CardMunch by LinkedIn makes converting business cards to contacts on your phone a piece of cake. Just grab your business cards and use iPhone’s camera to capture their information. The app also adds people whose card you have scanned as connections on LinkedIn. I love the fact that CardMunch offers LinkedIn profile information, related connections, and other relevant information for each contact.

CardMunch does have an elegant user interface. The app keeps track of your scanned cards which is quite useful. It is quite accurate too, which seals the deal for us. Better sync functionality would be nice though. Still, if you are addicted to LinkedIn, CardMunch is worth playing with.

Rating: 9/10

Path for iPhone has become a smart journal of sorts. You can use it to share what music you listen to, where you have spent time recently, and how you have slept. Path is quite smart as it can recognize where you are spending time and automatically records that. Unlike many other social networks, making your information private on Path is super easy.

Path supports Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare. You can check-in to let your friends know where you are. Users are in full control of their email and notifications settings. The new design not only looks attractive, it offers you more sharing options. So you get to share more types of content in more ways. Path is not just a digital life journal. It a social journal on steroids.

Rating: 9.6/10

Newstream has an attractive interface for a mobile RSS reader. It supports RSS and ATOM formats. It grabs your feeds and makes them look like a modern newspaper. Adding new feeds to it is pretty simple. Users can easily see how many unread stories they have in their incoming box. The app is social media friendly which helps.

Newstream has a lot of potential but is not perfect by any means. For starters, it did crash on us a few times. Adding folder management to this app would be pretty neat. We would love for it to support syncing with third-party and cloud-based services. Newstream has the looks and is a good effort by the developers. It does need more features and better stability though.

Rating: 8.6/10

Tweet Speaker has an elegant interface. It offers your Twitter updates in form a podcast. The sound is decent to listen to. The app reads usernames, tweets, and links. You can adjust the reading speed. Adding new sources to your timeline couldn’t be any easier. Airplay and Tweet Marker are supported as well.

Tweet Speaker is simple to use and reads your tweets in a very natural fashion. If you get the majority of your news from sites such as Twitter, you are going to enjoy playing with this app.

OnSay allows users to make phone calls to their friends without using phone numbers. You can only use this app for your mutual tweeps (people you follow who follow you back). It is especially helpful to call people whom you talk a lot with on Twitter but don’t know their phone numbers. Users always have the option to block annoying users or report them for spamming.

Our experience with OnSay has been a bit of a hit and miss. But the service does make it so easy to sign up and get started. The app has a lot of potential. It could certainly come handy for business scenarios. It could be useful for emergency situations too. This application is available for free but you want to check with your carrier to see whether there are any data charges.

How would you improve OnSay?

Facebook Messenger is integrated with Facebook messages and chats, so you can keep track of all your conversations on your phone. Users can message their friends one by one or engage in group conversations. This application handles both your Facebook contacts and anyone else you may have stored on your phone. Your contacts will receive your messages in text format whereas your Facebook friends get them on their app or in Facebook messages.

Facebook Messenger makes it easier to meet people face to face. It tells you where people are on the map (keep in mind others can see your location too as long as you do not turn it off). All your conversations are saved for future references which is quite helpful.

Facebook Messenger is a handy tool for anyone addicted to Facebook. It is not earth shattering by any means but does make Facebook messaging on mobile phones more convenient.

How would you improve it?

Readlines has a very simple to use interface. In order to take advantage of it, you are going to need a free Google Reader account. The app randomly chooses and displays items that you have not read already. The headlines are displayed in an easy to read fashion, making it possible to just dock your iPhone and keep up with the news.

Readlines has multiple backgrounds and does sync with your Google Reader account on a periodic basis. So you will continue getting the latest news throughout your day.

Readlines may not be super fancy as a Google Reader app, but it should work for those in need of an app that can help them keep up with the news on their docked iPhone.

Rating: 8.7/10

Social Calendar makes it easier to stay in touch with your friends without forgetting their birthday dates or the holidays important to them. It also gives you access to Facebook events and showtimes of theaters in your area. The process does not make more than a single tap.

Social Calendar does send reminders by e-mail or push notifications, giving you the chance to catch as many events as you prefer. Your calendar stays synced up at all times, which helps. The interface is pretty decent looking and does not make life difficult when using this app.

Overall, if you need an application that can keep track of Facebook events, holidays, and birthdays, you can’t go wrong with Social Calendar.

Rating: 8.5/10

Adding links and interesting stories to your Facebook account is one way to stay active. This application gives you a whole other way to engage your friends and followers. It allows you to search through quotes by category, saving you some time in the process. Users can email, tweet, and text quotes that they like. It is very versatile in that regard.

Quotes for Facebook currently has about 3000 quotes in its database. These quotes cover all topics including life, friendship, anger, success, and humor. Users can use this app to keep track of their favorite quotes or do some research on the authors behind these quotes.

Quotes for Facebook has a lot of potential. We’d love to have more quotes to choose from. Being able to add quotes and categorize them more effectively would be nice too. Still, it is a powerful app for Twitter and Facebook junkies.

Tweetboard is pretty simple to use. You can keep track of your timeline and mentions on your iPhone. Like a story? Just retweet it or mark it as your favorite. The interface is perfect for those of you who want to just dock your iPhone and use it as your news tracker at the place of your work.

Tweetboard has a lot of potential. It would be awesome to have a way to track certain hashes and keywords. A direct-message, reply notifier would be very useful too. The concept is very interesting though. Who needs TV news when you have Twitter?