The Five Best Apps on My Phone

As I mentioned last November, I upgraded my cell phone to a Samsung Galaxy S II. One of things that I’ve learned, the hard way I might add, is a smart phone is only as smart as the applications installed on it. So, I thought I’d share the apps I have installed on my phone. Here’s the caveat’s: 1) all of the apps I use are free; 2) my phone is not “rooted” or “jailbroken” and 3) I use my phone primarily to make calls and not as a mobile computer/PDA. Therefore, I don’t have a lot of  installed apps.

Oh, by the way, you might wonder why I said five and not ten or fifty. Well the answer is simple. These five are the apps that I use daily and I mean every single day.

1) Where’s My Droid?  While I generally don’t worry about losing my phone, I do turn the ringer to silent or vibrate quite often when I go meeting or when I’m in the office. I do fear that if I lose or misplace my phone while it’s in silent mode, it will be darn near impossible to find. That’s where Where’s My Droid comes in. You simply send your phone a text from another cell phone or email from a computer with your activation word and your misplaced phone will ring at maximum volume for up to five minutes. Additionally, the phone can tell you where it’s located by using the phone GPS .

2) Google Translate.  This app has paid dividends for me, living in Southern California where there is a rich Spanish-speaking culture. With this app I can speak into the phone in English and the phone translates my sentence into Spanish and speaks that sentence out loud for me. More importantly when it is in “conversation mode,” I can have a running conversation with someone in one of 24 supported languages. While I find the mechanics of this process amazing, I am more impressed by the fact that it works. It’s not perfect, but it’s very close.

3) Movies by Flixster.   This app allows me to find any movie theater within a specified distance from my location, see the movies playing and schedules, buy the tickets and get driving directions.  If you have a Netflix’ account, it can act as a gateway to that account so you can manage your queue. You can see movie trailers and see what the new releases are and when they’ll be out.  As Stan Lee says, “Nuff said!”

4) Amazon Kindle. I absolutely love this app. Hundreds of free books are available for reading and downloading from Amazon and Google. It is great for when I am at lunch or waiting for a meeting to start. It remembers which book I was reading and on what page I stopped. What I really like the most is that I can spot a book on the Amazon website from my computer, selected the book and it will be downloaded to my phone without any intervention on my part. Amazon calls it Whispernet. I call it cool tech.

5) YP (Yellow Pages and Gas Prices).  We, in southern California, generally pay the highest gas price outside of Hawaii. I use this app to find the lowest posted gas price in my area.  Additionally, I used this app on my non-smart phone and it served as my GPS giving me directions to my intended destinations with great accuracy.

I didn’t talk about some of the other apps installed on the phone because I simply don’t use them often enough to say they are “must have.” For example, the voice recognition app on my phone  is very good, but I don’t spend a lot of time telling my phone to “take a memo” or to remind me to call home to say the world will end if I don’t use it or recommend it.

Anyway, these are my five. What are yours?