Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!

Megan Fox is an obvious choice, for obvious reasons (if she’s your thing): She had a Motoblur, and we’re a gadget blog! See? Obvious. Anyway, tweeting from a tub on her new phone, she pondered what would happen if she sent a picture of her bathing out to the world. Hijinks ensued, people were hurt, and even a gay couple somehow got distracted by the fox that is Megan Fox:

And such is the power of Fox that there were scenes that didn’t make the final cut.

Then there was Beyonce, fresh off her Grammy performance, performing again for Vizio. Surrounded by Internet memes and celebrities, Twitter and what appeared to be an army of automobile assembly line robots (hopefully not ones from Toyota), she sang and sold that company’s Via/Internet Apps technology. Think Internet on your HDTV, not because I say so or because that’s exactly what it is, but because that’s the message Vizio assaulted viewers with during the 60-second clip:

Tough love was the story for Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot. The commercial was supposedly for Intel’s Core processor line, but I know the truth: Robot uprising. It 20 years’ time we can all look back at this commercial, when poor Jeffrey was snubbed For The Last Time by his human overlords:

Lastly, there’s one we actually covered yesterday. Google. Its poignant ad about a search-happy boy in love with a French girl aired yesterday, on the Internet, which is probably fitting. We’ll revisit it again here if you missed it tonight:

Sigh.

Personally, for me the ads were a bit stale this year. Even the Bud Light beer ads, which have made me laugh out loud on occasion in years past, felt a little tired. Betty White was a standout though, and there were back-to-back ads depicting grown men in their underwear. Possibly a first there. Also a first: Seeing a two-timing baby talk about eTrade while his “milk-a-holic” girl on the side blew up his shit over a webcam.

The one Bud Light ad I will give props to, however, was their Autotune bit. It’s a stretch including here on Gizmodo, but we have a history with that app (iPhone, anyone?), and we’ll take an opportunity here to thank Budweiser for hopefully killing the tech off for good with this Super Bowl ad:

OK, I admit it, I smiled a bit watching that a second time. Guilty.

The entire crop is over at YouTube in one convenient package (Fox’s is notably absent at the moment, although they appear to be updating throughout the night).

If you’re anything like me, you get incredibly annoyed each time one of Apple’s “There’s an app for that!” ads rolls. They like to pretend that there’s an app for everything – but you.. you know the truth. Sure, they have tip calculators, tens of thousands of games, and an app that makes you sound like T-Pain – but do they have cereal bowl simulators? Until this week, the answer was no.

Alright, now that I’ve written a satisfactory introduction, I’ve just gotta admit it: the only reason I’m writing about this is because it’s friggin’ hilarious. The app itself is cool and all [iTunes Link], but the accompanying press release sealed the deal:

Each month, the best new iPhone apps—and some older ones—are considered for admission into Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps Directory. Who will join? Who will live? Who will die?

For the full directory of Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps, click here.

The Month’s Best

As gathered from our weekly roundups.

If you hate hate hate galleries, click here for a single post.

Essential App Directory Inductees

This month was BOUNTIFUL, as we welcome seven (7!) new apps to the fold. Here are your new inductees:

• I Am T-Pain: This app was fun when it first came out, but now that you can sing over your iPod library, it’s priceless.

• Waze: Because it’s getting to be good enough to depend on (in a few areas), because it’s free, and because their video-gamey plan to make the app better is totally charming.

• Voices: Because when your iPhone isn’t acting as a tool, it’s a toy. And everyone loves some good voice modulation.

• Snapture: Because full 3GS support, which Snapture recently added, was the only thing holding this app back from replacing the iPhone’s camera completely.

• ShopSavvy: Because any iPhone decent a good, free barcode scanning app.

• Chorus: Because finding new apps is hard, y’all.

• Jailbreak: Kirikae: Because without a solid task switcher like Kirikae, fantastic jailbreak app Backgrounder is kind of useless. With it, your iPhone is a full-fledged multitasking smartphone, finally. (Don’t get defensive!)

And Farewell To…

Our current directory members are all safe this time around. But next month, expect hell. (Maybe!)

What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we’ve missed anything huge, or you’ve got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We’ll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy!

Nokia's X3 makes music.

(Credit: Nokia)

It’s been a busy week here at Crave with a whole lot of gadget news coming out of IFA 2009 in Berlin, including Toshiba announcing a touch-screen tablet called the JournE. This is, perhaps, Toshiba’s effort to take on Apple’…

(Credit: Alison Rosen)

Alison Rosen is back on the program today, and no, she’s not really shrinking. That said, she is mystified by Craigslist missed connections, so we debate about what sort of scenario would lend itself to the use of the site’s bizarre feature.

Next stop, Cougarville–better known as San Fransisco–where we investigate a disturbing new expo: The National Single Cougars Convention. Should cougars be given their own convention or should they be hunted in public, the natural way?

Finally, it seems we’re just never going to get rid of Autotune. Especially now that the new T-Pain Autotune iPhone app makes robot voice manipulation so easy–as if it wasn’t to begin with.

We’ve got all this and more on today’s 404. Enjoy the weekend! (No show on Monday).

Check out Alison’s blog or The Daily Alison.

EPISODE 419

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Originally posted at The 404

After months of anticipation, singing robot T-Pain has finally unleashed his secret weapon: an iPhone application that gives users the power to make their tone deaf voice sound…just as crappy. But digitized! The iPhone application is called I Am T-Pain, and it might be the end of music as we know it.

Even though T-Pain isn’t the first artist to use the Auto-Tuner, this is the easiest and cheapest way to obtain the popular vocoder software that disguises and corrects improper pitch by distorting the human voice.

The $2.99 app is a portable version of the tool that includes an instrumental collection of T-Pain’s greatest hits in addition to a “Freestyle” mode to cover your own songs. You can also record yourself singing and easily upload the tracks to various social networks.

I installed the app on my iPhone and it works pretty well, but instead of “Buy you a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” I went for Cher’s timeless hit “I Believe” on today’s episode of The 404 Podcast. Check it out and let me know if I have a future in the recording industry.

Check out more screenshots of the I Am T-Pain iPhone app after the jump.

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