Each week I bring you my picks for the best new iPhone app I’ve discovered in the past week. This week, I take a look at scvngr and Geocaching.

Free App:
scvngr – “A game about doing challenges at places.”

Initially, I assumed scvnger (pronounced: “Scurvy Avenger”) was going to be like loopt, whrrl, or foursquare, in that it revolved around ‘checking in’ places and hoping that your friends bother to ‘check in’ as well, so you can all meet up for a burrito or to kill a hobo. While this is a part of the app’s functionality, the real meat is that it shows you nearby locations and lets you do challenges such as “pretend to be an astronaut,” “throw a baseball,” or “murder a hobo using only a burrito” at specific places, and then give nearby onlookers scurvy or something.

It’s a neat idea, and can be a lot of fun if you have friends who like to do things beyond watching movies and grabbing dinner when you go out. If not, then you’ll probably feel like a complete moron for trying to mimic a mannequin while people stare at you for being such a freak.

But, hey, it’s free, and if you’re looking for cheap entertainment, it’s worth a shot.

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Paid App:
Geocaching
Price: $9.99

Geocaching is a hobby that’s been around for about 10 years, which started with the advent of highly accurate GPS receivers. The idea is that you (or whoever) hides a container of some kind at a specific location, hidden from the average person, post its GPS coordinates on the Geocaching website, and then search for caches left by other people. The caches may be as small and simple as a log for people to sign, to something big enough to hold a variety of tchotchkes and miscellany that people trade or move from cache to cache. It’s honestly a lot more fun that I make it sound.

In the past, you would go to the Geocaching website and load up your GPSr with a bunch of coordinates to caches you want to find, then go out and look for them. The iPhone app, however, will get your current location and then display all nearby caches. The iPhone GPSr is accurate enough that I’ve found about 30 caches using nothing but it and this app, and have only missed 3 so far. It’s NOT accurate enough, however, to use for actual cache hiding, as it may be as much as 50-65 yards off (or more, depending on reception). You can post new caches from the app, though, so if you have a better, dedicated GPSr (I have an old Garmin GPS72 that still does the trick), you can input the coordinates from it.

It’s far from perfect; once you’ve found and logged a cache, you can’t view it again within the app, and the handling of travel bugs and trackable items leaves a lot to be desired. But, if you’re into Geocaching and you own an iPhone, it’s absolutely worth the $10 to be able to do everything from a single device in your pocket.

If you have a suggestion for an App of the Week, email me at tremorx@me.com.