Apps: I have 45, have paid for none and use 10 on a regular basis. My partner has 112, doled out cash for three and admits to being a regular user of around 25. We just don’t have the same connectivity anymore. Maybe I just need an app for that.

Science Fiction fans amongst us will know about Sturgeon’s Law. Theodore Sturgeon was a writer who famously decreed in 1958 that “Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap”. A thought echoed by Scott Rosenburg in his 2009 book, Say Everything, a fascinating and excellent account on why blogging matters – which I was reading for pure enjoyment and not research.

I don’t want to dwell on the past, but I find it interesting that Sturgeon could have had those thoughts in a period when luxury goods and consumer items were still in relatively short supply. After all, World War II had only finished in 1945, and it was well before the relatively affluent and disposable times of the 70’, 80s and 90s. My point is that if 90% of stuff was crap in 1958, one wonders what the writer would have made of the world in 2010.

What would Sturgeon have thought about the 150,000 applications that are available for the iPhone? Or perhaps the thousands that the owners of the Android can buy? What would he make of Twitter? Would he have been a fan of the Blackberry? Would he have been on Facebook?

As ever, I don’t have the answers to these questions, mainly because Theodore Sturgeon died in 1985 but also because I don’t know anybody who can give me the information I require.

Let us consider applications that can now be bought or downloaded for free on your mobile phone. Like everything in life there are the useful ones, the “entertaining” ones, and the stupidly pointless.

I took the time out of my busy schedule to visit the Apple Store on Boylston because I wanted to know what the staff at the company’s second biggest retail outlet in the world thought about the apps that were available. The representative that I spoke to was very cheerful and helpful. In his opinion, “they are awesome, and they really help make your phone individual.” Anything I could think of, there was an app for it. Being English, I was interested in tea and cricket and there were apps that covered these subjects in depth.

A personal favorite is Tea Round, an app which “settles all thirst-based office arguments by deciding who makes the tea” and is “guaranteed to increase office productivity and ease workplace tension with its scientifically proven three-step brew dispute resolution process.” In the offices I have worked in we used a whiteboard, but this is 2010 and we need an app to tell us whose turn it is.

What about if you have been wronged by someone and need to seek vengeance? Try Voodoo Doll Revenge, developed by Viximo in Cambridge, which allows you to “extract hilarious revenge” by sticking pins in or setting fire to friends/enemies through an app. Inexplicably popular and especially pointless, this will set you back $2 to harness the power of Baron Samedi. For the record, Viximo is also a company that believes virtual gifts are the way forward, although I am certain that the lack of physical presence on Valentine’s Day would have resulted in a real-life pin situation.

However, there are some very useful applications that have come from the hub. Runkeeper tracks your fitness activities and its free version is currently sitting at number five in the iTunes Health and Fitness chart whilst the lads at Drync caught my eye for reasons that had nothing to do with my gym schedule.

But in all honesty, I found that the majority of apps that were out there were useless, not entertaining, or swallowed up in a sea of product that looked awfully similar to the casual browser.

It comes down to the difference between what we need and what we think we need. If we are downloading an app that will allow us to find decent restaurants (Urbanspoon), locate Zipcars or follow the latest news from the BBC, then there is some value in these applications having space on your phone.

If we think we need to have a Foot Pain Identifier, a Stool Scanner, bubble wrap on our phone, an application that tells you where you parked your car or where the nearest sex offender is (seriously, it is called Offender Locator), then we are reaching a point of excess over usefulness.

I don’t blame the Internet – I don’t even blame Apple.

The Internet has been a wonderful liberator of thoughts, concepts and ideas which have flooded our lives to such an extent that at times we find it hard to remember what life was like before we could email on a regular basis, have instant access to whichever piece of popular culture we want and network socially from the comfort of our own homes.

There was also a time before mobile phones. It wasn’t that long ago.

And 90% of that world was crap as well.