Last call

Remember judging your local bartender based upon his or her's knowledge of obscure beverages? If they couldn't make a Flaming Blue J. how could they be expected to grab the correct beer? Well now bartenders and their seemingly never-ending ability to make any drink on the planet can be easily replaced with a few iPhone apps. Why spend time at the local bar paying too much for booze when you can pretend you're a bartender at home? Plus, getting home is safer. You're already there. On the floor. That's spinning. 

A teaspoon of sugar

We’re not sure what we’re going to do with all that extra space in our kitchen cabinets now that iPhone has condensed our library of cookbooks into a 3.5-inch display. Between Betty Crocker, Epicurious and Allrecipes, we’ve got every cuisine covered--and Google’s always there to help with all any fancy terms or perplexing measurements. And the stains wipe right off with ease.






Point and click

OK, so you have to buy a $2,500 component that converts Wi-Fi into infrared, but the iPhone can replace your home entertainment center's universal remote that always getting lost. If you're a TiVo owner, you can control it over your local network. Or, we can just wait for Apple to finally release its Mac mini DVR and 50-inch Cinema Display.






Flash on iPhone


Apple has taken its share of lumps for not fitting it with a memory card slot, but that doesn’t mean iPhone isn’t capable of handling all of our file-carrying needs. MobileMe users have got it good with Apple’s iDisk app, but those of us without mac-dot-com addresses can download Air Sharing, DropBox or ZumoDrive and say goodbye to gimmicky flash drives forever.




Check it out

Signing, tearing, waiting on line at the bank: Writing checks is so 1988, but just because our debit card does most of the work doesn’t mean we aren't totally immune from sending and receiving them. A number of apps on iPhone allow you to pay bills and wire money, but the best has to be USAA Mobile, which lets you deposit checks right simply by snapping a photo of the paper nuisance. Now that’s a veteran’s benefit if we ever saw one.




Hey there, fanny boy

Frankly we’d like to forget these ever even existed, but if iPhone can eliminate the need to look like a lame kangaroo, we’re all for it. We never really saw much use for them, but now that iPhone carries your books, games, maps, camera, flashlight and iPod for you, take our advice and leave the fanny pack home.

Pic a winner

Never again will we have to squeeze a wallet-size photo into a flimsy, see-through sleeve and jam it into our back pocket just so we can show our co-workers how cute our kids are. Now we can show them a whole slideshow.




Starry, starry night

We haven’t stepped foot in a planetarium since our fifth-grade field trip, and now that iPhone’s become such an astronomical success, we won’t be going back. With a plethora of awesome apps to chart the sky, we only have one question: Is there an app to help us get over the lingering pain of being rejected when we tried to hold hands with the cute girl sitting next to us?




Pinball wizard

Why pay $2 in quarters for a 3-minute game of air hockey at an arcade when 99 pennies will get you unlimited access--and without the annoying eight-year-old begging to play winner?





Kindling for the fire

No one likes studying, but we might have enjoyed it a little more if we didn’t have to carry around dozens of Cliffs Notes and those God-awful giant SAT prep books. No, scratch that. We still would have hated it.





Say what?

With so many uses, there’s one thing iPhone takes away that an app can’t easily replace: excuses. "I left my backpack at school," "The dog ate my homework." "I didn’t get the message," "The power went out," "The post office must’ve lost it"--and our all-time favorite, "The check’s in the mail"--just don’t have the credence they once had.