Best iPhone Apps: CNET UK's Home Screen Awards

With more than 85,000 apps to choose from on the iPhone's App Store, it's increasingly tricky to sort the wheat from the chaff. Apple is serving up recommendations with its Genius feature, while user ratings and social-media buzz are also helping the best apps bubble to the top.

There are certainly more than 16 worth having, yet you can fit 16 app icons on every individual iPhone screen. So in a daring and in-no-way spurious move, here are the 16 applications that should take up those slots on the discerning iPhone owner's home screen. Lovingly cradling your iPhone for the first time? These are the apps you need.

Best Money-Saver: VoucherCloud

VoucherCloud has a database packed with discounts for everything from fish and chips to Chessington World of Adventures. Best of all, it's location-based, so it serves up vouchers for places that are closest to you. If you're feeling peckish, fire up the app to see what's going on near you -- in the vicinity of Crave towers, we've got 20 per cent off sushi and two-for-one tapas, just to name a few. Obviously this app works best in big cities, where you're more likely to be surrounded by great offers, but it's also great for cutting costs while you're visiting the big smoke.
Download from iTunes: free

Best Life-Saver: St John Ambulance

St John Ambulance says that 150,000 people die each year who could have been saved with basic first aid, including 900 people who choke to death, 2,500 who asphyxiate from a blocked airway and 29,000 who die from heart attacks. Heavens! Chuck some money to this worthy charity and ensure your mates aren't the ones who worry that each wine gum could be their last, with this app.

It focuses on simple directions for major traumas like heart attacks, but it also includes first aid for minor boo-boos such as heat stroke. Reassuring NHS-style diagrams help you arrange the injured party into the recovery positions, while links lead you quickly to more info on the details for CPR, for example. You don't need to have any first-aid training to use the app, but we think it's even better as a reminder if you've taken a first-aid class before.
Download from iTunes: £2.39

Best Novelty App: Cat Piano

Even if you're not a crazy cat lady, there's something irresistible about playing the Cat Piano app. Whether you're messing with your feline friend's head or creating the cacophony of a bag of moggies in your pocket, it would take an emotionless robot not to crack a smile once the tuneful miaows start filling the room. (Be warned: even the most ardent cat-lover may become violent if you keep playing for more than a minute.) The free version is good enough for most of your cat-piano needs, but if you want to splurge, the full version has ten cat 'voices' and only costs 59p.
Download from iTunes: free or 59p

Best Contact App: Bump

Bump swaps contacts or photos between two phones, just by bumping them together. WTF? Apparently, this is how it works. The app on your phone uses the phone's sensors to literally feel the acceleration of the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud. The system compares it to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then the app's servers route the information between the two phones. Both phones have to have the app installed, but this is so much more memorable than a business card swap, and less likely to end up with your contact details in the bin. Once you've bumped someone, you rarely forget them.
Download from iTunes: free

Best Social Media App: Facebook

Sixty-five million people a month currently access Facebook from their mobile phones, according to the social network. Its impressive iPhone application shows why mobile is exploding for the FB. The original app has been upgraded twice, most recently with a new icon-based homescreen and personalisation features to help users keep tabs on their most important friends. The app is an excellent example of focusing on the features most useful for users on the go, while also making it simple to upload photos and videos. The best Facebook app on any platform, and currently the best example of social media on the iPhone.
Download from iTunes: free

Best Game: Flight Control

With more than 20,000 games available, the iPhone is laying waste to DS and PSP for quantity. What about quality, though? While there's no shortage of visually stunning 3D titles emerging, it's a 2D game that's taken the App Store by storm. The unprepossessing subject is air-traffic control: planes appear on-screen, and you guide them in to land by tracing their flight paths with your finger -- making sure they don't crash. Updates throughout the year have added new levels and aircraft, while its online leaderboards have fuelled bragging. There's even a Google Maps mash-up showing the top players around the world.
Download from iTunes: 59p

Best Celebrity App: Jamie's 20 Minute Meals

Jamie Oliver as an iPhone star? You might not like the man, but you can't find fault with his application. It's a collection of 50 recipes, complete with step-by-step instructions, photos and even 75 minutes of video of the man himself. No expense has been spared, either: the photos make everything look ravishing, the instructions are idiot-proof, and there's even a shopping list feature to help when sourcing the ingredients. Everything is part of the app too -- it's a whopping 404MB in size -- so you're never left stranded in mid-masala if you lose your connection. Proper -- sorry about this -- pukka.
Download from iTunes: £4.99

Best Music App: Spotify

Spotify doesn't need more gushing from us -- the streaming-music service has been feted by journalists, celebrities and music-biz bosses alike over the last year. Its iPhone app still deserves a hearty cheer though, for getting around the key Achilles Heel of streaming-music apps: what happens when you get on the Tube? With Spotify, what happens is you switch to the 3,333 songs you've cached on the iPhone itself, in playlists. The free-to-download app requires a £9.99 monthly subscription to actually work, but it's a powerful reason to upgrade. Now, if only it could run in the background like the Android version...
Download from iTunes: free, plus £9.99 per month

Best Office App: Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite

Would you believe it: Microsoft hasn't released its Office suite for iPhone. That's left the way clear for rivals, with Quickoffice Mobile Suite being the best of the bunch so far. Its basic features include Quickword and Quicksheet for editing Word and Excel docs respectively. Copy and paste, text formatting, formulas and all the other features you'd expect are there. But it's the features beyond that which make it a must-have for iPhone-toting workers. Files can be transferred over Wi-Fi, and it can be used to remotely access your MobileMe iDisk. But even for basic document editing, it's an excellent choice.
Download from iTunes: £5.99

Best News App: Newsstand

As a headline-surfing tool, the iPhone is a joy -- from iPhone-optimised Web sites such as BBC News and The Guardian through to dedicated apps for a host of newspapers and broadcasters. For those with a slightly more technical bent, however, Newsstand is the best RSS reader available on any smart phone. Partly because of its smooth synchronisation with Google Reader online, and partly because it's slick and smart. Categories, an integrated mini-browser, and the ability to share stories via email or Twitter all work like a dream, while there's also the option to browse via a virtual newspaper rack. That feature's a novelty, but the app is most certainly not.
Download from iTunes: £2.99

Best Finance App: iXpenseIt

This app isn't one of the sexier uses for iPhone, but it's mightily useful for anyone looking to track expenses or plan a monthly budget. The interface is clean and quick to use, with good visual representations of your spending by category. It feels secure too -- a concern for many corporate users -- with password protection and the ability to backup and restore data at will. And if you want a gimmick -- but a genuinely useful one -- you can take snaps of individual receipts to be stored in your records too. Just what the company accountant ordered.
Download from iTunes: £2.99

Best Travel App: Qype Radar

Yes, you can use your iPhone to find train times, but what to do once you get where you're going? For a British audience, this is where Qype Radar comes in. It offers user reviews of restaurants, bars, shops, hotels and hundreds of other categories of place, with a five-star ratings system, and extra information including addresses and phone numbers. It ties in Google Maps to offer directions, and also lets you upload your own reviews from your iPhone, including photos. Plenty of blather is talked about user-generated content, but Qype Radar is one of the apps making UGC genuinely useful in your daily life.
Download from iTunes: free

Best Location App: foursquare

The same people who were buzzing about Twitter in its early days are buzzing about foursquare now. Cynics may mutter that this isn't a recommendation, but it's certainly a sign foursquare should be more than a novelty. The gist is simple: 'check in' when visiting places in a supported city (only London so far in the UK), and earn Xbox-style achievement badges for specific milestones. It's part game, competing against your friends for points, but also part nightlife guide, letting you see who's been where most recently. It relies on having a few mates using it, but if you do, it's an intriguing mash-up of social networking, location and game.
Download from iTunes: free

Best Utility: RedLaser

Are barcodes exciting? Not really. But RedLaser makes a good fist of making them much more interesting. It lets you scan barcodes using your iPhone camera, identifying products and then hunting down the best price online via Google Products and Amazon. The key use: you're in a shop and want to check if a product is available cheaper online. It's fully localised for the UK in terms of currency and Web sites, too. The serious use might be saving cash and sending high-street firms bust, but the silly use involves scanning every barcode in sight, just to see if you can stump it.
Download from iTunes: £1.19

Best Kids' App: Bebot Robot Synth

Bebot isn't designed specifically for kids: it's not one of the many colour-spotting, shape-sorting toddler apps on the iPhone. Even so, it's the single app that made this writer's child constantly try to steal dad's iPhone throughout 2009. It's a musical synthesiser that's capable of some powerful effects, if you get into the filtering, looping and distortion settings. What's of more relevance to toddlers, however, is the fact that when they touch the screen, a cartoon robot moves his mouth to make the noises. Simple, but sublime. If proper techno DJs had this, they might smile more.
Download from iTunes: £1.19

Most Futuristic App: Layar Reality Browser

We'll admit it: the main reason right now for having an augmented-reality browser on your iPhone is so you can tell people you have an augmented-reality browser on your iPhone. It sounds a bit Tron, and is a cheaper alternative to an actual lightbike. But AR apps such as Layar are also hugely intriguing, layering Web data over your handset's live camera feed, letting you spin round in Piccadilly Circus, for example, and see which places nearby have Wikipedia entries. Developers can create their own layers for anything they like -- gigs, house prices, sex offenders... It's a glimpse at the future. Possibly.
Download from iTunes: free

Update: This story was updated to reflect the latest apps on 27 May 2010.