Possibly the most striking aspect of Currency is its interface. Whereas most such utilities would initially present a 1:n 'exchange rate' and then only offer an actual money calculator as an afterthought, here the calculator is the main attraction. Need to know how much 8,000 Japanese Yen is in British Pounds? Tap on the Yen line, enter "8000" then on 'Done'. You'll now see the equivalent in pounds, as well as those in your other favourite currencies. And if you want the old fashioned 1:n system, just tap a line and enter just the number "1" to see the information you want.

Once you get your head around working with real sums rather than scaling up from 1:n rates, Currency is a dream to use. Impressively, every currency you've ever heard of is supported (as are quite a lot that you'll never have seen) and it's a doddle to add specific currencies to your favourites list, for display on the opening screen. The Apple interface guidelines are followed, more or less to the letter, and I especially liked the display of each country/currency's flag, for an extra visual clue.

By default, Currency goes online when you start it up, to grab the latest rates, but it's also clever enough to use the last known rates, should you be out of data/signal coverage. This is now a thoroughly polished little application that deserves to be on the Apple iPhone or iPod Touch of everyone who ever travels abroad.

Making the most of the iPhone's multi-touch screen, you direct your ship's movement by dragging and rotating with your left thumb and you control the direction of your own energy weapons with the right thumb. As you might imagine, trying to coordinate both thumbs in doing different things takes a bit of practice, but persevere and you'll soon be advancing through the 18 levels and scoring bonus points. Incidentally, there's a level download system as well, so that the developers can extend gameplay with extra levels in the future.

So all well and good then, but in addition to the thumb coordination thing, you've got to remember that the movement control is affecting acceleration, not absolute position, and thus you've got to take into account momentum and semi-realistic 2D mechanics. Which makes things decidedly tricky - and it's made harder by level design that's downright fiendish in places - you'll have to fly perfect levels in order to progress and not die a horrible flaming death.

One extra practical problem, that also affects Wolfenstein 3D, which shares a similar control system, is that because both your thumbs are on the glass capacitive touchscreen more or less all the time, they quickly get sweaty and sticky and this affects the precision of your movements. Dropship isn't painful to play, but you'll want to take a break between levels to let your thumbs dry out!

Not for casual gamers then, but Dropship will delight those who have got the time and patience to really put in some flying practice.

The core idea behind the real landing and behind 'Apollo XI Lunar Lander' is that you start off hurtling through the sky and then have got a limited amount of fuel to arrest the horizontal movement and arrange a controlled descent onto the surface. Land with either horizontal or vertical velocity over 10 feet per second and you crash. The controls are simplified here from those in the real spacecraft, but the principles and, more importantly, the feel of the mission are the same.  Touchscreen controls allow you to adjust pitch and thrust, while readouts of your altitude and horizontal and vertical velocities give you the vital data you need.

Although not strictly needed for the game itself, where would an iPhone game be without pretty graphics? And so we have a rather effective 3D simulator-like view of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) flying through the moon's scarce atmosphere. Moreover, tilt your iPod Touch or iPhone and the view tilts too - i.e. you control the camera, right up to viewing the LEM from underneath and gazing up at the stars! Accompanying the descent are a variety of appropriate sound effects - thruster noises, engines, occasional snippets of radio chat from the real landing, and these work well to suspend your disbelief that you're not flying the real thing.

Assuming you land successfully (and it will take a couple of tries) you're rewarded with the classic "The Eagle has landed" and an entry on the high score table. Getting down in one piece isn't that hard and in this sense there's limited playability here, but you can try and beat the time recorded by the real astronauts - this is much harder. But then they did have the computing resources of Mission Control behind them!

This limited replay value and a few minor sound glitches mean that Apollo XI isn't a must-have - but for anyone interested in the space programme or in stats-based sims, this little game is both nostalgic and gripping.

The exercises listed are comprehensive and are neatly tagged according to the body regions and muscle groups that they benefit. Drilling down into an exercise brings up photos of how it works, with tabbed pages for description/instructions, for a log (e.g. how many repetitions, what weights, etc), with all entries date stamped automatically and, after a few days of data, also plotted on a chart. Oddly, after bringing up the log screen, there's no way back to the exercise screen - you have to return to the main index page and then drill in again, which seems a bit inefficient.

Still, there are plenty of lovely touches, such as the '60 seconds' and '3 minute' timers on the log page, possibly alleviating the need to bring a stop watch with you into the gym. If you need a reminder of which exercises you'd planned to do in a session, the 'My workouts' section lets you select any from the iFitness database and they're automatically ticked off after you enter data for the appropriate exercise. You can have multiple workouts, named accordingly.

'Routines' suggests sets of exercises according to particular themes, I especially liked the 'Business Travel Workout', designed to be done by the iPhone user on the move and with little or no access to gym equipment, but 'Beginner' and 'Body Toning for Women' were also noteworthy. At any point, you can view your exercise logs for the current day, week, fortnight or month, even exporting the details via email. And kudos to the developers here for including email functionality within the iFitness code - there's no ugly reliance on closing down and using iPhone Mail instead.

Extras include a weight monitor, again logging against date and providing charting and a Body Mass Indicator monitor (ditto).

A few minor glitches in the interface aside, I was tempted to dock iFitness a star because, although, after an interruption (e.g. a phone call), it remembers completed exercises and also your intended routine, it doesn't return you to the same exercise/log screen, which can be annoying when you're trying to get back to where you were, possibly with sweaty fingers. However, the wealth of information and functionality won me over at every point and it seemed churlish to withold a five star rating!

In a word, yes, provided you tend to listen on your device's tinny little speakers. In other words, for background music and companionship - we're not talking CD quality here, not even stereo. How much of this is due to technical issues and bandwidth constraints and how much is due to the legal situation regarding the streaming of quality, copyrighted music, is up for debate, but it's probably a bit of both.

Still, you get crackle and hiss-free, monophonic rock music for free, 24 hours a day, which can't be bad. I say 'rock' music because Absolute tend to steer clear of 'pop', 'rap' and so on - this is the sort of music that anyone over about 35 (like me!) will appreciate, I suspect. Each of the three stations is selected with a simple 'Tune' button and cuts in after a couple of seconds, rather abruptly - surprising given that Absolute Radio's audio fades out smoothly when you switch away from the application, but then maybe this latter behaviour is more down to the OS than the work of the programmers.

So yes, you lose the radio stream when you switch away to another iPhone application. Even with OS 3.0, this remains a huge downside of the iPhone's software - if you want Absolute Radio, then you have to keep this in the foreground - making your iPhone the most expensive AM radio you've ever seen!

With Absolute Radio being a commercial station, you also get occasional radio ads, but again this is fair enough when you're getting the music for free. There were no audio glitches here but the 'album art' often failed to appear - doubtless the system will become slicker in time.

If you're interested in Internet radio, you might also want to check out the iPhone apps: Wunder Radio (commercial, but worth it), Virgin Radio and 95.8 Capital FM.

Any other "uses" for your iPhone? Comment about it!

See an example of these innovative glasses here: http://www.22moo.com.au/products/argo-videoeyewear.html

The first nice touch that you'll notice is the use of different, striking colours for the main dictionary and thesaurus pages. In addition to giving a big clue as to which module you're currently in, the same colours are used for the icons showing matches in the 'Search' page - all very intuitive. Word matches are very good, with even British spellings recognised (despite this being a USA product), even though the entries are essentially redirects to the American version of the word. The information given, in all modes, is nicely implemented into a standard iPhone OS 'look and feel'.

Importantly, and despite this product being largely the creation of an online dictionary site, all the main word and thesaurus information is stored locally, i.e. on your device, so you don't need an Internet connection to look up words or their synonyms. So if you're miles away from Wi-Fi and also don't have a good 3G signal, you'll still be able to use the application.

In a sensible design decision, there are two features which do need to go online: firstly, the audio previews of each word, of necessity requiring significant storage space - these download quite fast over the air and are typically played within a couple of seconds. And secondly, the 'Word of the day', designed to increase your vocabulary - this is presumably set manually on the developer's servers.

The only slight confusion, and the reason why Dictionary.com drops a star in its rating, is that the dictionary's not quite as complete as you might think. Many words are 'resolved' down to their main variant and you're left to complete the related words in your head. For example, 'coagulability' is in the main listing, in that it comes up as a 'quick match' as you type. But when the entry is shown, you're looking at (and hearing, via the preview) 'coagulable' - you'll get the gist of what the initial word means, but it's a shame that so many complex words are rationalised down in this way.

Although there's no 'browser-like' forwards and backwards 'history', you do get a 'Recent' list, which keeps track of everything you've viewed - if anything, this is even more useful. Overall, for a free application, you really can't fault 'Dictionary.com - Dictionary and Thesaurus' in terms of value for money(!) and commercial competitors will have to really stretch out in order to beat it on functions too.

The initial list of eight categories looks a bit thin on the ground, but tapping on 'More categories' opens up another dozen, presented in a separate list, somewhat bizarrely. Even more strangely, there's no way to collapse these extra categories again, to show just the original eight - why the full set wasn't kept as one list is beyond me.

However, get past this glitch and there's something for everyone in the categories on offer. You pick a category (e.g. 'Fashion') and are shown entries presented in order of distance from your current position. Tap on one and you'll see the address, contact details, plus, crucially, the chance to drill down further to read user reviews and see user photos. Qype claim to have a quarter of a million registered users available for writing reviews for their system. Tapping on the address, as you'd expect, brings up the location in a Google Maps rendering, although you have to use the supplied button to close Qype and open the full Google Maps application if you want anything ambitious like directions.

So far so good then, but Qype, as with every other 'point-of-interest' system, is ultimately only as good as its underlying database of places. Qype didn't do badly, in that almost every category brought up suitable matches, from restaurants to petrol stations, that were genuinely not too far away. So at least it's not leaving you high and dry. But it could do a lot better. In most cases, my own local knowledge could supply a better and closer restaurant, hairdresser, coffee shop, and so on.

Trying the same 'searches' in Google Maps (built into every iPhone or iPod Touch) provided more matches and direct routing, albeit without the user reviews and photos. Still, in order to really replace the big 'G' for this sort of thing, a third party system has got to at least match its underlying data - though I can understand that this must be a somewhat daunting task.

Qype lets itself down again by the scarcity of photos - having majored on putting thumbnails besides each place of interest in every listing, it's disappointing to see most of the gaps not filled in.

I'm sure Qype Radar will acquit itself better in big cities (many of the matches for my somewhat rural location turned out to be in the nearest city) and in some cases may even turn out to be a useful search and social tool - but in the light of Google Maps' own search system it's tempting to file this as an interesting also-ran.