Top Mobile Apps in February – our picks, your picks

We love Apps. We love writing about apps, but we don’t always get a chance to write about them all. So, in the first of a monthly series of ‘top apps’ we asked some of our writers for their favourite mobile apps in February.

The criteria was simple, mobile apps they found and loved in February. It didn’t matter if they were new or old, just what they liked in February. We asked our twitter followers as well, here is what we came up with. Staff Picks

Balloonimals

This was my choice, a childishly brilliant little app. Remember the balloon animals you got at children’s parties? Now you can have them on your iPhone. Choose from different coloured balloons and blow them up by blowing through your microphone. Shake the phone to twist the balloon and with a few shakes you have an animal. Now comes the best bit – tap the animal and it does things, the fish blows bubbles, the dog sits and scratches itself. Brilliant! A great distraction for those of you with kids. I have no excuse but I love it! Here is the link but it is broken today.

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TV Catchup

Matt has been enjoying the TV Catchup facility on the iPhone. By strict definition this isn’t an app, but an interface to allow  you to watch live UK TV on your iPhone. The free service (registration required) allowed Matt and his wife to watch TV whilst they passed the hours away before the birth of their baby boy. With TV in the hospital charged by the hour, this little ‘app’ saved them money and gave them hours of distraction.  www.tvcatchup.com

SimpleNote

Zee, our Editor in Chief loves Simplenote. The iPhone app replaces your little notepad with a simple notepad that can be synced and accessed anywhere. This free app fixes one of the flaws with the iPhone which is the notepad and the inability to easily sync and access the content.

Gowalla

Martin loves Gowalla for the Android. If  you aren’t familiar with Gowalla, it is another Geocaching service a bit like foursquare. The new Android app beats the Gowalla iPhone app for cleanliness and ease of use. It has revived Martin’s use of Gowalla. For once, it is nice to see an Android version work better than the iPhone. You can download it here.

Geocaching

Tim plumps for Geocaching, one of the App Stores hidden secrets. Geocaching is an old technique that was first played with on the original GPS devices, basically a location based treasure hunt. The Geocaching app works to locate you on the ‘phone and then queries the database for locations, information or anything else that is of interest in your location. If you like this is a more ‘raw’ version of what foursquare and gowalla are trying to achieve.

So, a handful of suggestions this month. It was a late idea from me to do the post so we will have lots more recommendations for March. We also opened the question to our Twitter followers who were very generous with their suggestions. Here is a selection of the suggestions.

Gravity, the fully featured Twitter App for Nokia is tipped by @Owrange.

Streamtome for the iPhone streams music stored on your mac to your phone, @robertnewham likes this.

Seesmic for the Blackberry is going down well with @dregar.

Flourish, the music composition app on the iPhone is the suggestion from @jburkunk .

Google Googles for the Android is working for @patrozoo .

OK, so a few new ones to play with. Thank you to all of you who responded. Next month, we’ll give you more warning and ask for more reasons why. In the meantime, we would love your feedback. Was this a useful post? Would you like to see it again? How can we improve it? So many questions!

If you have any apps to share that you have enjoyed this month, please do let us know in the comments.