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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?

Comments (9)

  • 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?

    sdmonty6:25 PM on January 17, 2008 Reply

  • 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.

    rose — 10:51 PM on January 17, 2008 Reply

  • wow, thanks for sharing those very useful apps!

    nhick
    http://www.itrush.com

    nhickmarin — 7:16 AM on January 18, 2008 Reply

  • 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

    John Atkinson12:29 PM on January 19, 2008 Reply

  • 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

    Alana12:56 AM on January 21, 2008 Reply

  • 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!

    swvorthy10:24 AM on February 27, 2008 Reply

  • 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.

    mr march — 3:12 PM on February 27, 2008 Reply

  • 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:)

    Ande000 — 3:07 PM on March 7, 2008 Reply

  • plese let me know how do i fouword my texr messeages on my i phone tankyou

    saj — 7:59 PM on March 31, 2008 Reply

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