With the release of the iPhone 4S, there’s never been a better time to reevaluate and review the best of the best iPhone applications. Over the years, the number of applications available for the iPhone have increased to well over 300,000. With this many choices, it only stands to reason the average user might feel a tad bit overwhelmed. So without further ado, let’s look at the some the best and most popular applications in each category.

Health – Unless you’ve living in under a rock, you’ve probably heard about RunKeeper, an iPhone app that using GPS technology to track you while running, walking, jogging, or even riding in a vehicle. In addition, data can be entered manually, which allows you to keep track of your fitness stats while on treadmills or at the gym. By using this app, you can avoid the cost of the expensive runner’s watches, plus keep track of your distance, pace, and calorie expenditure. RunKeeper also has its own website, which you can use to upload your data and share your stats with friends.

Extra cool feature: You can take photos on the iPhone while running, and images are automatically geo-tagged to appear on the map where they were taken.

Education – Going by today’s fast-paced program upgrading standards, the Open Culture application is an oldie but a goodie. Never thought you could get an inexpensive education? Good news – with Open Culture, you can. The application itself is free, and this educational media ain’t exactly Hooked on Phonics. You can take real college courses, listen to music and science podcasts, take language lessons, and download audio books. Let’s face it – free knowledge is priceless.

Extra cool feature: Did you read about the part where you can take free college courses? ‘Nuff said.

Entertainment: There’s no question that entertainment apps are among the most popular with users – especially teens and young adults. However, we think the best entertainment applications are the ones that have are a bit more intellectual value than say, making yourself and your friends look fat. And this is why the Amazon Kindle is still among the best applications of its kind. Bridging entertainment with education, the Kindle application allows its users to download free books, free samples of books, highlight text, bookmark pages, and take notes. All this is synchronized within the application, so you never have to lose track of where you were.

Extra cool feature: The Kindle application syncs with an actual Kindle if you have one, so you can pick up where you left off on another device.

Productivity – No surprise here – the Siri application is the Apple’s latest great acquisition – that is, it was snagged up by Apple last year, and after a few tweaks, is the new virtual assistant mastermind of the smartphone industry. It uses voice recognition technology, which is nothing new, but it can use it in ways no one could have foreseen a few years ago. There has been a running joke for years about the inconsistencies and failings of voice recognition software, but this application does a great job of mitigating most of those issues. In fact, it usually knows what you are saying, and even what you mean. When compared to voice recognition software of the past, this is a huge step forward.

Extra cool feature: There are many – but generally speaking, but if you can command your phone to deliver the daily weather forcast for you, or make restaurant reservations, you are just a sliver away from holding true artificial intelligence in the palm of your hand.

Navigation – Believe it or not, there are actually quite a few good GPS applications available for the iPhone, and picking the best is not a decision to be taken lightly. That said, the favorite GPS application of both critics and users seems to TomTom, when you consider and compile both customer and online expert reviews. Mentioned in PC World’s “18 Best iPhone Apps”, the TomTom gives you turn-by-turn directions, updates maps and changes routes, and reports on traffic delays. You can also get your directions read to via a celebrity voice – Homer Simpson is one of the latest co-pilots available.

Extra cool feature: Only application to offer a feature that evaluates routes based on real-life driving experience instead of just posted speed limits. For example, it takes into account heavy daily traffic periods such as rush hour, the number of traffic lights, holiday shopping crowds, etc.

In summary, if you’re new to the iPhone and plan on picking up the newly released 4S, or are a current user who hasn’t road-tested the tried-and-true applications yet, these are among the slickest and most useful applications to check out.

Every time that you have a new technology it requires you to learn how to use it. However, this can sometimes be extremely difficult, especially when there aren’t very many resources to help you learn new techniques. A great example of this is with the new Apple iPhone. When you first purchase an iPhone, than you have probably spent many hours getting familiar with the various technologies that are inside this amazing cell phone, however, there are some tips that aren’t learned by simply playing around with the phone. In order to learn about these tips, than you must first learn them, and one of the best tips concerns the keyboard.

When you have such a unique feature as the touch screen keyboard, than there are several tips that you must know in order to keep your messages flowing. When you follow these tips than you will be able to type quicker and error free, as well as being able to type easier than ever before. The first of these tips concerns actually typing the letters into the iPhone. When you want to enter a letter, you tap on it; however, the letter isn’t placed onto the screen until you lift your finger off of it.

Thus, if you touch the wrong key than you can simply fix this error by sliding your finger to the correct letter. Then when you have found the right letter or number, you can lift your finger and the letter will be placed onto the screen. This tip helps fix the majority of errors, and will save you time.

Many people have found that the auto-correction feature within the keyboard is a great way to keep your writing clear and easy. However, it is very easy to accept a word that you didn’t want to type. If you want to steer clear from this confusion than you need to learn how to accept and reject a suggested word. When you want to accept a word than you will want to tap either return, space or tap a punctuation mark. However, if you want to reject a suggested word, than you will simply want to finish typing the word you want and then you will have to tap the completed word.

A reminder, if you write a full word out two different times, and then tap on them both times, the iPhone will actually add the word to its dictionary. It takes a couple of weeks to store all of your most used words into the dictionary, however, once you have done this typing on your iPhone will be extremely fast.

The last tip has to deal with the capitalization of words. If you want to capitalize the first letter of a word, you simply tap the shift key and then tap the letter you want capitalized, but what happens when you want to capitalize the entire word? This is very easy, and doesn’t require you to tap the shift key before each letter. You will want to go to settings and then tap general after that tap keyboard. From there you will tap “Enable Caps Lock,” and then when you double tap the shift key it will light up blue, and now you will be able to type in all caps.