Killer mobile apps

I’m pretty geeky at the best of times, but I’m especially geeky re mobile stuff. I love my N70: it’s bulky and slow, but you can do so much with it. On the bus yesterday I sent a long email using Gmail - last week I won an Ebay auction on the way to the pub.

So I thought it might be useful to share the apps that I think are unbeatable, and the ones that I’ve tried but don’t quite cut it (yet).

The killer appsGoogle for mobile

  • Opera Mini 3.0: I’ve been using Opera Mini for a while now, and have already written about how good it is. However version 3 is even better: it supports RSS, which works really, really well.
  • Gmail mobile: outrageously good reworking of Gmail for mobiles - quick and, unusually for a mobile app, looks really good (see right)
  • Google Maps mobile: another great one from the Google chaps. I imagine my data usage has rocketed up since I started using this - I can’t stop! Having an A-Z in your pocket is invaluable in London

The misses

  • MgMaps: too US-centric, and the ability to switch between Yahoo, MSN and Google maps wasn’t enough to overcome the problems finding anything
  • MSN Messenger: works beautifully, but apart from the first day when I was trying it  I’ve not really found a use for it.  Might just be because I don’t use MSN that much anyway
  • Bluepulse & Widsets both promised an alternative to using your browser, but the one thing I tried both out for initially (uploading/syncing with Flickr) they failed on, so I lost patience.  Thanks for the tip, Ryan, but I’ll stick with Opera for now.
  • Zonetag is a different approach to uploading photos to Flickr - the priority is geotagging photos.  This it seems to do quite well, but the upload process itself isn’t good enough (yet)

I’m aware that everyone uses mobile applications differently (if they use them at all), but my priorities are web access (the Guardian site works well in Opera Mini), Flickr integration (still not cracked this due to my network), speed and robustness.

Posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007. Read the comments and add yours. This item is tagged with .

Comments on this post

  1. 1 HeGe said: (on January 5th, 2007)

    Hi Matt,
    I’m sorry that WidSets didn’t do the thing for you. Bear in mind that the idea of the Flickr widset is to provide you automatic updates from your Flickr community i.e. you’ll get an update every time someone of your contacts posts a photo to Flickr.
    We haven’t put any efforts on photo upload, since there are some many clients for that already.
    Thx!

  2. 2 Matt said: (on January 5th, 2007)

    Well first of all thanks for taking the time to reply - appreciate it. Appreciate that the widset isn’t designed for uploading to Flickr - maybe I should have tried doing something else with it!
    I’ll try again when I get time, and if relevant write up any new experiences.

  3. 3 anonymous said: (on August 31st, 2007)

    try this http://mobigamut.com

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