Five Unsung iPhone Applications–Most of Them Free
January 17th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 9 Comments
At this week’s Macworld trade show in San Francisco, Google announced updates for its iPhone applications and Apple itself announced a free software update and new applications for the iPhone. Meanwhile, the list of useful applications for the iPhone from the development community is steadily growing. In this post, I’ll round up five unsung examples–most of them free.
PimpMyNews is a free offering from a startup company that delivers an audio version of news stories to your iPhone or to an iPod Touch. You can select types of news stories or blogs in 59 categories and have them regularly delivered to your iPhone. The effect is similar to getting a podcast based on your interests and updated throughout the day.
iZoho is a free way to bring Zoho’s popular productivity applications to your iPhone. With Zoho Writer you can view and edit documents on your iPhone. You also get Zoho Sheet for spreadsheets and Zoho Show for presentations. Note though, that you can’t edit spreadsheets or presentations, but you can view them.
RDM+ is a remote desktop application that allows you to access your desktop computer with your iPhone when you’re on the go. It’s good to have when you’ve left something critical behind.
Try @Task if you want a really robust mobile solution for managing projects on your iPhone. The charts and interface are very good for most types of projects. There’s a 30-day free trial, so you can see if your style of task management fits with the application. An account is $32 a month.
Even though many web workers use online applications for writing, Microsoft Word remains the most ubiquitous word processor out there. If you want to create Word documents on your iPhone and e-mail them to colleagues, gOffice is a good way to do it. It comes with a library of common letter formats to save you time if you’re writing a letter.
Do you know of any useful applications for the iPhone?
9 Comments Post your own comment
sdmonty says: January 17th, 2008 6:25pm
With the advent of additional app’s on the iPod Touch, does anyone know if these add-on apps are portable to that device as well?
Until Tuesday, I was very on the fence about what my next iPod will be; the addition of those app’s to the iPod Touch clinches it, and if I could add additional app’s I might even run out this weekend and buy one.
Thoughts?
rose says: January 17th, 2008 10:51pm
http://www.bywifi.com is another good service for iPhone. It provides mobile transcoding of videos and web pages for iPhone. I always transcode and download youtube movies with it.
nhickmarin says: January 18th, 2008 7:16am
wow, thanks for sharing those very useful apps!
nhick
http://www.itrush.com
John Atkinson says: January 19th, 2008 12:29pm
sdmonty - the PimpMyNews web app will work on iPhones, iPod Touch devices and other devices with mobile browsers. You can access it here: http://www.PimpMyNews.com/m
For the “Full PimpMyNews Experience”, users can sign up *on their computers* to personalize their account on the full site at http://www.PimpMyNews.com
Thanks,
John Atkinson
Co-founder
http://www.PimpMyNews.com
Alana says: January 21st, 2008 12:56am
Hi all,
Just wanted to mention Foneshow [whom I just started working with]. They take the mobile news thing a step further by allowing folks to receive the blurbs regardless of how uncool their phones may be.
Basically, you get a text with a unique phone #, you call it, and hear the news podcast(s) you’ve subscribed to. You can then forward it to anyone else, sans registrations or other hassles.
It’s a neat application of technology… and I couldn’t let a reference to something called Pimp My News go by without pitching a cooler, pimpless project (:
-Alana
swvorthy says: February 27th, 2008 10:24am
FYI- PimpMyNews will work on all ipods, not just iPhones or iPod Touches… you can create playlists based on your interests and download them. If you haven’t tried this yet, you definately should!
mr march says: February 27th, 2008 3:12pm
pimpmynews is a pretty sweet iphone app. i’ve been using it since apple gave it a staff pick rating. i just sync in the morning and listen when i workout.
Ande000 says: March 7th, 2008 3:07pm
Pimp my News is great! Once I got my personalized podcasts setup for my i-pod, I just have to tune in and listen. highly recommended! Maybe some of the pimps from Pimp my News can go over and give some pimping pointers to Foneshow:)
saj says: March 31st, 2008 7:59pm
plese let me know how do i fouword my texr messeages on my i phone tankyou