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20 best iPhone apps to get you started

Here's a selection of some essential and not-so-essential apps that will help you get by in a world increasingly dependent on digital interaction. 

6. Portable

  • By Andrew Averill Contributor

Portable is a portable table app for playing games.

The app when opened on an iPad displays the green felt of a card table. Players choose their game item from an inventory, a set of either 32 or 52 cards, dominos or dice, and the selected item drops onto the card table.
 
The dealer can shuffle the deck or manipulate the dominos or dice any way they want. 

The game gets really cool when passing cards, dominos, or dice between players. 

Each player’s iPhone is connected to the iPad via Bluetooth. There is a strip of colored light at each end of the iPad table and at the top of the table displayed on the players’ iPhones. By dragging a card across the iPad table and through one of the colored strips, the card suddenly appears on the iPhone display with the corresponding color.

The system takes some getting use to, but it allows for the closest virtual simulation to real card, domino, and dice games on an iPad or iPhone yet.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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