Best Apps of the iPhone 4s Era

If reports are to be believed, the iPhone 5 will be officially announced at an Apple event on September 12th. To celebrate the end of an era, we are shining a spotlight on the best and brightest apps and games that were released during the iPhone 4s' lifespan. It was the best of facetimes. It was the worst of facetimes. Goodbye iPhone 4s. Now go on and ride your Retina display into that great and infinite sunset.

SpotifySpotify is the holy grail of music streaming apps. It gives you constant access to, well, just about every song ever recorded. This service is free on a computer but will cost you ten bucks a month for use on your iPhone. If you opt not to pay the 10 bucks a month, their radio feature is free. That's a whole lot of tuneage for a fairly low price. It even has an offline mode that acts as a cache. Make a playlist before you leave in the morning and the app will download the songs before you leave, thus preserving precious 3G data for important stuff like looking for directions and drunk Facebooking.

SpliceA big showing was made by Apple when they packed in their mobile version of iMovie with the iPhone 4. For our money, however, you'd be better off using the third party app Splice. The editing is faster, smoother and with a host of features and plugins that aren't offered by Apple's program. Nothing available on your phone will match the raw processing power of video editing on a computer, however. Use this primarily for stuff you don't care about. May we suggest cat videos with silly soundtracks?

SiriSiri is the lovable, helpful and trash-talking robot that came packed in with the second iteration of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S. You know the drill. Ask her stuff and she responds. The tech is great for sending texts, setting reminders or just chatting up an artificial intelligence while suffering from extreme boredom. The tech is not yet perfect, however. Siri will think you say "pizza" when you say "piece of" a fair amount of the time. Here's to hoping they enroll her in some language recognition classes for the next iPhone.

DropboxApple is busy perfecting its own cloud service. Until they get it right, Dropbox is your go-to source for white, puffy things that float in the sky. Drop stuff in it. Load stuff from it. It turns your iPhone into a portable hard drive that has access to all of your important stuff (and plenty not so important stuff). The pricing varies depending on how much storage you are looking for, ranging from $10 monthly for 100 GB to $50 monthly for 500 GB. Embrace the cloud and you'll never have to worry about losing your files again, that is, until there is another massive Internet outage.

HeyTellThis is the perfect app for when you are much too anxious too talk on the phone but much too lazy to send out a text message. Just hold down the button and speak into the iPhone's microphone and your voice message will get sent to the recipient. It's like having your very own new-fangled version of your childhood walkie-talkie, but without those restrictive distance limitations. "On the way home, with milk" has never been communicated so effortlessly.

PulseOne of the coolest things about smartphones and tablets is the ability to use RSS readers to organize all of your favorite website content together. Pulse takes this idea one step further and groups all of your RSS feeds together into a handy dandy, single-page format. There are plenty of other apps out there that have their own takes on this concept but, for our money, Pulse is the best and brightest.

FacetimeEveryone's favorite technology featured in Back to the Future 2 became an honest to goodness reality when this video chatting feature debuted alongside the iPhone 4. Sure, the ability to see someone's sweaty visage as you talked to them has existed on PCs for a while but Facetime made it truly ubiquitous. It's too bad we never got hoverboards, though.

InstagramThe Internet was pretty much built on sharing photos, so it comes as no surprise that this smartphone-centric social network took the photographic world by storm. You snap photos. You throw on a bunch of cool filters. You share em. That's pretty much all there is to it. It's that simplicity that has helped it garner more than 80 million users.

SuperBetterJane McGonigal is a game designer and author who found herself enduring a slow recovery after suffering from an extensive concussion. In order to give her the positivity and strength she needed to get better, she crafted this unique gamification app. SuperBetter allows you to craft personal betterment goals in whatever it is you need help with. In this confusing world, we need all the help we can get.

Google ChromeSure the iPhone already comes packed in with Safari but why settle? Chrome takes your surfing game to the next level with a rich featureset, including the ability to sync with your PC and a combined URL address bar and search bar. Google and Apple may not exactly be besties, but at least they know how to work together once in a while.