I am one of the people who stood in line for six hours on July 11th for the privilege of buying the new iPhone 3G. My wife, friends and co-workers wondered about my sanity, but they all agreed that as geeky as I am, I really didn’t have a choice!
There have been many articles written about business apps, fun apps, games and so on, so this article will not talk about them. What I want to talk about are the 5 apps that I cannot live without. In the few short months that I have had the iPhone I have to come to rely on one or more of these apps every day. Maybe you will too!
Ok, so I use Facebook…and I love the fact that the Facebook app gives me access to my Facebook friends, mail and I can also chat with them via the app on the iPhone. I can write on my friend’s walls, view their photo albums and see their full profiles. (Free)
Not to be outdone, LinkedIn also has an iPhone app that although not as robust as the Facebook app, still does a great job of giving me mobile access to my LinkedIn contacts, Updates and Status’s of my Connections. (Free)
My day job as a Trainer for Pacifc Union GMAC Real Estate has me traveling all over the Bay Area each week. And since I have been on a major weight loss program, I have been very particular about what I eat. The Yelp app gives me mobile access to the Yelp database of reviews on all sorts of restaurants and many other services. I can always find that great restaurant with the best salads no matter where I am! (Free)
I’ve always been irked about having to pay for “Information Calls” as I am old enough to remember when these were free and you always got a friendly operator to help you find someone’s phone number. This app helps solve that problem in the US. It does it’s best to locate someone’s phone number by searching a database of 180 million US adults.
But, that’s not the best feature…it is also a Reverse Directory. In other words, put in a phone number and if the number is listed, the app returns the street address registered to that phone number. We used to have to pay big bucks for that reverse directory feature from a third party company. (Free)
This little gem is a bloggers dream come true. I can write a blog post to my blog using my iPhone and this app handles publishing it to the blog! It works with wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress installations. It can insert pics from my camera or from the pictures in my phone’s library. It supports multiple blogs, multiple categories, allows me to edit exsiting posts, set tags, set categories, in short, I can blog to my heart’s content from wherever I happen to be! (Free)
All of these apps can be found on the iTunes store and do not require a jail broken phone. I use one or more of these every day and they are definitely my 5 favorite free apps. What are yours?
(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of http://RealtyTechBytes.com
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Filed Under: Mobile Apps
Tags: iphone, iPhone Apps, Mobile Apps
What about Showtimes? I use that movie app more than anything. It’s the best!
Josh, I agree showtime is a pretty neat application, although I would not say it’s the best…
To me the best app is WinterBoard but you will not find it in the App Store…. hehehe
does anyone know if the iphone has an app for word processing like Microsoft Word or something?
Taylor, no there is no Word editing app so far. A spreadsheet app called EditGrid is in beta though It lets you create, edit and export spreadsheets on the fly. Check out their site: http://www.editgrid.com/
The WordPress app is a joke. I love wordpress but I have to say that this app is well below my expectations. Why? Simple have a look at the http://wphoneplugin.org/ plugin for wordpress. This plugin let’s gives an “iphone friendly” admin panel when logging in to your admin panel from the iphone.
wphone let’s you do everything you can do in wordpress, such as creating new post, deleting comments, editing tags, creating users, even activating and deactivating plugins, and much much more!
Give it a try and tell me what you think. Of course it is not a native app but who cares, as long as it gets the job done.
I am sure that there are some great apps for a jail broken phone, but I am just a bit nervous about doin that to my phone, so I’ll be confining myself to apps from the app store for the foreseeable future…
Sebastien, I am confused. When I vivited the link you provided for wphoneplugin, I find that they developer has essentially said that they are not keeping the app up because of the app I described. Apparently they think that the AppStore app, WordPress for iPhone is better than their app…
I’ll stand by my choices for apps that can be gotten from the appstore, for free, for an iPhone that has not been jailbroken…
Jerry, I understand that the developer doesn’t want to continue working on wphone. But still, it is a much better app for managing your blog on your iPhone. Wphone is just a plugin for WordPress, it is actually not an iPhone app. You don’t need to have a jailbroken iPhone to use it. When installing Wphone, and going to login to wordpress, it will give you the choice to login in the “mobile admin”. Do this and then you can do everything you do in wordpress from your computer, but it will be formatted to fit your iPhone screen. If you have a wordpress blog, give it a try.
Sebastien, I did go and get the plugin and installed it, and you are absolutely correct. It does give you almost complete control of the blog…after you open Safari, navigate to the blog and log in.
The app that I describe doesn’t require any of that. You open the app and start writing, then it handles the log in and the posting.
I am glad that you told me about the plugin becuase I can a real use for it, but when it comes to just banging out a quick post…the app wins.
Looks like we are both right on this one!
Best regards,
Jerry
Jerry,
Yes I guess we were both right. The WP app just let’s you create a post on the fly. WPhone let’s you do everything else. I don’t understand all the hype about Apps as there are many many web based apps that are much better than native apps. The mobile version of Newsgator for example is way better than Newsgator’s native app NetNewsWire. That’s just my opinion though.
An application you may want to add to your list is Instapaper. I wrote something about it on my blog. Check it out and you’ll see, you will love it. Basically it let’s you save web pages for offline reading. How cool is that? It should have made it in this post.
So many apps, so little time to review or to even know they’re here.
s