Hasta La Gadget!

With the holidays and our year-end app lists (games and everything else), it’s been a little while since we last dove in to our weekly roundups. Time to catch up!

Mint: The app I’m most excited about over the last few weeks is Mint—a free iPhone companion to the popular online financial planning site. Mint gives you recent transactions, balances and budgetary breakdowns for any of your banking, investment or credit accounts, presented with really nice typography and design. It’s read-only—you can’t make any transactions—and if you lose your phone, a kill switch on Mint.com will disable remote access to your account. I use this app every day now. Free

iHand Massage: It’s a hand massager. Suuuuuure, and that sexytime font was chosen for its superb double ‘s’ ligatures, mmhmm? iHand gives you full control over your iPhone’s vibrator to relax away all the tensions of the day in whichever way you choose. $1

iBonsai: A diversion, but a pretty one: iBonsai uses a random-number algorithm to grow infinitely diverse bonsai trees before your eyes, which you can then rotate around in 3D and save as your wallpaper. $3 is a little steep, but it’s very pretty.

Bailout: The texts of US laws are in the public domain: If the developers of Bailout are making a grand ironic statement by demanding you pay $2 for the full text of the Bailout bill, hats off. I doubt they’re that smart, though.

Zephyr: Another hit from the guys at Smule, creators of Ocarina and, of course, Sonic Lighter. Zephyr lets you draw images with snowflakes, adds wintery whoosing sounds. Right. But the social aspect is very cool: you can then send your message out to other users of the app, who will see it drawn out on their own screens in real time and can then send a reply. I haven’t received Zephyr stick figure porn yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. $1

Shapewriter 2.0 Pro: Shapewriter is an innovative text-input tool from the creator of the T9 auto-recognition system that’s now ubiquitous on phones everywhere: drag your finger over a soft keyboard connecting letters into words like a connect-the-dots puzzle, and Shapewriter will sort it out with surprising ease. The free version also has recently received a full v 2.0 overhaul, but the pro version for $10 will remove the supported ads and add landscape typing, internal copy and paste, and few more features not found in the free version.

RjDj Shake: And finally, RjDj Shake builds on the awesome concept of music generation that responds to your environment in real time by adding accelerometer input. Seven different scenes twist the sound you hear in different ways according to your shakes and shimmies. $3

This week’s app news on Giz:

• The Best iPhone Apps of 2008

• The Only 10 Games Your iPhone Needs

• Softbank’s Speeek iPhone App Translates Spoken Japanese to English On the Fly

•IAmAMan Period-Tracking iPhone App for Sleazy, Shameless “Players”

• Crayon Physics iPhone Game Looks Amazing

• Don’t Be That Guy With The New Year’s Noisemaker iPhone App Tonight

• Safari+ Adds Desktop Functions Like Text Searching to Mobile Safari

• Melody Bell Turns iPhone Jiggling Into Ensemble Performance Art

• iSteam iPhone Steam Simulation App is Amazingly Cool

• A Disney Artist Draws Way Better Than Us…On His iPhone

• Mr. Game & Watch Saunters His Way Over to the iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.