Useful Smartphone Apps

beancounter

The Fire That Burns Within
Joined
Jun 3, 2012
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Just like the title says, please post any apps that you find useful. I'll start:

"The Weather Channel"

A lot of websites have smartphone native apps:
"Netflix for droid"
"Kindle for Droid"
"Youtube"
"Amazon"
"Wikipedia"
"Ebay"

Kelly Blue Book" - When your buying a car. good to be able to check prices on the fly
"aWallet" - An app used to store user names, password, bank account numbers, etc.
"Car Loan" - for calculating a car payment
"karl's Mortgage calculator' - For calcing a mortgage payment.
Square" - Let's you pay for things using you phone.
Norton security - Antivirus - basic is free
Instagram- An easy way to post "on the fly" pics to facebook.
Moviephone- Check movie times and locations
 
I have one that works out your salary after tax, that's a good one. UK Salary Calculator, I think it's called. It was free.

As I am all about all things wedding, I downloaded a bunch of different free wedding planner apps and kept the one I liked best. It was the easy wedding planner.

My absolute favourite, though, is AppShopper. You can make acwishlist, and it tells you when things go up or down in price, as well as giving you the entire cost history for the app, so you can see when you've got a bargain.

(this is all iPad, by the way)
 
Tapatalk for accessing message boards such as this one.

Chess.com to play online chess.

Google maps.

I got a few others as well, but these are the ones I use the most and find most useful.
 
My most used apps on both devices:
Tapatalk
Facebook
Amazon
AppShopper - I always check the price history of an app before buying. If it's ever been on sale for a lower price, I stick it on my wish list and wait until it's on sale again.

Most used on iPad:
Netflix
Newsstand - My print subscription of The New Yorker comes with a free digital subscription, and I'm more likely to read it on the iPad than the physical magazine.
iBooks - I haven't actually bought any books, but there are tons of free books available in the iBook store.
Feedly - RSS reader client; I'm not entirely happy with it, but I like it better than a couple other reader clients I've tried (Flipboard and Pulse). In any case, this is how I keep up with RSS feeds.
Crosswords

Most used on iPhone:
Pandora
Bill Minder - keeps track of bills due and alerts me when I need to pay them.
iReconcile - keep track of my personal and household finances, and it will do budgeting and run reports.
Grocery IQ - for my grocery and other shopping lists.
Weather.com - free version for forecasts and severe weather alerts.
MyRadar - nice free weather radar. It loads the radar map faster than weather.com.
KeyRing - manages all of my store savings/membership cards, so I don't need to carry all of them around with me. The cashiers just scan my phone screen or type in the number.

My local library also has an awesome app that lets me search their catalog, place and manage holds, and alerts me when I have a hold item available and when I have items due.

I use Dropbox on both devices and both computers to transfer files around.
 
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Android Terminal Emulator, the main reason I will always prefer droids over iPhones :p
Alarm Clock Plus (cause it has the gradually increasing alarm, which I find awesome)
Interval Timer AD
Click Counter/T-Counter
Skype, but only on a phone that doesn't have Skype dialing auto disabled
HappyCow VeginOut (with GPS on, can just tell you where nearby veggie restaurants are. Pretty cool in places like Taiwan)
Audible (I love my audio books)
 
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I use Tapatalk, Netflix, Kindle, BBC News, Whatsapp, Wunderlist, MyFitnessPal, YouTube & InstantSleep pretty much daily.

Whatsapp is so good for chatting with friends. Wunderlist keeps me semi organised, because I can write lists and notes quickly & easily. :)
& InstantSleep really helps relax me before sleeping.
 
There are two apps with the name Instant Sleep- Who makes the one you use? I could use something that would help me relax before sleeping.

It's just called Instant Sleep so I'm not entirely sure, but it's by Glenn Harold (he's the man speaking) & the app logo is purple background with a picture of him.Hopefully it'll help!
 
Lovely.

There's tonnes of sleep hypnosis apps on there. I'd definitely recommend trying out a bunch of the free samples (is that the right word?) so that you can find a style/voice that you like & that calms you. A lot of them didn't work for me. Their voice was annoying or I couldn't understand their accents or they'd breathe really loudly...
 
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.... wait. do you mean audible is available on android?! Why did I not know this. Ive been waiting for my MP3 player to come back from repair for noooo reason. brb signing up haha.
 
Lovely.

There's tonnes of sleep hypnosis apps on there. I'd definitely recommend trying out a bunch of the free samples (is that the right word?) so that you can find a style/voice that you like & that calms you. A lot of them didn't work for me. Their voices was annoying or I couldn't understand their accents or they'd breathe really loudly...
I agree! I use sleep apps too, and this one guy had such an annoying voice, I ininstalled it.
 
Maybe of limited interest but I have been playing with the Android OpenVPN client today and it seems to be very nice. Easy to install and configure although some previous knowledge of OpenVPN for other platforms is probably useful. Automatic reconnect when moving from 3G to/from WiFi works and is useful. This version uses the new VPN API in recent versions of Android so doesn't need root.
 
The firefox beta for Android is starting to look pretty good. I don't think it's quite there yet with respect to performance though. Having access to the plugins and extensions is very appealing although noscript doesn't seem to be available yet and that is something I'd really like on my phone. Updates are coming through fairly regularly so hopefully it'll only get better.