Challenge: Out your top mobile apps

19/08/2008 by nicola.

Do you use nothing but the phone and SMS? They’re my top 2 uses, maybe camera and clock+ringtone for my preferred alarm noise of choice too. Confession anyway - I hastily flung together a list of my top 10 mobile apps for learning, which upon thinking about, some are just related to personal organisation whilst I’m working in learning technology and would probably be using if I wasn’t, as well. So below is my list with proper explanations and some other ideas too.

See Ignatia’s great learning list and also Clark Quinn’s Top 10 mobile from earlier this year. If you have never visited Jane’s amazing site of top tools for learning technology, its worth a look - it has saved me - I don’t know how many hours - but a lot !

So, this is the challenge, if you work or interested and blogging about mobile technology and haven’t already done this - out your apps, if you don’t want to blog them, you can contribute them anonymously via C4LPT tools..

My top 10
Utterz - voice blogging on the go with publishing options on the spot.

Screenshot - taking still screenshots from a s60 phone, using one of the phone cameras - I use it to show shots for experimenting and for showing how to do things. There are others available for windows mobile devices and others

Find.mobi - brilliant mobile search. Provides web and mobile web-friendly page searches (Mobile web friendly pages = less time to download and display properly on your mobile device). To find flight status, select Travel from the tag cloud below the search box, then select Flight Status - you will then see various options - if you are a frequent traveller or organising conferences / events, this is such a useful mobile tool.

Other mobile search tools incl Yahoo Go, Google mobile, Kooaba also have a brilliant visual search/image recognition tool

Mobile flickr - upload photos quickly

Nokia Maps used this in Switzerland last week, it told me I was in Germany and France before I knew I was and scarily quickly finding you via GPS. I use it all the time. I think some phones are now coming bundled with Europe maps or similar / Google Mobile maps is good too (I like both equally at the moment). UPDATE - just saw a post today that can now purchase and use Lonely Planet guides from Guides-Extras menu directly within Nokia maps app.

Fring - Skype,AIM,GoogleTalk,MSN,SIP - see contacts all in one place and who is online, with options to chat/call/send files. Skype now appearing on more phones, you can Skype chat out okish from Fring, haven’t tried Skype calling (for VOIP anything charges, check operator package). I used this quite a bit when Surrey email crashed and I was more mobile for a few days, it was great. However, Twitter / Jaiku would still also be as useful and as quick !

Nokia mobile Web Server & extensions - starting to play with but finding useful, can blog, upload, IM, chat and manage a mobile site from the phone (have to pay data fees for transfer, according to your operator package).

Adobe mobile pdf reader - mostly using for work files and articles I’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us which can be read on the go.

Mobiseer - mobile bookmarking, tagging, sharing pages. Don’t find it easy to bookmark pages whilst on mobile though. Currently using this whilst mobile delicious - which found out last week, is being developed . I can currently use delicious via my webkit browser when using an N82, can edit, share, delete bookmarks but can’t bookmark pages. Can’t wait for mobile delicious - oh and a mashup with find.mobi so you could get delicious for mobile friendly pages would be awesome.

OperaMini browser - free download and works on loads of phones/devices - I also use it as a backup for any browsers I have on an older phone which for whatever reason may format pages strangely (hasn’t happened with webkit but earlier browsers on older phones). I think Opera are likely to be the first to bring out a voice-friendly browser too - they appear to be leading the way with voice at the moment. Another cool browser in beta at the moment is Skyfire.

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