Home
BlackBerry, Droid, iPhone — no matter which smartphone you have, it’s the apps, not the features that make your phone unique.
These little applications are customized programs that help run your life when you’re on the go. They can help you with everything from counting calories to checking Facebook to finding a good happy hour.
Without a smartphone and apps, you wouldn’t be able to do some of the things you do now, especially when it comes to travel and work.
Users love apps. Apps are one of the things that propelled the iPhone to such success. You can customize your phone to do anything — it really is a little computer in your hand.
Apple’s online App Store leads the pack with more than 200,000 apps, followed by Google’s Android store, at around 60,000, and BlackBerry’s App World.
But more isn’t necessarily better.
You can’t really think in terms of thousands, because many thousands of those apps are not worth anything. But there are enough good apps for every kind of smartphone out there.
Even better, many of these are free. PCMag.com recently published its list of Top 100 free smartphone apps — a group that includes applications for lesser-used operating systems such as Palm webOS and Windows Mobile as well as BlackBerry, Android and Apple devices.
The list encompasses everything from lifestyle apps (Flixster, Mint) to communications (Dragon Dictation, Google Voice) to networking (Facebook, Foursquare) to games (“Cube Runner,” “Replica Island”).
It used be that if you had a phone and you wanted new features, you had to go get a new phone. That’s not true any longer. Now you can just download an app, and your smartphone stays fresh.
With PCMag.com’s list in mind, smartphone users listed their favorite mobile apps.
Here are some of their choices:
SPB TV — PCMag.com’s top pick for Windows Mobile allows you to stream TV channels on your Windows phone. You won’t pick up HBO or CNN, but you get a lot of interesting video and foreign channels.
Viigo — This app, available for multiple mobile systems, combines news from your favorite websites with social-networking features such as Twitter updates.
