Best iPhone Apps

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.

Zosh cuts out the print-and-fax routine, letting you sign, edit, and return documents right on your iPhone.

Pastebot is a stylish, all-purpose scratchpad, scrapbook, and formatting mill for favorite or frequently used text and images. The app’s retro-industrial interface gives you a giant clipboard to collect, edit, and share content among apps (and, for Mac users, with your computer).

Keyboard, shmeeboard, who needs it? Just speak into your iPhone, and Dragon translates your speech to text. It's remarkably good for computerized transcription, but Voxie's paid service by human transcribers earns an honorable mention for its improved accuracy and handling of longer text.

Your chunky Palm Pilot of yesteryear might seem quaint now, but it could still do something your iPhone can’t: Beam info straight over to a neighboring PDA. Swap It gives you a nifty approximation, letting you exchange clipboards — text, photos, URLs, phone numbers, Web clippings — with another iPhone or iPod Touch.

Give your iPhone a 275,000-word vocabulary. Dictionary.com plucks its definitions from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary and gathers 80,000 synonym entries from Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus.

Liberate contacts, webpages, email, photos, and documents from your tiny touchscreen and onto the printed page. With the help of free software installed on your Mac or PC, Print & Share can talk to any printer connected to that computer when you’re on the same WiFi network—or even, conditions permitting, from anywhere on the Internet. The app doubles as a document briefcase, letting you swap and read files from your computer.

Graphic designers and font fans will find lots to love in this technical survey of the typographic universe. The app combines a guide to the history and technique of type with a font-size calculator, ruler, and HTML reference for web designers. A visual glossary illustrates letterform anatomy when you need to brush up on the difference between diacritic and dipthong. WhatTheFont nabs an honorable mention for its just-like-magic identification of fonts from snapped photos.

Dropbox offers quick access to the latest version of important or shared files. The app talks to getdropbox.com, a service for syncing files among multiple computers—perfect for folks who scramble between home, work, and laptop computers or who collaborate with a team.

Despite a quaint dependence on tree pulp and phone lines, faxes somehow persist, but that doesn’t mean you still need a full fax machine. FinarX faxes PDF, Word, Excel, and image files right from your iPhone and even “scans” pages with the camera.

Got a cubicle neighbor yammering on the phone? Jackhammers going strong outside? SoundCurtain quiets the din so that you can focus on work (or catch some shuteye). The Ambiance app nabs an honorable mention in the category.

When voicemail systems have you barking up the wrong (phone) tree, Dial Zero helps you find a human voice, providing the precise steps for reaching a human operator in hundreds of corporate voicemail systems. The Direct Line app nabs an honorable mention for dialing the touchtone sequences for you.

Who do you know in this company or that city? Groups tells you in a hurry, listing contacts by company, city, even birthday. The app makes it easy to organize your address book into groups, either by manual drag and drop, or by “smart groups” which gather contacts based on your criteria.

Face it, we’re all thumbs when it comes to the iPhone, and blazing-fast typing doesn’t come easy—unless you have TextExpander. The app lets you create abbreviations which expand into full text when you type them, a huge timesaver for common phrases or boilerplate paragraphs.

When your memory of meetings, project work, and casual chit-chat starts to blur, Contacts Journal brings things into focus. The app blends a professional diary into your Rolodex, giving you a simple method to track interactions.

iThoughts helps you construct mind maps, brainstorming devices that cross outlines with flow charts to organize stream-of-consciousness ideas. CarbonFin's Outliner nabs an honorable mention for more traditional outlining.

Most mobile phone plans offer free national calls, but woe to your wallet when dialing abroad. Call Global sidesteps the international intrigue by routing calls through its discount network, available everywhere.

ReaddleDocs is the Rolls Royce of document portfolios. Lots of other apps (including Quickoffice and Evernote) let you share, store, and browse files, but this app offers the cleverest mix of methods to spirit files on and off your iPhone.

Who knew tracking deliveries could be so classy? This stylish, efficient app tracks packages from over 40 stores and delivery services, even mapping your package's current-ish location.

Jaadu puts your entire desktop on your iPhone or iPod Touch, working your computer when it's on the same WiFi network—or across the Internet, with a bit of network know-how.

Far more than a notepad, Evernote is a self-organizing file cabinet for all the info you care to keep. It's Google for your brain. Chuck anything into it, and Evernote's search finds it for you.

Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a mouse, keyboard, and remote control for your PC or Mac, a boon for stage-stalking presenters or couch-happy movie watchers.

Time is money, especially if you're a freelance designer or an hour-tallying lawyer. When you need exact counts of billable hours—or just want to track how you spend your time—Jobs watches the clock for you.

Put Skype's popular Internet phone calling service on your iPhone to make free or dirt-cheap calls to anyone in the world when you're connected to a WiFi network.

Edit Microsoft Word and Excel files—and view a slew of other file types—with this capable suite for editing and sharing documents.

Turn your iPhone into an unfailing executive assistant, ready to remind you of calendar items, notes, and todos.

Don't let the small things you've gotta do today make you forget your grand plans for tomorrow. Goal Tender is a little app about the big picture, a tidy complement to the nitty-gritty task manager apps.