made being without a laptop manageable. With all the apps available on the App Store, there’s an app for everything I do on a desktop, namely, chat, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and web surfing. Now that I think about it, if not having my laptop is like ripping off my right arm, being without my iPhone would be like ripping out any vital organ. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without it. Not having a cellphone would be impossible because of the nature of my work. I need to be able to be reached at any time and I can’t be at my desk the entire day.

I have to give Apple some credit. When I got my laptop back, I thought there might be some problems since they were swapping out a motherboard. I know Windows usually doesn’t like when that happens but I was surprised when not only the Mac side turned out ok, my Windows partition was ok with the motherboard swap out. I just hope that I never have to go limbless again.

Here is my quick, if not unorganized, review of the iPhone. Before buying the iPhone, I was using a Sidekick 3 on T-Mobile. When the SK3 first came out, it was one of the cooler phones available. The SK3 was finally in a form factor small enough that didn’t make it look like you were carrying a brick in your pants. The full keyboard, internet over GPRS and AIM made it for me, the best phone I had ever owned. But only after a year it came out, it quickly grew old for me and after being promoted to my new position, the SK3 wasn’t cutting it as a mobile version of my computer. And it looked more like a kid’s toy. I bought my iPhone right after the $200 price drop. $400 was a little bit easier to swallow than $600. I justified the purchase of the phone by convincing myself that I was spending $200 on a new iPod and $200 on a new phone. After I bought it, I was ready to cancel my T-Mobile acccount and switch back to AT&T.; As soon as I tried to activate my phone, I was told that my number, for whatever reason couldn’t be ported over. It was important that I keep my old phone number for work purposes. And since the help center at AT&T; was closed for the evening and I couldn’t wait until the morning to call, I decided to unlock my phone to use on T-Mobile’s network. After an hour and half total time of researching and actually going through the unlock process, I was able to successfully unlock the phone from AT&T; and was making calls using my T-Mobile SIM. After changing my data plan, I was able to get every aspect of my iPhone working on T-Mobile. Youtube, Google Maps, email, and Safari all worked perfectly once added T-Mobile’s Total Internet plan. As an added bonus, I also have access to T-Mobile hotpots at Starbucks and Border’s on my phone and my laptop. As for my voiceplan, I even successfully signed up on their myFaves plan. I have to admit that using it on T-Mobile is even better than using it on AT&T.; The only thing that doesn’t work is the Visual Voicemail feature which is network specific to AT&T.;

After using the iPhone for 2 months, I can’t imagine using any other phone and I can’t believe how I got by without it. If I really wanted to, I could get by using just my iPhone and leave my laptop at home. I have access to the Internet and email. I can carry music and movies. Whenever I visit Crystal or go down to San Diego, I really could get by with just this device. Oh yea, it makes phone calls too.

Of course, nothing is perfect and neither is this phone. First off, I wish the battery life was just a little bit longer. I’m a heavy user of using the Edge network for internet, email and Google maps so on a typical workday, I can barely get it to last longer than 7pm assuming I start work at 8am. Using it strictly as a phone, I have used it for 2 full days without charging but where’s the fun in that? The onscreen keyboard is surprisingly accurate and it’s probably the best implementation of having a full keyboard without physical buttons, but on my SK3 and it’s physical keyboard, I was able to type just as fast as on a real keyboard. But still, the keyboard is fine and the auto correction really saves this phone from being a total flop. And being the IM junkie that I am, I was real disappointed to find out there was no native IM client for the phone. I’ve used Apollo IM and several web based clients but I always get logged off. I’ve resorted to using IM forwarding which uses SMS to chat with people. So far it’s the best option short of a native IM client from Apple.

Even with those minor flaws, I still feel my iPhone is the best mobile phone I’ve used so far. And unlocking it to use on T-Mobile and still being able to use all the functions saved me $200 in cancellation fees and, in my opinion, gives it more functionality than being locked into AT&T.;