The Top Five Most Useless iPhone Applications

Since your new iPhone 3G has limited storage space you want to be thoughtful about what you fill your hard drive up with. After piling up MP3s, video, and photo files into the iPod section, you may not have room for many applications as well. Here are some applications that you should avoid at all costs.

It may seem like allowing your iPhone to do any practical function is a good idea, even turning it into a flashlight. This is what is promised by the SOS Torch application, which makes the touch screen bright white in an effort to give off enough light to see in the dark. It doesn’t. Its real function is to drain your battery without actually giving a beam of light bright enough to see anything with.

Even though some programs are free they are really not worth the clutter or storage space. iWood is a piece of wood that you are supposed to touch every time you say “Knock on Wood” superstitiously. You may think that it is more complicated than this, but it is simply just an image of a large wooden board. Enough said.

Hee Button is one of the most bizarre and confusing free applications available from the App Store. It is a bubble that you push, adding a number to the total in a digital read out every time you do. It allows you to go up to a total of twenty. The description on the App Store is that it is from a “famous Japanese television show” and that you are supposed to push the bubble every time you hear intriguing trivia. The informational page of the program is in Japanese and at the bottom sends you to a link in the App Store for an application that turns your phone keypad into a rotary telephone interface. It does not seem to serve a purpose and I have more fun washing my hands repeatedly.

Many programs take a simple concept and try to specialize it to a specific use. This is the basis for BeerCounter, a program that keep track how many beers you have drank. Every time you drink a beer you get out your phone, open BeerCounter, and add one more. There is a large digital display of the number of beers you have drunk for easy reference. Why this program would ever have to exist is completely beyond me.

Some programs are not only an empty concept but also ridiculously expensive. Super Duper Cowbell is an image of a cowbell that when you touch makes, gasp, the sound of a cowbell. It is not even that this application is completely useless, it’s that its price tag is $24.99.