This Week at 148Apps: January 22-29
This week, January 22 to 29, 148Apps tallied up over 500,000 votes, for 609 final nominees, to determine the winners of the 2010 Best App Ever Awards. It’s a once a year celebration that reveals what you think are the best apps out there on the App Store. 2010 saw a record number of votes, and 148Apps was proud to announce the winners last Thursday on stage, live, at the MacWorld Expo. You can read the selected highlights below, or see the full results here.
Angry Birds took the top of the charts this year, winning the Best App Ever Category, followed by Pocket Legends (3D MMO) in second and Pocket Frogs in third. For the most innovative apps, you voted Word Lens as number one for iPhone and Flipboard for iPad. Moving onto games, and Angry Birds once again took the number one spot, this time for the Most Innovative Game for the iPhone. Its iPad counterpart was Osmos. Real Racing leads the way for Best Game Graphics on iPhone, with Zen Bound and its abstract thinking coming in top of the iPad charts. If strategy’s more your thing, Plants vs Zombies took the top space in Best Strategy Game for iPhone, along with Sentinel 3 for iPad.
AB Classic
FREE!
Pocket Legends MMORPG
FREE!
Pocket Frogs: Tiny Pond Keeper
FREE!
In other news, Electronic Arts’ Dead Space for iPhone received the Editor’s Choice award for its stunning gameplay and graphics. “To say that Dead Space is one of the best games that we have seen in 2011 doesn’t do it justice" writes Blake Grundman, who awarded the application 4.5 stars earlier this week. "It isn’t merely a game, it is an experience that all iOS gamers should partake in."
Dead Space™
$4.99
We also had a sit down with Ideaworks' Vice President of Business Development, Phil Waymouth, discussing the work in porting over Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and what the future holds for iOS gaming. "For something like iOS you’re not actually writing a game for a console but you’re also not writing for a phone (since the iPod Touch isn’t one)" says Phil, noting that "we wanted to keep the gameplay as similar as possible and I think we’ve succeeded in doing that."
Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
$2.99
Bonnie Eisenman discovered a hidden gem in the App Store, under the name Instant Queue. "Sometimes I like the current song, but not the one I know is coming next; I want to finish this song while being able to pick the next one" and, "with Instant Queue, you can select one or more songs to be played next." The application runs in the background, meaning you can work away on other apps without having to worry about changing songs over. The application features something that Apple's iPod app has been lacking since its inception on June 11, 2007, with the release of the original iPhone.
Instant Queue
FREE!
Finally, you can keep track with some of the best free games through Chris Nitz' FrEEday column, and episode 69 of The Portable Podcast is now available to download, featuring an interview with the developer of the popular puzzle game, Trainyard. The app won third place in the Best Puzzle Game category for iPhone.
And that's us for this week! Be sure to check back on Monday for a massive promotional code giveaway in celebration of the 2010 Best App Ever Awards. You won't want to miss it.