At Apple's press event last week, Steve Jobs announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded over 100 million apps since Apple's App Store came online. That's a lot of downloads, approximately twice the rate of song downloads from iTunes, according to Apple.

But how many of those apps add value to our iPhones, and how many are simply diversions which illustrate the kinds of neat tricks one can pull with a built-in accelerometer? A large number, like the "Beer" app, which shows a glass of beer on your touch screen which empties if you tilt the phone, are utterly useless except as novelties for idiots. Others, like the interface apps for Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc, make it easier to interact with those sites, which is great if you use those sites. A large number of the apps are games, some of which are more fun than others (Labyrinth LE being one of the best examples), but none of which are really useful in any way other than as time-killers. Still others, like the impressive "Shazam", do really neat things that don't really have any practical value.

The best apps, as far as I'm concerned, are the ones that expand your iPhone's potential as a convergence device, taking advantage of things like the built in GPS or WiFi connection to add new (and perhaps more importantly, useful) things you can do with your phone that it didn't do straight out of the box. Here are two that I think meet that description:

1. Apple Remote: One of the few applications developed by Apple so far for the App Store, Remote allows you to control your iTunes via WiFi, turning your phone into a remote control for your music system. What makes this potentially awesome is iTunes' available AirTunes feature, which lets iTunes broadcast wirelessly to stereo speakers via an AirPort Express. That means you can have your home theater, your music library, and your iPhone, all in separate places, all communicating wirelessly, all working together to deliver a 21st century home music experience.

Here's how things are set up at my house: I have an old Windows box that Travis gave me, and that box lives in the attic. It is running iTunes and loaded up with a healthy library of music on its hard drive. It can stay in the attic because I have a remote way of accessing and controlling it: Whenever I want to listen to music, I simply pull my iPhone out of my pocket, access the iTunes library with Remote, find the artist and track I want to hear, and press Play. The Windows box in the attic then broadcasts a signal to my AirPort Express (available from Apple for about $99), which is connected to my home theater system. With no lag time, the music comes out of the high-quality speaker/subwoofer system sounding delicious and rich (that's why I paid for nice speakers, after all). The combination of AirTunes and Remote means I can hide the computer out of sight and seemingly pull music from thin air, just by calling it up on the iPhone. It's just one step closer to my dream of ultra-convergence, the day when every electronic device in my house will be connected to and communicating via the WiFi network -- the lights, the HVAC, the sprinkler system, the TV, everything. And instead of a million remotes lying around everywhere, there will be one remote in my pocket, the one that makes phone calls, plays music, checks your email, surfs the web, and controls every appliance in the house. I'm not there yet, but Apple Remote has brought me just a little closer.

2. Air Sharing: A new release from Avatron Software is Air Sharing, an app which uses WiFi to turn your iPhone into a wireless thumb drive. Need to take some files home from work with you? Air Sharing lets you mount your iPhone as a hard drive, allowing you to drag and drop files onto it wirelessly. The range of acceptable file formats pretty much runs the spectrum from Word docs, PDF's, image files such as JPEG's, PowerPoint files, etc. to video and audio (MPEG-4, MP3, WAV, whatever you need). Then when you get home, just access the files (again, wirelessly) and copy them onto your home computer. Everything is as simple as dragging and dropping between finder windows in OSX, and though I haven't tried it in Windows yet, it should be pretty straightforward. At the time of this writing (Sept. 15, 08), Avatron is offering Air Sharing for free at the App Store for the first two weeks of its release, after which the price will be $6.99.

So, there are two apps that make you iPhone something it wasn't already -- a remote control and a thumb drive. I hope that as the App Store grows, developers will continue to look for ways to make my iPhone into a tool rather than a novelty.