BY SEBASTIAN HUMBERT // MARCH 23, 2012 //

There are thousands upon thousands of iPhone, Android and Blackberry applications to download. Yet, there exist the better ones, the top-tier apps. Even with the thousands of apps available, almost everyone with a smart phone seems to have at least one of the more popular ones—and if you don’t, you’re missing out.

The poster child for popular apps is, without a doubt, Angry Birds. Everyone has at least played the game, where you fling birds at carefully stacked objects with the intent of destruction. Now the game cost $1, so people who limit themselves to free apps can’t join in on the fun. However, there are new kids on the app market block.

Besides Angry Birds, the most popular game app for college kids this semester has been Temple Run. In the game, you play a man running through ruined temples collecting tokens and dodging obstacles, like narrow running space, flaming limbo installations trees hollowed out at the base for the easy passage of very short people. If you mess up, large black monsters—or monkeys, I’m not totally sure—chase you.

Zynga's Words With Friends dominated smartphone gaming world during the fall semester // PHOTO COURTESY ZYNGA

If you are more intellectual, land miss virtual social interaction, then Words With Friends, Scramble with Friends or Hanging with friends might be your deal. Words was another high ranking app this semester. Kind of like scrabble, you get letters and have to make words on a board and there are bonus tiles. Scrabble is timed, and that means you have to dedicate more time to the game. So, if you’re like me, you don’t have that kind of extra time.

I still go back to Words every now and then, (and the people in the middle of games with me there won’t like this post,) but since Draw Something has taken off in popularity, that “every now and then” is slowly morphing into something even less frequent. In Draw Something, your opponent draws an object and you guess what it is. You given three options of objects to draw, and letters to guess what that object is. It can get very hilarious, and is harder than it sounds.

But apps aren’t all fun and games. (Well, almost all are fun, but not all are games.) Postgram—not to be confused with the popular Instagram, which almost everyone has and is now a staple in the app world—is an app where you can take a picture, edit it, and then send it as a real, physical postcard to any U.S. address for $1. That’s right, you could send a picture, as a postcard, of you and your sibling right to the mailbox of your grandmother for just a buck and in only two screens. We know you wouldn’t use it for anything less scrupulous, so I won’t even go there.