TV Catchup lets you stream UK TV live onto your iPhone. It’s a mobile site that skims the fringes of legality and lets you watch most British TV channels live on your phone including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 at the same time as it broadcasts on TV.

It’s not really an app – it’s a mobile webpage – which means that anyone with an internet-enabled smartphone can watch it – pretty useful. iPhone users can bookmark it on their home screens (click the + button) so it looks like and behaves like an app, though runs through Safari. Handily, that means it avoids the limitations on Apple’s app store too…

As for the streaming of course – best to do it over wifi, streaming TV is a lot of data.

But honestly, on any phone with a decent wifi connection and a good screen, this is a really fun app and allows you to watch TV while lying in bed, being on the bus or….

After a series of court battles, TV Catchup is currently legal, but we note on the TV CatchUp wikipedia page it says that a fresh wave of law suits were launched against it in June 2010, by Channel 4 and Five. Problems come because it’s letting you watch TV as it’s actually happening.

Being a mobile site rather than an app, it’s open to any person with an internet-enabled smartphone.. – pretty useful. And for providing great content for free, it’s great.

How do you like it? Try it, this is going to be fun!

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Pong 72 takes you back in time to 1972, the birth of Pong. Complete with small paddles (try Hard!), MONOCHROME graphics, high-fidelity 8-bit digital sound effects, and amazing gameplay like you’ve never seen before 1972. Think you were good at pong? Compete around the world with an online leaderboard and achievements.Now with iOS4 multitasking and automatic game save, you will never lose your best game to an interruption.

Here’re some main features of this awesome retro game:
1. Realistic computer player with 3 skill levels
2. Volley challenge game
3. 2 player mode (on one device)
4. Online leaderboard
5. Nostalgic sound effects
6. Several screen colors to choose from (like amber and green from the 70s!)

It is fun and enjoyable!

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For those of you less musically gifted than your peers, this iPhone app might let you unleash your talents in a karaoke-style game you could actually win.

To do well in the game, all you need to do is learn the lyrics. Called Lyric Legend it’s all about getting the words right and the tune can go to hell. It works like Guitar Hero in that you have to say the right word at the right time to register a hit and ‘burst’ the bubbles. You don’t even need to sing in front of your friends to compete against them, you can do it with just you and your iPhone then rack up the scores afterwards.

Given the vagaries of voice recognition technology (you know.. the sort of thing where your voicemail saying you’re locked out of the office gets transcribed as “I’m in South Africa”) – it actually sort of works.

The app is free but the catch is that you have to pay for songs – three come free with the app but if you want your favourite you have to buy it, there’s only a choice of 60 too.

Sometimes I find these pay-extra-to-buy-songs apps a bit annoying because if you’ve already spend 79p downloading the song onto your iPod, it seems downright wrong to pay for it again. Though the prices a bit more reasonable here: you can get a two pack of songs by a particular artist for a 59p – available for Rihanna and Robbie Williams for example.

This is fun, well maybe not as fun as singing itself, but you have a chance to win this time! The Lyric Legend App really turns your iPhone into a Karaoke device. You should really try it out. Just not in the office

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Usually if I thought something would set me back 59p, I wouldn’t blink an eyelid. Hell I pay easily triple that for a coffee and that’s just coloured water in a cup.

But we still have a slight reluctance to splurge on apps. Even as a dedicated iPhone user I still hesitate over any app that costs over £1. That is exactly the mental contradiction that the Oatmeal, that chronicler of geek dilemmas, picks up on in his cartoon recently “This is how I feel about buying apps”.

I do sort of know why of course: that’s because at heart I still think stuff on the internet is free, so I don’t compare apps with coffee, I compare them with FREE STUFF ON THE INTERNET. Compared to nothing, 59p is expensive. Still, I’ve got 90 odd so it’s not exactly prohibitive.

The Android store is known for having the most free apps, then Apple’s store is probably next with Blackberry and Window’s mobile apps being pretty pricey – in general. Nokia’s Ovi store prices are moderate but they don’t have many quality free apps.

The Internet has been well developed for the recent decade, and it becomes a most important part of our life. But things become ugly when it comes to shopping for internet resources, we are way more generous when buying real things that we can touch and feel. It’s just we don’t get it that the Internet is real, and so are the apps! We could really become a tightwad when it comes to the Internet, and the Oatmeal comic well explained this, you can check out the full cartoon at their official site.

Well, how do you feel about apps?

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Knight Defense combines action and strategy in a dynamic re-imagining of the tower defense genre. It’s bold, intelligent, challenging & fun. If you have a shiny new iPhone 4, the game takes full advantage of the HD Retina Display.

Well as a game we should first check out the gameplay, right? In this case, the gameplay’s a little complicated but not too quirky, it’s actually great gameplay that you’ll love:

 
- Defeat all waves of enemies without losing your King.
- Your pieces fire at enemies in distinct patterns reminiscent of chess pieces. Each time a piece fires in a particular direction there is a short delay before it can fire again in that direction.
- If an enemy hits one of your pieces it explodes and damages that piece (and sometimes the pieces around it).
- Combos: destroy multiple enemies at once to greatly increase your score.
- Each of your pieces can be upgraded 7 times, increasing health and attack, as well as healing the piece back to full health and allowing it to fire immediately in all available directions.
- Each piece has a unique special ability with a cooldown before it can be used again. Eg. making nearby pieces fire twice as fast or healing nearby pieces.
- Enemies vary in health, speed and attack power.
- Enemies home towards your King, so where you position him determines their movement.
- Pieces can protect each other, reducing the damage they take.
- Tap the skip button make the next wave arrive immediately.

And here’re some special features about this interesting new game:

 
- Move and upgrade your forces in real-time to defeat the waves of enemies determined to destroy your king.
- Each level is a hand-crafted scenario with many different ways to win.
- The levels are divided into easy, medium and hard difficulties. Can you beat the hard levels?
- Unlock achievements and rocket to the top of the global leader boards with OpenFeint!
- Free updates to come – more levels and achievements.
- Resume exactly where you left off when you restart the app.

So generally speaking, the Knight Defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch is just one of the thousands of Tower Defense games, but what makes it different is that it has a really great twist! Try it, you’ll find yourself love it!

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SquareBusta is a fun and addictive game where you must use the pieces that start appearing in piece pile, and build squares and rectangles with them before the piece pile fills up. Beware that it starts slow but, it will speed up, and before you know it you don’t know what to do with all those pieces.

Made a little change, but the core idea is the same, so we can call the SquareBusta a mutated Tetris. Just like the origin one, the game is enjoyable and quite addictive, just with a little more fun. And it is free for the iPhone, so enjoy!

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If you’re into goofy action cartoons and watching animated characters getting bashed up, this is the iPhone game for you.

iHurt takes inspiration from Loony Tunes and cartoon violence to create a game where the more you hurt yourself, the more you win. The gameplay? “Steer your character down Mt. Spinebreaker while hitting as many objects as possible in your quest to rack up the largest hospital bill in the history of the iHurt Championships!”

The main idea of this little game is: You’re falling down a hill, the idea is to bash your character into as many trees, rocks and mulitpliers as possible to maximise the hospital bill at the bottom of the hill.

Here’re some great features about this game:
1. The visuals are great, it’s genuinely quite exciting for an iPhone game with the ground rushing below your feet and trees flying past to either side
2. Accelerometer control by tilt is intuitive and easy to do
3. Integration with top scorers from twitter/facebook is a nice

And here’re some weaknesses:
1. Screen reaction is a bit slow to taps
2. Limited choice of character and scene
3. You look like a bit of a twat moving your iPhone around like it’s a steering wheel.

And it’s also important to note that iHurt is only a virtual simulation, a game, and should not be recreated at home in any way. The actions in the game are just what cartoon characters do for a living, they fall down and go boom. They are professionals in the world of slapstick, and also you wouldn’t like the hospital anyway.

It’s not at the level of top games like PocketGod – where the endless variation makes the play really addictive. But this is well visualised and the gameplay flows smoothly. Cartoon link-ins are fun.

All in all, this is a really nice game to kill time with, but you should always bare in mind that it is MERELY a game!

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Yes, it has something to do with Kaddish, very clever. Actually this is an app that teaches you Jewish mourning prayers.

I don’t know if this is an common need among iPhone users, but an app now helps you to pronounce a Jewish mourning prayer.

If you find it hard to master the intonation while reciting the ancient Aramaic text of the Kaddish, this app will definitely help you.

It’s a free tutorial program that displays the text of the Kaddish in the original Aramaic and English transliteration, and chants the text, highlighting each word as it is pronounced.

I guess it could be embarrassing getting it wrong on sombre occasions, so take the time to download this app and get it right.

And if you want another app to help you cope with the grief itself, try Personal Cemetery, an app that lets you make gravestones for people who have died. Only kidding. Even Engadget think it’s a bit shoddy.

The iKaddish is free on iTunes, so why not give it a shot? It’s free anyway, nothing to lose.

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If there’s one thing people like finding out about, it’s themselves. So iPhone app TrakIt is probably onto a winner with their tracking yourself app. It doesn’t really do very much apart from provide a format for you to track things in: helping you help yourself, you know.

Describing itself as a “unique Goal Setting and Daily Tracking app”, TrakIt says that they ”enable users to track anything on a daily basis: Sales calls, blood sugar, pill taking, their weight, stock prices, billable hours, miles run, whether they worked out or not, or anything else they would like to track. Users can also take notes, set goals, and quickly see how they’re performing in relation to those goals.”

Obviously that is most useful if you have some particular area you want to improve on and certain goals you want to achieve. Like with a lot of stuff it’s down to how much effort you put in. Do you remember to record stuff?

Features of the app that make it useful include the ability to track anything. Other apps tend to focus on particular things like weight loss. There are three ways to input data – you can either input numbers (calls made a day); yes/no data (did you go for a run?); or an average (what was your weight?). Your progress and goals can displayed visually in a graph, and the app also generates an automatic To-Do list which can buzz you with reminders – “eat a carrot!”, stop looking at it, you can’t have cheese burger!

It’s part of a broader trend of tracking ourselves, taken to a sort of extreme by the people in this New York Times article on self-measurement. Something that has increased a lot with smartphones because of the convenience of updating something that is always available.

Available for $3.99, it’s actually quite pricey for an app, but totally worth it for some people.

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Well seriously, if you watch the Discovery Channel, you’ll know I’m not kidding!

I’m not suggesting you suddenly morph into Jennifer Love Hewitt and start styling yourself as the UK ghost whisperer, but you can get a little closer to the paranormal if you wish by downloading cellphone ghost detection software.

Seriously. It’s free from the Discovery Channel if you sign up for their Most Haunted newsletter, and then you can use it to search for strange occurrences and patches of energy in your vicinity.

The software allows the phone to become an Electromagnetic field (EMF) fluctuation detector, which measures variations in data transmission times from your mobile, and can alert you if it detects unusually high fluctuations, which will have you running for your cross and bible. Apparently EMF is what all the top paranormal investigators use, so should you feel like starting up a sleuth business you’ll be well on your way.

Hah…This is really fun! And to be frankly, I would really love to know if there’s really ghost around me, do you?

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