So, we broke down and got an iPhone 4. It was not for lack of trying to avoid modernity. The sales staff all said they had never seen our 2002 era peanut phone and were certain that it should not have lasted that long on their network. Nice thing about the old phone was the lack of apps. It did what it did the day I bought it and not a single thing more. And much of what it did it did very badly. Texting a fifteen word message could take fifteen minutes due to the tiny multifunction buttons or at least it did the one time I tried. There were games, too, if you liked your games pre-Pong. I never really figured out how to answer it but as no one called me on it that didn't matter.

But this new thing, this smiling screen, it taunts me. Children have already asked me if they can put this or that on it and, whammo, now I know I hate the red angry bird but love the blue one. There are even TV ads for apps, for God's sake - ones giving out promises that one day I will find Mongolian food up a back alley in the Falklands if I just learn to use the phone correctly. Do I need to know that? Maybe I do but unless I have the app I will never know.

You must be ahead of me about all this. What are the most useful beery apps that I should get to know? I know I can read this blog on it - and you might want to, too, just so we ensure that your time here is unbroken from your home computer to the one at work. But that is not so much an app as a little problem of mine and yours. No, I need more. I need to know what are the real stand alone additions that I can find out there to make all this effort and all these bills to come worthwhile. And not the iBeer concept of worth my while, please.