Category: Travel; ridecharge.com
Never get caught trying to hail a cab in the rain again! Taxi Magic offers one-click taxi booking in over 25 major cities across the U.S. It will even give you live updates on where your cab is and its estimated time of arrival.
This one is a dictionary app with spelling and definitions for more than 275,000 words and a thesaurus with 80,000 synonyms. No Internet connection is required for the dictionary and thesaurus content, all of which is installed on your iPhone or iPod touch. However, all that content occupies a big chunk of memory. After I installed it on my iPhone, my free memory was reduced by about 240 MB. The app includes audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words, and Word of the Day. Note that you do need to be connected to the Internet to use these last three features.
Released earlier this year, AccuWeather also has a solid range of features. It automatically determines your location and offers an array of weather forecasts and other information. Features include animated radar and satellite info, 5-day local forecasts, hour-by-hour forecasts, weather videos, health weather indices (air quality, a flu index, etc.), graphs that show the probability of severe weather over the next eight hours, and weather alarms.
This one is also on the top 20 list of free apps. The Weather Channel is rich with features, including location-based conditions and forecasts, in-motion radar maps, traffic cams (for selected areas), weather alerts, video forecasts, and the ability to customize the features and store your favorite locations.
This iPhone app makes it easy to access the hugely popular Pandora Internet radio site. Once installed, open the app and create a Pandora account. (If you’ve already created an account on your desktop computer, you can log into it via your iPhone.) Then, simply tell Pandora your favorite song, recording artist, or composer. Pandora scans its database for similar music, based on a wide variety of attributes identified by the Music Genome Project (
Google Earth is the second title on the list of all-time top 20 free apps. Like the desktop version, this app uses satellite and aerial imagery to let you explore the Earth. It also offers information about particular locations, including panoramic pictures and Wikipedia articles, giving you an idea of what those locations look like and offering more info about them.
Skype is the most popular application available for making free computer-to-computer phone calls. It also offers very low-cost calling plans that let you make calls from your computer to landlines and mobile phones. It also has great instant messaging and file-transfer features.
One of the big surprises of the past couple years has been the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. Serious readers love it, but at around $350 it’s a bit pricey. So I was thrilled when in early March Amazon released a free iPhone app that lets you read any of the 240,000 titles you purchase from the Kindle eBook store.
