Best iPhone Apps

The App Store is chockablock with feed readers, but a truly great one has been a long time coming. Reeder is the one. Version 2.0 introduces blazing fast downloads to match the elegance of the app's interface.

If thumb typing doesn’t feel right for quick notes, try finger doodling. Note Taker lets you scrawl full-screen with your finger, and the app automatically shrinks your writing to fit lots of text onscreen at once.

KaleidoVid turns your iPhone camera into a kaleidoscope, turning the world around you inside-out in shards of elaborate and colorful prisms. Sounds innocent enough, but once you start playing with it, you’ll compulsively seek out colors, textures, and patterns to make it sing.

Send and request money from your iPhone, just as you would on the PayPal website. The cool bit: “Bump” phones with a chum to send money straight to their account.

In this gorgeous game of stylish, minimalist graphics, you preside over what must be the most lethal duck pond ever.

If you’ve got an eye for food and an appetite for photos, Foodspotting offers a fun way to discover what’s on nearby tables.

OK, Mister Fancy Cosmopolitan Jetsetter, would you know how to call the cops in Tangiers? This simple and elegant little app tells you the emergency numbers in whatever country you might find yourself

Meebo lets you juggle chats from several instant-messaging accounts, supporting over 100 services, including biggies like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and Google Chat. BeejiveIM nabs an honorable mention for its collection of power tools for IM diehards.

Balloonimals gives kids a whimsical set of animated balloon animals to play with, buying harried parents some downtime, no clown required.

Great music, fiendish humor, and lasting gameplay make this game a standout in the App Store’s crowded category of tower-defense games.

This personal assistant understands and handles your spoken-word requests for dinner reservations, movie and concert tickets, taxis, weather info, restaurant tips, and more.

Aardvark fields questions on any subject, routing them to real, live people (including you) who have volunteered to offer answers on topics near and dear.

Bookmark offers dead-simple listening, navigation, and bookmarking for audio books. The app works with audio books you’ve synced from iTunes, so it plays nice with books from outfits like Audible and Librivox.

Scrabble collides with Tetris in WordCrasher, a colorful and fast-paced game for spelling speed demons.

The White House’s official app plugs politicos into the raw feed from the White House communications crew, featuring blog posts, press releases, photos, videos, and live video from whitehouse.gov.