Our phones stopped being just phones a while ago, smartphones permeate the market and recent offerings such as the iPhone and G1 have made them attractive to entire new segments to which smartphones would have never been marketed before. Our company has recently become multi platform when it comes to mobile Operating Systems as well as desktop ones, with our team currently working with Windows Mobile(WinMo) 6.1, Palm OS 5, as well as the iPhone. This post is the first of a series showcasing our top 5 favorite mobile apps for each of these platforms, starting with WinMo.
1. Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta
Recently available OEM with a lot of phones, this browser is easily the best one available for WinMo by leaps and bounds. The current Internet Explorer Mobile bundled with the 6.1 release, falls short of delivering a usable browsing experience by ignoring the site developer’s intentions and instead over-imposing standardized style and formatting rules to arguably deliver a better mobile experience. Most of the time it fails miserably.
Opera saw this opportunity to deliver a much better user experience. Pages load as they would in a regular browser following style rules and even loading many javascript solutions. Zooming in and out of a page is as simple as double clicking the area to zoom in on and double clicking again to zoom back out. This version brought tab functionality to WinMo through a handy pop-up toolbar at the bottom of the screen also used for stop and back functionality. It is definitely a resource hog so don’t even try on older phones, loading sites takes up tons of memory and tabbed browsing doubles it with each new page.
It should be getting prompt competition as Microsoft has announced a new IE mobile with the upcoming WinMo 6.5 which brings many of the above mentioned innovations as well as Flash support and lower memory usage. Microsoft has big shoes to fill, and the current track record doesn’t favor it in the least. For now Opera is still king of this hill.
2. TinyTwitter
The twitter mobile page already does a great job of mobilizing their micro-blogging service, but for those of us who need additional functionality while twittering from the road Tiny Twitter is a must.
First, it loads all recent posts from people you’re following quickly and seamlessly, if you leave it open it’ll update in the background but if you’re a resources nut, as I am, you’ll probably tell it to shutdown completely when not in direct use. Easy menu tools let you post, reply, send direct messages, and look at a single user’s posts, within the same minute. It is lightning fast and easy on the phone’s memory reserves. It even uses it’s own link shortener automatically in all posts which is a definite plus.
On the downside, you can’t search for and follow people, links from tweets are replaced by a footnote-like [1] which refers to a menu item, not clearly marked as something that would be assigned to that particular functionality, where the link actually resides. There is also no pasting into the posting field which particularly stinks when trying to link to urls with funky formatting. Otherwise it’s a fantastic app and by far the best for this platform.
3.Dashwire
This thing is both fantastic and a new discovery. What it does is backup your phone to a cloud server where you can retrieve or share that content as you see fit. This thing backs up EVERYTHING, well not everything but: call history, text messages, contacts, pictures and videos, ringtones, and browser bookmarks. The great thing is that should you lose your phone everything you might need is online and available from anywhere.
It also has little things that are greatly appealing. Should you have a Skype account you can call your contacts directly from the site. Did you have a pic associated with a contact? Already loaded. Continuous texts to one person are organized in a conversation format to which you can reply, from right there. Pics and video can be easily viewed, posted and shared through simple posting tools to third party sites like Facebook, twitter and Flickr. It’s very complete, really, check it out.
4.GoogleMaps
Where I live I rarely get lost, I’ve lived here my entire life and I have an uncanny sense of direction. Every once in a while though I’m forced to go to a spot with weird directions through badly labeled side roads. This app has merged perfectly with my phone’s GPS to deliver some of the best directions I have ever gotten, coupled with Google search for restaurants and points of interest it’s the only GPS I’ll need for most situations. Only 2 things I’d like to add to it are voice recognition and spoken directions.
Oh also with location services you can broadcast your location to the web for later viewing. If you’re the type that loses phones, updating your location frequently might help the search in future situations.
5. Qik
Ever needed to share something quickly with an inordinate number of people? Qik let’s you stream whatever it is that’s going on around you LIVE straight from your phone. Friends, family or anyone can then log onto http://qik.com/YOURUSERNAME and take a look at whatever you phone is looking at. Streaming usually has 4 or 5 seconds of delay depending on your connection, which considering what you’re doing is amazing. Two additional things that really set this thing apart for me are the live chat, which you can see on your phone screen and respond to real time, and the fact that it stores the video as you’re streaming it, which is fantastic as evidence of anything noteworthy that might happen randomly while you’re out in the world.
That’s it for WinMo, there’s a couple of also rans such as moBlog which has been previously reviewed here, and Pocket Podcasts, but for integration, features, and general awesomeness, these top 5 are my top 5. What are yours?
