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In year-end round-up of The Top 10 Everything of 2008, Time magazine has published list after list after list. Because God forbid you should read something on the web that wasn’t numbered—who knows what order those paragraphs go in!? Were Paul’s Letters the first blog post?

In addition to laying out the best Quotes, Scandals, and Awkward Moments, they also pick the Top Ten iPhone apps (what, no love for the Zune?), and while there’s not much on the list you haven’t heard of before, Time does make the rather shocking choice of picking a side in the bloodiest conflict since Mario vs. Sonic:

Ocarina Wars!

Unsurprisingly, the magazine comes down on the side of Smule’s Ocarina app:

Some genius figured out how to use the microphone on the iPhone as an air-flow sensor—now we’ve got a virtual ocarina, albeit not potato-shaped. Hold the phone up to your lips and blow; four “holes” appear on your touch screen allowing you to play almost any scale (which you select under Settings). Share your tunes with other Ocarina players around the world, or just set the app to listen to their masterworks.

Wild rumors (entirely made up by me) have surfaced (just now, as I’m making this up) that Steve Jobs is furious that the iPhone is becoming known as an Ocarina device rather than a games machine, and vows to shut out all Ocarina, and perhaps even Alto Saxophone-related apps from the iTunes store. Stay tuned for more dispatches from Ocarina Wars.

Via [Time magazine’s Top 10 iPhone Apps of 2008]