The first seven apps you should download on your iPhone

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So you’ve just bought yourself a shiny new iPhone, and you’re setting it up ready to use in your day-to-day life. But there’s one important thing you should be thinking of at this point, “what apps should I download?” There are an awful lot of apps available, and barring the usual services, like Facebook or Twitter, that you want access to on the go, what should you choose? To help, here are seven important iPhone apps to help you get started.

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Viber

Apple might have promised that calling over Wi-Fi will be included on the iPhone 6, but on the older models you don’t have that feature without some help from the good old app developers. Viber is a way for you to make your calls over the internet so that you don’t have to be wasting your minutes.

Even though Viber does come with a messaging function, you don’t necessarily have to use it because iMessage is included on all iPhones.

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Google Maps

The iPhone has its own maps application built-in, but everyone on the planet hates Apple Maps. Hell, I’d bet even Tim Cook hates Apple Maps. That’s why you’ll be wanting a mapping app that everyone doesn’t hate, and actually works well. That’s where Google Maps comes in.

Use it to look up where places are, look for directions, look up interesting points of interest, and everything you’d want to use a maps app for.

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Soundhound

There’s nothing worse than hearing a song without being able to figure out what it is, even worse is when you have the song stuck in your head and you can’t figure it out. Thanks to the magic of apps and the internet it’s never been easier to find out.

Soundhound listens to a small sample of a song, and compares it to a central database to determine which song it is and who sung it. Best of all the app will then show you the lyrics in real time, with links to where you can buy it or listen to it. But remember how you often get a song stuck in your head and can’t figure out what it is? Soundhound is rather clever in that you can actually hum or whistle a tune to the app and it will do its very best to figure out what tune has been plaguing you all day long.

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Inbox Cube

Emails are one of the things that smartphones are made for, and chances are you’ll have multiple accounts for different things, making it much harder to keep track of everything. Luckily Inbox Cube is here to help.

What it does is it organises your Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and AOL emails into three different ‘cubes’: emails, attachments, and contacts. Each cube organises your email based on those three categories making it much, much, easier for you to keep track of everything than it would be with the stock email app that the iPhone comes with.

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Evernote

Everyone needs an app on their phone that can be used to document all your thoughts and musing easily and quickly. The iPhone does have its own built-in notes app, but it’s fairly limited by the fact that all you can do is type out notes. Evernote, on the other hand, is different.

The main advantage is that Evernote is capable of syncing with an online server, meaning you can access your notes on whatever device you happen to be using at any given time. Those notes can be made with text or voice, and can even be saved for offline use if you have a premium subscription. Plus, as an added bonus for all of you who need to keep track of business contacts, Evernote can scan and store business cards so that you can keep track of them all.

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Launch Centre Pro

One of the things about iOS is that there are no real menus to speak of, in that everything you will want can only be accessed through app icons that are stored on the device’s home screen. Navigating through them all can be a bit of a pain, which is why you need Launch Centre Pro — it’s basically speed dial for your apps.

Everything you need, or use, regularly can be put into a customisable screen for easy access. It dosen’t matter what it is, as long as it’s an app on your phone.

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PQ Chat

Privacy is paramount, especially now that we live in a post-Snowden world and know what kind of nefarious deeds agencies use to keep track of everyone. Apple itself claims that it can’t see or read your iMessages or emails (and won’t give access to that information to anyone), there are other organisations that have no moral conflict by doing so. Agencies like the NSA or the GCHQ.

PQ Chat has been built with privacy in mind from the word go, and the developers promise that it does everything possible to ensure that your communiques are kept safe from prying eyes. Not that you’ll really notice that, because from a user standpoint it functions almost exactly the same as any other instant messenger out there. That’s a good thing, it means you don’t have to worry about anything at all.

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