With the constant trickle of TPAs (third party applications) for the iPhone and their quick and painless installs, you tend to try everything out - because it’s just as quick and painless to uninstall them. (And believe me, there have been a lot that don’t last ten seconds on mine; the ratio of crap to good stuff is heavily one-sided.) Whatever the case, updating Installer has become a daily routine, which I expect is the same for a lot of you guys.

At the moment I have four pages of apps on my iPhone (considering that the Apple-legal stuff takes up only over half a page, that’s a lot of TPAs). The number of pages grow and shrink as the weeks go by, and staying on the iPhone is survival of the fittest; the ones that stay are either really useful or fun, or are just really good conversation pieces. The common thread among most of them is, why didn’t Apple think of these? (The only one I haven’t yet come across, but was fully expecting to appear this year, was something that let me cut and paste text.)

It being year-end, people have a compulsion to make lists, and I’ve succumbed and made a listing of apps I’ve kept on my iPhone over the many weeks. Please take note that these are personal, subjective choices. I’m sure you have others you prefer, or some you feel are moronic. But hey, it’s my list. Why don’t you post some of yours in the comment box? Who knows, there might’ve been some we missed and should know about.

Anyway, here are some that have managed to stay on my screen this year:

weTool - There have been a few other apps that individually do all the small things that weTool does, but none all together, none as well, and none in a more professional looking package. You can delete specific items in the Call and SMS logs, you can forward texts (to multiple recipients!) and contacts, you can even save texts to Notes. You can even makes calls directly from it. One of the best parts is that it has a set of visually stunning page transitions you can select that Apple is only beginning to do (as the page curl transition seen in a screenshot of the 1.1.3 preview.) Nice one.

TuneWiki - This is for the karaoke lover in you. When connected online, it will search an online wiki database for the lyrics of the song currently being played in iPod mode and will show it to you line by line as the song plays, ostensibly so you can sing along. Of course you have to manually forward each line by tapping on the TuneWiki icon on the screen, but hey, it’s free. Who’s complaining?

weDict - It’s an all-in-one info repository from the weTool guys in Shenzhen. Just by adding the available dictionaries, thesaurii (is that a word? Better check it in weDict.), lists of jargon and slang, lists of technical terms, abbreviations, even CIA factbooks, you can have an entire reference of anything and everything at your fingertips. It’s even got a feature to pronounce the words you are researching (although personally I’ve never gotten it to really work; and to be fair it still misses some basic words).

Stumbler - This is a new version of an old standard being used for Macs since, well, since as far back as I can remember Macs had wifi. It’s just a wifi signal finder. It “stumbles” onto signals weak or strong, locked or open, hidden or public. And that’s all it does. Oh, it also gives you a load of info about the signal as well. Useful little sucker.

NES One of the more polished emulators out there, although the polish seems to come from the fact that the source ROMs are the least complicated of the lot and the easiest to work with - GBA and PS2 ROMs are way harder to emulate. This Nintendo Entertainment System emulator brings back happy memories for this old fogey.

MIM - Howard, my editor friend, looked aghast at my iPhone and exclaimed “AT&T?!? You’ve using the US SIM?? You must be paying a fortune!” Joke’s on him. It was “AT&T” because it’s what I put there - I could put “Howard The Duck” if I wanted to. Which is what MIM does - change the provider name to whatever you want. A simple little program created by the famous Erica Sadun, it’s a great gag app. I once put A&TT for the longest time and no one noticed the misspelling. Heh.

iSlots - The One-Armed Bandit comes to the iPhone. A relatively recent app, it looks great and plays the way it should, perfect for a few minutes of mindless fun. The Slot Machine visuals are way exceptional as well, and it keeps me sane: virtual gambling is all I can afford at the moment.

ContraSense - It was a toss-up between Labyrinth and this one for Best Game to Make Pointless Use of the Accelerometer. Tilting the iPhone on its horizontal axes steers and speeds up or slows down a car navigating a multi-lane highway congested with traffic. Great fun, although I don’t play in public - you’d look pretty weird twisting and tilting your iPhone like mad. The latest version adds sound effects.

Books - An eBook reader app to keep the art of reading alive in this age of YouTube, Britney Spears, podcasts and silly driving games. No explanation needed. The toughest thing you need to learn is to find the books you like, and figure out how to upload them. (Which you really needn’t trouble yourself with; check out our Honorable Mention at the end of the list.)

CameraPro for the iPhone - This was just released yesterday, but is so useful and functional and full of that “Where Have You Been All My Life?” vibe that it immediately earns a spot on my Top 10. It’s one of the most egregious omissions on Apple’s part. See previous post for details.

One last. It isn’t really an iPhone app itself, but rather an app for the iPhone, but is so damned convenient and useful that it merits an Honorable Mention on my list: iFuntastic is a do-all utility that runs on the Mac and does things like file management, screencapping, adding ringtones, wallpaper and a gazillion other stuff that normally would involve command-line magic and ftp trickery beyond the ken of an ordinary Mac user. God bless you!

Ok, that’s it for me. What’s on your list?