If you spend your free time twiddling your thumbs or gazing off into space, you’re wasting precious moments that could be devoted to an entertaining, educational, or simply fun smartphone app. There are apps to suit any taste. Whether you want to spend your spare moments learning something new, getting to know your friends, or cultivating a virtual farm, there’s an app out there to meet your needs. Start with some of these favourites.

Social Media Apps

• Facebook – The Facebook App has almost all the same features as the webpage including the ability to poke, message, friend or defriend, and write on walls. In any incarnation, Facebook is great for the pure thrill of seeing what everyone is doing.

• Twitter – The edge that Twitter has over Facebook is that so many celebrities obsessively use this program to update us all on their daily lives. You’ll be hooked on checking back to see what your favorite movie stars are having for dinner (and yes, they’ll be telling you).

• FourSquare – FourSquare allows you to check in to any location that you may be at, from your favorite bars and restaurants to your own home. It’s not only useful to let all your friends and followers know where you’re shopping or hanging out, it’s also tempting to check and see who else is there and what comments others have left about a location.

• Pinterest – This newcomer to the social media scene is just as fun as anything else. With the app, you can scroll through hundreds of enticing pictures with a single sweep and repin your favourite items with a quick tap of the finger. It’s easy to waste away the hours browsing through mouthwatering recipes, brilliant decorating ideas, and more.

Games

• Angry Birds – Whether you’re new to the iPhone, or a long-time user, you’ve no doubt heard of Angry Birds. This game will suck you in with level after level of strategic slingshot birds bent on attacking the invading pigs.

• Doodle Jump – Doodle Jump is surprisingly simple. In this game, you jump from one platform to the next avoiding dangers and collecting bonuses along the way. The mind-numbing simplicity makes it easy to play for hours.

• Words with Friends – If you have enough friends in on the action with you, Words with Friends is an interactive Scrabble game that you’ll return to every time you have a spare second during the day. Your battle of the brains to get the best word in can go on throughout a marathon of multiple games.

• Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima – This app tests your “brain age” with a variety of challenging brain-boosting exercises like memory games, math questions, and perplexing strategy challenges. There’s enough variety to keep players interested and the promise of improving your brain age with regular play is sure to keep you addicted day after day.

• Draw Something – Draw Something is a social game where you play against friends, drawing pictures and guessing what others are drawing. The more you play, the more words and colours you can unlock. This is another friendly marathon that can go on forever.

News Sites

• Reuters News Pro – For the business-minded, this app is something that will be very useful. You can personalize the information in your stock tab, access global financial data, and keep up with late-breaking news stories in all genres. The ability to check in on important financial information is very addictive when you’re invested in the outcome.

• Cracked – Though hardly a hard-hitting news site, you can get lost in a never-ending wormhole of interesting content with the Cracked app. From hilariously photo-shopped images to factual stories of the bizarre and unbelievable, the Cracked app has content that can help you effectively spend endless hours.

• Reeder – Reeder is the app version of Google Reader. You can track any feed that you’ve loaded into Google Reader with this app, making it essentially a personalized news site. Whether you’re interested in following the new designs of knitting bloggers or business trends in the hospitality industry, you’ll have an endless stream of new information to dig through with this useful app.

• CNN – The CNN news app is helpful because it offers information in a format that’s very easy to enjoy whether you have a few moments, or whole hours to waste. You can browse news headlines in a minute and find out what’s going on. The quality photos, videos, and feature articles will take you as in-depth as you want to go on an ever-changing array of stories.

If you’re not the proud owner of a smartphone yet, you should take the time to learn about prepaid cell phones; a lot of these affordable phones will give you access to these awesome apps and you’ll only pay a fraction of the price.Your free time may start slipping through your fingers, but with these great apps, it will feel like time well-spent. Because after all, time enjoyed is not time wasted.

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• Five Apps for Your New iPhone (rackspace.com)