The Top 10 Most Uncool iPhone Apps

Well, the app store has been on line for a while now, and we’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain silly.  It’s amazing to watch the skills of iPhone coders–and to note the range in quality from really useful all the way down to absolutely goofy. Here’s our list of the 10 goofiest (or most useless) iPhone apps.

10. Polo Ralph Lauren Collection - As if it’s not painful enough shopping for overpriced clothing! The one good thing about this app is that, unlike the pink, too-small golf shirts that are so popular right now, it’s free.  For those without a Ralph Lauren store in the neighborhood, of course.

9. Cooking Mama for iPhone - One of the killer app launch titles for the Nintendo Wii console a few years ago, Cooking Mama Cook-Off was fun simply because of its immensely pleasing absurdity.  The laughably poor English voice recordings in the game almost singularly made it worth playing, at least in our book. Gone from the iPhone version are the Engrish voices as well as most of the fun.  Oh, and the game is easy to beat in just under an hour.  Serious Cooking Mamas need not download this waste of time. PETA’s ridiculous parody of the title is ostensibly more fun–though not by much.

8. MySpace for the iPhone - Like everything coming from MySpace these days, the iPhone app looks like a couple of college freshman scratched this thing together on a dare.  Everything we love about Facebook on the iPhone (most notably instant mobile photo uploading and live chat) is a sad imitation or just plain missing from the MySpace iPhone app… Which reminds us, is anybody even using MySpace any more?

7. Woo! - OK, does anybody REALLY want a button on their touch screen that makes the iPhone scream “woooo!” ?  You can insert a joke about mute people at baseball games if you like, or you can just download the much more enjoyable (and variety-driven) iFart, shown here:

6. Microsoft Tag - OK, this wouldn’t be so bad if there were real-life applications for reading barcodes.  Apparently, this technology would be a bit more appealing in Japan, where we understand there to be a greater integration with barcodes in the social cumulus.  Of course, leave it to Microsoft to develop an app geared at the market where the iPhone has arguably had the least success.  We’d rather have Live Writer for the Mac, if Balmer and the game are going to have play time with XCode, thank you very much.

5. RjDj - Digital Delay is the power behind the cheesy-ness of all hairband guitar solos from the 1980s.  It’s also the main digital effect in RjDj — an iPhone app that attempts to loop sounds recorded from the immediate surroundings of the iPhone and make some form of rhythmic music out of it all.  The result?  Well, it’s about as annoying as those ten-minute long choral swells from the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  As the developer of RjDj explains — it’s like listening to your world on drugs.  Ugh.

4. Bubblewrap - Whenever the subject of the “bubblewrap” padding for packing breakables enters the conversation, somebody invariably chimes in with, “I’m addicted to popping that stuff!”    To cure the addiction, ween yourself off the hard stuff with Bubblewrap for the iPhone.  Your secret is safe with us.

3. iPity - A newcomer to the app store, this quintessentially useless iPhone app speaks phrases uttered by the classic thought leader Mr. T.  Now - if you could get these phrases to play during a phone call, then it *might * be fun.

2. iSteam - Having to wipe the steam off your iPhone screen is not unlike having to wipe off the daily grime and finger grease that seems ever to build up unmercifully, requiring a visit to the wallet or purse for the “special iPhone grease removal rag”.  Why in the world would we want an app that clouds our display even more?  How about an app that actually cleans the damn screen.

1. Fake Text - Oh, the hours and hours of fun we can have receiving fake text messages from whomever we choose. The developer suggests receiving fake texts from the president. Yay. Too bad it displays the iPhone’s default wallpaper under the newly received messages.  Perhaps they should change the name of this app to “Obviously Fake Text”

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Tags: app store, apps, dumb, fake text, iphone, ipity, pointless, software, stupid, useless