Ben Boychuk

You may be a poet and not even know it. But even poets and songwriters occasionally get stuck on a word. What rhymes with iambic pentameter, anyway? Under such circumstances, a decent rhyming dictionary is indispensable.

Ben Turley'sRhyme Time helps fill the bill as a simple but reasonably sophisticated rhyming dictionary for the iPhone and iPod touch. The interface is what you might expect of a dictionary: drab and utilitarian. You tap the search bar and up pops the keypad. Type in your word and the app will return a range of word selections.

Among other things, the iPhone and the iPod touch make for half-decent digital recorders. Most note applications don't take full advantage of that particular capability. A number of note-taking apps, for example, have a recording feature. But the audio quality is middling to fair, the controls are often primitive, and the audio files themselves are sometimes difficult to export.

And then, of course, there is the whole transcription matter. The worst part of recording anything is the transcribing afterward. Nobody wants to do that. Can't I just farm it out?

There is a reason retailers close for a day a couple of times a year to take inventory. Proper accounting demands that any responsible business owner count everything in stock and write it down. And if they find themselves the victim of an act of theft or what lawyers used to call an "act of God," they can say with total certainty what they lost, what they kept, and what they need to replace.

The same principle applies to your personal possessions. Anyone over the age of 25 who isn't either living with his parents or a monk probably has a lot of stuff: Furniture, appliances, dishes, flatware, tools, to say nothing of personal electronics, DVDs, CDs, video games and books. That stuff cost money. It's worth something. If you lose it, you need to replace it. And if it's insured, your insurance company won't simply take you at your word about those Faberge eggs and that near mint copy of Action Comics No. 1. They want proof.

Before Apple released the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, countless users lamented the lack of video capability on their phones. For those who could afford to upgrade to Apple's latest phone, problem solved. But for those who could not or did not? Laan Labs' iVideoCamera app for the iPhone offers a solution, albeit an imperfect one.

iVideoCamera lends video capability to any iPhone, even first-generation devices. To be clear, if you have an iPhone 3GS, you do not need this application. (Some users claim there are superior video camera apps available for jailbroken phones, but I wouldn't know so I can't vouch for them.) The app lets you shoot short videos, save the clips to your phone's camera roll, and export the videos to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo, among others. The latest version of iVideoCamera also lets you e-mail clips to friends or upload your videos wirelessly via file transfer protocol.

Now hear this: Dragon Dictation is shaping up to be the essential voice app for the iPhone and iPod touch. You say the words and they appear as you said them with remarkable accuracy. Although the technology isn't new, the application from Nuance Communications is novel and terrific. And for the moment, at least, you can take advantage of it for free.

Users who never found much utility in the Dragon Naturally Speaking desktop products--I was one of them--might find some use for Nuance Communication's app on their handhelds. At its best, Dragon Dictation lets you easily update Twitter and Facebook or compose short e-mails or SMS messages by speaking rather than fumbling with the keyboard. The developer claims that speaking and seeing your words instantly transcribed is up to five times faster than tapping out the same message on your iPhone or iPod touch. You will have every reason to believe that's true after just a few minutes experimenting with the app.

If you're one of those people who spends hours curating your music, books and movie lists (I certainly was), the LivingSocial app for the iPhone and iPod touch might be appealing. Facebook users will instantly recognize this free app, which lets you catalogue and share your impeccable tastes with friends and like-minded cool people near you.

Alas, the iPhone app is a bit like the odd cousin Oliver of the LivingSocial family. Disappointments abound. The app is awkward to navigate and not as thorough with features as you would expect. Problems are apparent from the outset. If you don't have a LivingSocial account outside of Facebook, then entering the app will be a bit tricky at first. You can sync with your Facebook account if you go through a few steps that aren't obvious.

Quickpedia is a simple, free app for browsing Wikipedia. What makes Quickpedia worth the download over simply navigating to Wikipedia from Safari is the easy-to-read interface and the search history. The app remembers all of your searches, lists them on the home screen, and--this is key--saves every article you've read to your iPhone or iPod touch for future reference offline. (The app does not save images, however.)

If that were the end of it, Quickpedia wouldn't be much worth noting. But the app from Next Mobile Web has a few novel features. You can browse random Wiki entries and popular user searches, for example. Perhaps not surprising, the two most popular searches of all-time (as of this writing, anyhow) are "Obama" and "Barack Obama." But scroll down a bit, and you will find that "Slumdog Millionaire," "Family Guy," and "India" are also popular articles.

So you've joined the growing ranks of the unemployed. Obviously, you're not alone. You need to find a job soon, though, because you need to pay your monthly data charges and, unfortunately, you cannot eat your iPhone or your iPod touch. Turns out, you don't have to. But you can look for gainful employment. The beauty of job-finding applications for your handheld is you can hunt for a new gig while you're waiting in line at the unemployment office.

The downside is the experience may be more depressing than actual unemployment.

Microsoft launched Bing in 2009 in a bold but foolhardy effort to unsettle--if not actually unseat--Google's domination of the search engine market. Microsoft, ever the scrappy underdog, unleashed a clever advertising campaign that prescribes Bing as a remedy for search overload. For the low, low price of $100 million on marketing, Microsoft captured about 10 percent of the search audience in its first nine months. Not bad.

And just as Microsoft followed Google into the search market, so Microsoft follows Google to the iPhone app market.

Reporting that the App Store is brimming with news aggregators for the iPhone and iPod touch is, well, yesterday's news. Many are utilitarian and plain looking affairs--essentially lists of linked news sources with built-in browsers. They're fine as far as they go, which sometimes isn't very far at all. An exceptional few have the graphic pizzazz to match the stylishness of the device for which the app was built.

John Cotant'sNews Rush and News Rush Pro for the iPhone and iPod touch have a pretty interface and link to a ton of news sources. But the diversity and quantity of sources is undermined by the near total absence of customizable features.

Any reminder application for the iPhone or iPod touch has one simple hurdle to clear: Does it remind you to remind you? It doesn't matter whether the app is supposed to tell you that your wedding anniversary is next month or your mortgage was due yesterday. It doesn't matter how pretty the app looks, or how user friendly the interface may be. If you don't remember to use the app to check on what you're supposed to be doing, the app is, shall we say, less than useful.

And the best way for an application to remind you of anything is with push notifications. If a reminder app lacks that one feature, the rest is essentially window dressing.

What does Dow Jones's financial wire service, MarketWatch, have that competitor Bloomberg doesn't have? After all, both offer up-to-the-minute market news, analysis and data, with searchable stock quotes. On the iPhone and iPod touch, both have easy to navigate screens with extensive coverage of the day's events on Wall Street and at stock and mercantile exchanges around the globe.

The MarketWatch app displays the day's top stories, and a ticker at the top of the screen rotates through the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ and S&P 500. The menu at the bottom of the screen lets you browse through tech news, latest stories, markets and the ever-popular "more."