When the Apple iPhone 4 was released, there was a rush to offer a flashlight app using the new LED light on the back of the phone. At first, Apple did not approve of such apps, stating that they were an “inappropriate use of hardware,” but later relented after a discussion with a developer, and the floodgates were opened.

Flashlight apps which use the backlight of the iPhone screen have been available for a while, and many more have since been added to the App Store. There are now dozens to wade through. At first, most of the apps that turned on the LED light were pay apps, with only one free app that used banner advertising. Just three weeks after the iPhone 4 was released, the landscape changed dramatically. There are now about a dozen more free LED flashlight apps, and some of them do not even make use of advertisements.

Why is there even a need to review a flashlight app? The reason is simply because so many of them are poorly programmed. To be useful and indispensable, such an app needs to be as easy to use as its real-life counterpart. How would you feel about waiting five or six seconds for your flashlight to start up, or if you waited that long but the light would not turn on? Many apps had those problems, so no matter how flashy they looked, they were not considered for this review. That narrowed the field down quite a bit. The fastest apps turned on the LED within one second to three seconds after launching so only those were considered.

I had one last requirement that took even more apps out of my selection: the app had to turn on the LED light by itself upon launch. I did not want to touch a button to activate the LED. This app has to act as much like an appliance as possible. There were only four apps left in my selection and any one of those would have been fine. All but one of them had minimalistic interfaces. When all functionalities are equal, the only differentiator would be the aesthetics, which is why iStrobe LED Flashlight is the iPhone App of the Week.

iStrobe LED Flashlight is really not that much different from the other apps, but it stands out with its well-designed graphical interface. There are only three large icons on the screen and it is very clear to the user when they are on and when they are off. That’s really all a flashlight app needs to do and iStrobe LED does it best. As a bonus, there are no ads!

iStrobe LED Flashlight is free.

[etRating value=“ 4”]

iPhone App of the Week: iStrobe LED Flashlight

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