by Ciera Ware

Created on: February 07, 2010

As of right now, the App Store currently has over 140,000 apps. The App Store has 20 categories of apps including:Games, Entertainment, Utilities, Social Networking, Music, Productivity, Lifestyle, Reference, Travel, Sports, Navigation, Healthcare and Fitness, News, Photography, Finance, Business, Education, Weather, Books, and Medical. Many of these apps are free or $0.99. My favorite games are Ranch Rush, Kinetic Balls, Paper Toss, Trace, and Jelly Car.

All of these are free except for Ranch Rush, which is $0.99. Social Networking apps are incredibly popular and include: Facebook, Skype, MySpace Mobile, Yahoo Messenger, and Twitterific. A battery monitor is a must-have for iPod Touch. They tell you what your battery level is, when your iPod is done charging, or when it is low on battery.

Pandora Radio and Shazam are the top two free apps in the Music category. Although Shazam requires headphones with built-in a microphone it is really helpful. The Reference category includes: Google Mobile, Dictionary.com, Bing, Wikipedia Mobile, and the Bible. All of these are in the top 25 free apps in Reference. These are all really helpful in everyday life. The New York Times app is ridiculously popular and takes up minimal space on your iPod. My personal favorite apps are Jelly Car, Read It Later, Classics, Stanza, Google Mobile, BatteryMaster, Unblock Me Free, Ranch Rush. Read It Later is something I use everyday and find insanely helpful.

After you have downloaded the Read It Later bookmark, you can tap on it whenever you find a page you want to save and it saves it. You can come back to these pages in the app without a Wi-Fi connection! Classics is a wonderful app that has 23 classic novels including: Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Frankenstein, and others. You can read these without a Wi-Ficonnection. This app has an incredible layout (a bookshelf) and is remarkably realistic. Some apps such as: Scribble Lite and MyPaint Free allow you to create drawings and paintings right on your iPod. The Youtube app is built-in your iPod and is the only video player workable on the iPod besides Quicktime.

This is useful for quickly watching a clip or lounging on the couch watching several videos. The built-in calculator app is really nice with a regular calculator in portrait view or a regular+scientific calculator in landscape. Apple has done an amazing job with the App Store and I hope they continue to do well.

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