Each week our best iPhone apps column corals the most exciting apps you can get for your lovely slice of Apple hardware. Sometimes they’re free, sometimes they come at a price but all of them are double plus awesome, and brand spanking new. In this week’s best iPhone apps we’ve got a game that reminded us of Streets of Rage (Street of Rage FTW), a great cross-platform IM app, a nifty new browser and the coolest RSS reader in town. No, really, trust us on this one…
Boxcar
£free, iTunes
Some of the best iPhone apps are the most utilitarian, the ones that just add an extra bit of polish to iOS’s already pleasing set up. Boxcar is one of those. It super-charges notifications (yes, yes Android bots, I know your notifications are SO much better). With a nice, slick interface, Boxcar makes it simple to coral notifications for Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and more esoteric options like Github and Growl in one place. It’ll also let you add notifications for an site’s RSS feed and Twitter searches, lists and trends.
Kik Messenger
£free, iTunes
Another one from the Department of Truly Useful iPhone apps, Kik is a cross-platform IM app that’s essentially Blackberry Messenger for the rest of us. There are Blackberry and Android apps too so you can connect with friends from all the smartphone tribes via one app.
BigToe
£0.59, iTunes
The BigToe web browserearns its spot in our best iPhone apps list by being smartly designed and super-simple. It’s a nice alternative to Safari with some nice features. We’re especially keen on the quick links bar at the bottom of the app which make it easy to jump to your most visited site and search engine with one tap. The black and white colour scheme also helps you to focus on the site you’re looking at rather than the app.
Pulse News Mini
£free, iTunes
This is a nice one to throw into our best iPhone apps list: Pulse got a lot of attention when it debuted on the iPad earlier this year as the most visually stunning RSS reader we’d ever seen (before Flipboard took some of its thunder). Now it’s upped the ante by going free and the iPhone version is pretty great. It’s a shame it’s limited to 20 sources (no competition for the excellent Reeder for Google Reader) but the visuals are just so pretty, it’s worth a download for that alone.
Gun Bros
£free, iTunes
After all the practical apps in this week’s best iPhone apps, we had to include one frivolous game. Gun Bros is an eye-poppingly good looking top-down arcade game. The game features two muscle-bound heroes wandering around alien wolds and blasting baddies. Strangely it reminds me of Streets of Rage and as any fool knows, Streets of Rage was bloody brilliant. Ergo, Gun Bros is ace too.
Spotted a brilliant app that’s crying out to be included in our Best iPhone apps library? Hit the comments right now and tell us about it!
