The 10 best free iPhone apps to get you through university (2009)

If you’re fairly young and fairly intelligent, you’re quite possibly contemplating three years of lectures, tutorials, squalid living conditions, and intense exam pressure. That’s right: you’re a student, and your preposterously long summer break is over.

University can be daunting if you’re entering your first year. You’ve got a lot of new faces to learn, a lot of information to absorb, and all without the tidy structure of high school. You’re finally responsible for your own life, which means paying the rent on time, shopping, cooking for yourself, and making sure the toilet is safe.

This will be a slow transition. For the next few years you’re going to experience periods of boom and bust as you burn through loan instalments at the union, spells of ill-health as you adjust to a diet of biscuits and vodka, and a succession of truly unsafe toilets.

When it’s all over, you’ll have acquired a number of important skills - evasion, misdirection, and plagiarism chief amongst them. You’ll have lived with poverty and occasionally stress, but you’ll have done so in a place with thousands of people just like you in an environment where heavy drinking and the avoidance of work aren’t just permitted, but actually underwritten by that hapless portion of society not engaged in full-time study.

In case you’ve ever wondered: Yes, university is the best part of your life. By miles.

But if you’re just starting out it can be daunting, which is why we’ve compiled this list of the ten best free iPhone apps to take to university with you.

It’s day one. You’re standing amid a heap of unpacked boxes in a bare room in your halls of residence, wondering how you go about arranging for your bed to be made. Then it hits you: you’re on your own. What now?

Easy: pizza. There’s nothing quite as good for establishing your presence in a place as having something delivered to it, and once you've eaten a pizza you paid for yourself with the money your dad pressed into your hand before driving off, you’ll immediately start to feel like a grown up.

It’s not all about pizza, though. Over the years you’ll find you often need to consult the digital version of the Big Yellow Book. Is your car broken? Are you hungry? Do you need a cleaner to come round and make your toilet safe? Yell.com is your friend.

The App works very well, using just two search fields - Search for and Where - to bring you into contact with the world of services.

University isn't like school, you know. Instead of having to be in lessons all day, you only have to show your face at your department once or twice a week for tutorials. You don’t have to go to lectures at all.

This new freedom brings with it great responsibility, however. Specifically, the responsibility to manage your own time.

While many students are able to divide their time into two simple categories - mandatory presence (2 per cent overall) and hedonistic excess (98 per cent overall) - some like to take advantage of their access to the world’s finest minds by actually learning something. For that vanishingly small demographic, easy time table is a useful and nicely presented App.

Working pretty much like the Calendar included with your iPhone but laid out in nice pastel colours and displaying a whole week on one big scrollable screen, easy time table is a fairly nice timetable app that will be moderately useful for recording what you have to do every week, but useless for recording long term assignations or notifying you when you should be somewhere.

Basically, it’s like a paper timetable, but behind a screen.

Never before and never again will you have to meet so many people at once. The first weeks of university are like Big Brother on a grand scale, with thousands of freshers all trying to make friends, get in with the popular cliques, and work out which of their wide-eyed contemporaries they’re going to marry.

With so many bodies coming together simultaneously, a great deal of lubrication is required. This is why students can often be found weaving on the pavement and vomiting in corners. It’s drink or sink.

This is yet another area of student life in which your iPhone can help you get a head start. Why jostle at the bar with the gits in the union when you can wow your housemates and friends with a cocktail or two? Or 5800.

A word of warning, though. The App may be free, but the booze, fruit, and assorted equipment will cost you £500,000.

Naturally, many of the people competing for your fellow freshers’ attention and admiration will be far, far more interesting than you. They’ll have worked abroad, grown up in exotic places, or spent their gap year travelling around South East Asia living in beach huts and drinking snake blood.

The only option realistically open to you if you intend to make an impression is to lie, and this is where the excellent Google Earth can help you.

All you need to do is get your story straight. If you’re going to tell everybody you spent a year hiking in Peru, you’ll have to boot up Google Earth, type 'Peru' into the search field, and then spend a few hours fingering your way around the country memorising place names, learning the topography, and browsing the information tabs.

Lying about where you've been for the last year is far from ideal, of course, but it’s better than admitting that you spent it stacking shelves in Morrisons Basingstoke while you retook A-level History.

Social lubrication isn’t the only thing you’ll need during this trying time. With so many new faces and personal details to memorise, it’s also a good idea to use some kind of social networking software that allows you to electronically befriend, communicate with, and closely monitor the lives of your peers.

Facebook has long been the students’ networking site of choice, created as it was by students as a means of interacting with other students. When I first joined up, in fact, you had to be a student to join. They were happy days.

The iPhone Facebook app is a stripped down version of the main site that’s actually preferable to it in some ways. Gone is the clutter, and in its place is a nice clean news feed from which you can enter a menu screen where icons take you to your profile, your friends, your inbox, and so on.

You can always use Facebook on a computer, of course, but aside from a clear interface the iPhone version has a distinct advantage over its immobile counterpart: you can surf during lectures.

Sometimes, lectures are an unavoidable occupational hazard in your academic career. Nearly all can be avoided, but for those occasions when you can’t get out of it you need something to occupy the time.

Bluetooth Chat was designed for such predicaments. All you need is an iPhone or iPod touch and one or more companions similarly equipped. The app, as the title suggests, allows you to connect with friends and chat with them via a simple messenger interface.

Tarquin: I’m so ruddy bored.
Toby: I bloody detest philology.
Tarquin: It’s philosophy you absolute gypsy.
Toby: Then why is she talking about bloody esperantu?
Tarquin: …
Tarquin: Ruddy hell. I should’ve installed that timetable App that ruddy hero Rob Hearn recommended on Pocket Gamer.
Toby: I rather think you should. Cocktails later?

One of the most galling experiences of student life is having to buy shelves full of unusually expensive books that you don’t even want, and for every English student that means buying the complete works of Shakespeare.

Readdle's Shakespeare app really is brilliant. Not only does it contain every play and poem, but it has options to change the size and colour of the fonts and to search for keywords in the text.

The best thing about Shakespeare is that you don’t have to be an English Literature student to quote him endlessly. Do yourself a favour: slip a few gems from The Bard into your international relations, anthropology, history, philosophy, or psychology essays and reap the rewards or appearing to cleverer than you actually are.

Well, it’s happened. You’ve finally run out of loan money, and the stipend your parents have witheringly agreed to supply isn’t generous enough for takeaway food. You’re going to have to learn how to cook.

Thankfully, your iPhone can help you out. Cooking isn’t so hard - all you need are recipes, and Allrecipes is a great place to look for them. It contains what appears to be hundreds of different recipes, all supplied by users of Allrecipes.com.

You can search for recipes by ingredient, create favourites, view the app’s Feature recipes, and even make use of a device called a ‘Dinner Spinner’, which lets you randomly create meals by spinning three wheels: Dish Type, Ingredients, and Ready In. It’s a bit of a haphazard way to go about finding a recipe, but it’s useful if you’re casting around for ideas.

Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be a recipe for my own university staple of thick packet soup mixed with pasta, but in all other respects it should help keep you nourished.

The honeymoon period was never going to last forever. After just four weeks of work-free excess and hedonism, you finally have to write an essay.

Fortunately for you, this ordeal is far less traumatic since the invention of the internet. Lecturers and tutors will exhort you not to rely on The Web for material, but the choice is stark: either get cold and tired walking back and forth to the library, or sit half-naked in your room typing stuff into Google.

Never mind what your elders and betters tell you: the internet is your friend. And Wikipedia is your best friend.

The app works pretty much as you’d expect. When you boot it up you go straight to a Home page on which is displayed an interesting story of the day, and some historical news under that. A search bar at the top lets you look stuff up. Easy.

You’ve had enough hard work. After a month of leisure you’ve been disruptively forced to write an essay on a subject you know very little about thanks to the university’s lax attendance policy, and the experience has been traumatic. You deserve a night out watching your favourite popular beat combo performing live.

This is where Local Concerts will come in useful. It’s a simple but extremely handy app that lets you know which gigs are happening near you via push notifications if you tell the app who you want to see or, if you prefer, a simple search function.

The Shows tab gives you a list of all the gigs within a set distance from your location, and you can set this distance (0-150 miles) using a slider. Alternatively, you can choose to view by venue. It’s all rather neat.

So there we have it: ten apps that may make your time at university even more cushy than it already is. If you discover any for yourself, let us know about them.