Smart apps,
smarter you
By Joe Hutsko
Smartphones are called “smart” because they do so much more than ordinary cellphones. Besides making and receiving calls and text messages, or snapping pictures and videos, smartphones let you do things you typically do on your computer—albeit on a Lilliputian scale. Pocketing either of the two most popular mainstream smartphone platforms—iPhone or Android—can often liberate you from having to haul a notebook computer to accomplish everyday tasks using your smartphone’s suite of built-in applications, or apps.
What’s more, you can make your smartphone and yourself even smarter, thanks to hundreds of thousands of apps you can download for free or for a small fee. I’ve selected a handful of my favorites to help you get started.
favorite websites
Did you know your favorite websites are even better as apps?
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Facebook and Twitter: Sure, you can access Facebook or Twitter using your smartphone’s built-in Web browser, but running the official apps for those services provides better posting, browsing and sharing experience. You can use either to send free text messages to others also running the apps on their smartphones.
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Google: Download and install the Google app on your iPhone and you can say what you’re looking for out loud, just like the speech-recognition feature that comes standard on Android smartphones. You also can ask either version of the Google app to find solutions to questions like “What’s 15 percent of $47?” or “Who’s the president of China?” On Android smartphones, you can even speak commands like “Send text to Lee Jonsson, lunch at noon?” and the app creates a new text message to Lee containing that text. Or say “Navigate to Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia,” and the Google Maps app opens and displays routes to your destination by car, public transit or on foot.
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Google Voice and Skype: Save cellphone plan minutes (and dollars) with the Google Voice app, which provides your own unique phone number for dialing other Google Voice users for free, or landline or mobile numbers for a low fee. Or consider the Skype app which, in addition to free or low-fee voice calling, lets you conduct face-to-face video chats with other Skypers running the mobile app or running Skype on their Mac or Windows PC.
Both apps also offer text messaging features, which can save on or even eliminate costly text messaging plans if the people you text with the most are running those apps on their smartphones as well. |
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Stay organizedEvernote: This app lets you capture just about any kind of note you can think of, including voice, text, handwritten, picture, email, PDF and Web page notes. What’s more, notes you create are automatically synced in the “cloud,” so you can be certain your notes are always up to date no matter how you access them—whether that is on your smartphone, using the Evernote app on your PC or Mac or by logging in to the Evernote website.
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Dragon Dictation: Capturing and converting your spoken words into text is a built-in feature on recent and new Android phones, but not iPhone. For that task there’s Dragon Dictation, which is generally lauded as the best and most accurate voice to text conversion app. | |
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Stay currentPulse News: The Pulse News app brilliantly organizes content in bite-sized headlines you can quickly flick through to browse and read up to 60 of your favorite news, blog and other sources. Sources include big names like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, LA Times, MSNBC, CNN, BBC and Reuters, plus magazines and blogs from a slew of others in categories like food, lifestyle, and science just to name a few.
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Read moreKindle, Nook and Kobo app: When it comes to reading e-books, my favorite e-book reader is Amazon’s Kindle app. Two reasons: It runs on a slew of devices, and it automatically remembers and flips to the last page I read of whatever I’m currently reading, no matter which device I’m reading on, be it my iPhone, iPad 2, Android tablet, Mac or Windows notebooks, or Kindle 3 (my favorite device of all for reading hours at stretch). Other standout e-reader apps include the Barnes and Noble Nook and Kobo Books. |
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Be in the knowWikihood: Sometimes the most interesting sites are in your own backyard—or just around the corner, anyway. Wikihood taps into your smartphone’s location information to reveal a map with pushpins designating historical sites and venues of interest. In my immediate vicinity in Pennsylvania, for instance, Wikihood turned up the original Pennsylvania Hospital (“Pennsy”), founded in 1751, Washington Square Park, the Institute for Colored Youth (1837) and Mikveh Isreal Cemetery (1740). Tap a pushpin to read more and view pictures (available for iPhone only). |
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Education videosKhan Academy: Drawing on Khan Academy’s more than 2,100 free education videos (khanacademy.org), individual app editions for iPhone and Android let you focus on your specialty of choice, including biology, calculus, geometry, chemistry and trigonometry, to name just a handful. There’s even a series of eight SAT test apps that aim to help you prepare for the real thing. On your smartphone, go to khanapp.com, then follow the on-screen instructions to download and install the app. |
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Stay currentHSW and Videojug: These two “get smart” apps tap into their website counterparts (howstuffworks.com and videojug.com), and both serve up how-to videos on a broad range of topics, from practical and useful stuff like how to tie a necktie, to more in-depth topics like explaining how mortgage foreclosures are processed and how earthquakes work.
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Joe Hutsko’s stories about high-tech gadgets, gear and games have appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, Newsweek, Wired and others. He’s also the author of Green Gadgets for Dummies, Macs All-in-One for Dummies, iPhone All-in-One for Dummies, and The Deal: A Novel of Silicon Valley. His website is JOEyGADGET.com.
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