Apps Roundup 2011 – Have you tried these Mobile Apps yet?
Second half of 2011 was quite interesting – As Tech Editor to YourStory.in, I got an opportunity to use and review quite some apps! Some of them were brilliant, while some showed a lot of promise.
I thought iPhone 4 was very highly priced, till Apple announced the price of iPhone 4S inIndia. However, if you remove the pricing aspect of iPhone inIndia, it is a brilliant phone, and its App ecosystem makes it very special.
Instead of googling and finding out what guys at Wired, CNET etc write about and then write a modified article, I thought what apps I use the most, and those with cool quotient that are worth bragging about.
Find My Friend
This app exactly locates your friend (with scarily good accuracy and resolution) if your friend has agreed to let you do so. I actually tracked Shalin Jain (CEO, Tenmiles.com) while he traveled in a bus to my office that I could actually accurately time myself and pick him up from the bus stop. It allows you to even temporarily let your friends track you (say when you are attending some function / party). This app is jaw dropping cool and effective. This app is pitched directly against Google’s Latitude. The only drawback is that this works on iPhone 4 or later (4S) only since it requires iOS 5 / iCloud support. Of course, there is a ‘Hide my location’ in case you need it.
MyCityWay – IndiaThe locations are neatly sorted based on distance, categories or alphabetically. There is a huge catalog too!I reviewed this app, some time ago, and boy, am I glad! I travel extensively and this app greatly helps in locating places to dine, watch a movie or locate a temple! I actually found some temples I was not aware of, around my office!
If you are in one of the major cities inIndia, you definitely need to have this on your phone!
Dropbox
This is one of the most popular photo sharing app. One of the key aspects of Instagram is its usability – Once can instantly start using it and sharing pictures with Instagram. It is rated one of the top free apps in App Store, for a reason. If you like taking photos, applying some cool (or silly) effects and sharing with friends, you know where to download this! (There is only one place where you can download apps, actually, unless you know about Cydia… well, that’s another story!)
Dropbox is your USB drive on the web. What separates this from various online drives is the ease of use, and it supports most OS’ known to humans, and wait – It works on your mobile too. With Dropbox, you are always in touch with your files, and the cloud storage is synced regularly so, when you want a file, you have it when you need it. 2GB is free, but you can also pay for much bigger storage. Also checkout box.com.
People have asked me on differences between dropbox and iCloud – The main difference is that iCloud is more active while it syncs, and promotes the idea of local storage, kept in sync across devices, while Dropbox is a cloud storage that allows access from various devices.
Pulse NewsThis is a great example in terms of UX design done right. It is incredibly easy to browse multiple news sources, and also news feeds from various sources. This is also one of the fifty apps in Apple’s ‘App Store Hall of Fame’
And, to tops, it is free! (Though it was launched as a paid app) – There is no reason why you shouldn’t have it in your phone (unless you hate news)
InstagramYourStory.in
Last, but definitely the latest (Tamil people might recognize the famous dialog by Rajinikanth) is YourStory.in’s well designed news app. The app is a must download for entrepreneurs inIndia and abroad, and all members of its ecosystem (read VCs). So, now you can read the latest startup news on your iPhone instead of browsing the YourStory.in website in the phone and doing a pinch zoom. (Android guys might still want to do that. However, it will not be for long since Android and Blackberry versions would be launched soon. My hunch is that Blackberry would be next since Blackberry and Shradha (YourStory.in’s founder) are hard to part. But, as they say, we’ll never know since they launched the iPhone version first) I want to read this article first on my iPhone rather than the website now!
