Phone and iPad apps that will change your life. You're welcome.

Your mobile phone is more versatile than a Russian gymnast with a muscle spasm.

It’s a clock, a computer, a web browser, a compass, a GPS, a filing system, a voice recorder, a camera. Oh, and a phone. And a very sexy paperweight if you happen to have dropped it on the tiles.

This is mostly because smartphones use apps (short for applications and I’m not even sure if I need to explain that anymore) to perform awesome tasks. But for every app that changes your way of life, there’s another app that is basically a light sabre that can also make fart noises.

Not cool. There are actually more than 100,000 mobile phone apps out there but only some of them are genuine-100-per-cent-joy-ticklers. There’s a term you’ll want to forget quickly. So here’s the best way, check out our pick of the apps that will change your life:

Spotify launched in Australia today, people. And despite a few slow starts with getting the app to show up, it's well worth your time as a music lover. You can stream music anytime, anywhere - with offline playlists - and search by songs, artists or just genres if you want to discover something new. Subscribe to your friend's playlists and more. This has been a huge hit overseas but hasn't been available in Australia until now. Woohoo!

This American Life. I could not recommend this highly enough. This American Life is one of the most popular radio shows and podcasts on the planet, with good reason. The show shares stories of people each week. About anything and everything. It's top class journalism and story-telling and the app is a bargain at just under $3 which gives you access to their entire archive going back to 1995.

Cinemagram. This app only hit the appstore this month and already it's creating a buzz. Think of it as a cross between Instagram and video. You can take a picture that has an animated part. The cat's frozen but the ball of wool isn't, and so forth. It's stunning.

I spend more time on Twitter than should technically be street-legal. And while Twitter apps tend to be a personal choice, I'm all over Twitter for iPhone. It works. I like it.

ABC iView. This one's an iPad app but it stands out for two reasons. One, it lets you watch amazing ABC content without Flash player dramas and two: it's ABC's freaking iView!

All Recipes Dinner Spinner. It's a recipe app that reaches for the stars and brings you an even better risotto. Get it.

There are approximately two people in the world who haven't heard of Angry Birds and one of them is my mother. However, on the off chance you do not have this iPhone game you should. Plot points be damned, you get to throw angry birds at snooty pigs. It's highly addictive.

Consume. For the budget-o-philes out there, this app taps into your various service accounts (like phones, reward cards and so on) and keeps an intricate track of whether you're approaching data limits, cash limits and so on.

Couch to 5k. No, this app will not physically pick you up and drag you on a run for 5km. You still need to do the actual leg-work, so to speak. But my word it's a fantastic little motivator with cool stats and helpful advice. Everyone I know who uses it, swears by it.

Instagram. I swore an oath that I would never, ever, ever deliberately change a picture I took and 'sepia tone' it to make it look edgy and cool. Then I downloaded Instagram and I have been sucked into a vortex of amazing images. It's not just about photos ... it's about following other people and seeing a visual diary of their day.

Instapaper. I spend MOST of my day reading things online. But not everyone is online for roughly 23.9 hours of the day. So, there's this. Clip and store anything you read online on the app and you can read it anywhere, any time without a net connection. You can categorise it, share it, you name it. Nerd gold.

Period Tracker. Mia's a fan of this one. Safe to say I don't use it personally. Chart your period, keep on top of your cycle. All in one place!

Kindle App. It's simple. If you like eBooks and if you have a Kindle, then this mobile app is the next logical step. It syncs your reading progress across the device and the phone so you will always have your book on you.

Notability. This app is kind of like the apex predator of note-taking apps. It's an iPad creation and Nat in the office here (who studies Law at uni) swears by it. You can have everything in the one document. Recordings, drawings, text, hand written notes and pictures, video. EVERYTHING.

pandora

Card Munch. Love. This. So. Hard. Take a picture of a business card and the app automatically strips out all the contact information and stores it under a contact in your phone. This is networking for the 21st Century. Yay, I can use those cards again!

iTunes U. Apple did something very cool. It made entire university courses from the world's top institutions like Harvard available for download at iTunes U (short for University). Seriously, you can go and grab all the reading and course material FOR FREE for hundreds of different courses. Education has never been so easy.

Shop Ethical. If you care about what you eat and where it came from, Shop Ethical is the app for you. You can look up the parent companies of more than 2800 products and assess them on a range of factors like environmental sustainability, animal cruelty and so forth.

Springpad. This is note-taking on steroids but if you're anything like me, you will use every feature of this app (which works on your regular iPhone, unlike Notability which is for iPad).

Sprout. If you're pregnant and you want an easy way to keep up to day with the average development of the bub inside, then this app is the most comprehensive (I'm told). I haven't had cause to use it yet myself.

Thousand City App. If you're a woman or man about town, get this. It's basically a quality-controlled bar, cafe, gallery, shop and event guide for cool folk in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

TripView. OK. Here's the thing. TripView is a New South Wales-based public transport app that keeps track of bus, train and ferry times. I bought it before I even moved to Sydney on a trip and it seriously revolutionised the way I thought about public transport travel. I use it literally every day and despair when back in Queensland without it.

Tune-in. Live-stream more than 40,000 radio stations and frequencies from around the world. Record them. Save your favourites. I use this every morning. The sound is crisp, kind of like the air at 6am.

White Noise. So, this is a thing. If you need to listen to some noise other than what you have around you, the White Noise app is here to help. Choose from hundreds of different 'sounds' from rain on a car roof to rainforest noises to the impossible-to-imagine-anyone-using train on the tracks. How's the serenity?

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21 of our favourite phone apps. Tell us yours.

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