Touch Phones Reviews

iPhone apps all all the rage, but which are the best iPhone apps for the New Media Professional?

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of great iPhone apps (broken down into categories and then alphabetized). Please note that all of these apps are free (unless marked otherwise). I also asked my Twitter community which apps they use, and it came back with the “usual suspects” (with some discrepancies when it comes to Twitter on the iPhone).

News & Information:

• All Things Digital. The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network.
• Huffington Post.
• InstaPaper. Save web pages and documents online and read them via InstaPaper.
• The New York Times.
• TED. Inspiring talks and great gymnastics for your brain when the music runs dry.
• Wikipedia.
• Yelp! Great recommendations for social activities (hotels, restaurants, bars and more). Try out the “Monocle” option (awesome augmented reality).

Online Social Networking:

• Facebook. ‘Nuff said.
• Foursqaure.
• FriendFeed.
• LinkedIn.
• Tweetie. ($2.99) Great little Twitter app. TweetDeck for the iPhone is also very impressive. Other recommended Simplytweet, Twitterlater Pro, Hootsuite, and a few others.

Productivity:

• AroundMe. This app helps you find banks, bars, gas stations and more that are in your vicinity.
• Battery Master. The Achilles heel of the iPhone is the battery (simply not enough juice). This app gives you a pretty good idea of how much time you have left.
• Dropbox. Organize and grab files that can be transferred from your hard drive to the cloud and then to your iPhone.
• Evernote. For all of your note-taking needs.
• Google. Get access to your Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, and more. But, more importantly, you now have Google Reader (all of your RSS feeds) at your fingertips and synced with to your desktop version.
• Quickmark. Uses the camera to grab bar codes and then provides full information on the product.
• Skype. Can’t go wrong with Skype on your iPhone.
• Stanza. Great little e-reader for the iPhone.
• Weather Eye. Courtesy of the people at the Weather Network. If you travel a lot, this app will let you know everything you need to know about the conditions.

What’s missing? What would you add to this list?

There’s something a little deeper happening here, and it’s not about whether or not the iPad (or any other pending touch tablet) is a success or not (but let’s be honest, 300,000 iPads out the door in one day is still pretty impressive, especially when you consider that Apple sold more iPads on its first day than when it launched the iPhone). There’s a-change that is happening (or has happened).

Most of the hardware we use to create media now seems old.

That’s a big deal. Keyboard, mouse and even the laptop just looks so tired and old when compared to a touchscreen iPad. Touching a full screen and manipulating everything (including typing on the screen) with your fingers/hand is the present (and future). “I just can’t seem to type on glass… it doesn’t feel right.” People said the same thing when the typewriter came out (it felt very foreign when compared to writing cursive), then the computer keyboard came out and people felt it didn’t give the same feedback as a typewriter. What about mobile devices? For years people complained that they could never type with their thumbs… and then they did.

Touch changes everything.

It’s much more human and yes, you’ll get used to typing on glass… but look even further into the future (the not-so-distant future) when you won’t be typing on glass, but you’ll probably be typing in the air (hello, Minority Report!). Pause to reflect a little on this entire Blog post: most babies will grow up learning to type on something like an iPad (glass or a flat surface)… or on air. Keyboards are going bye bye. The mouse is going bye bye… in fact, everything except your personal touch is going bye bye.

That’s going to change everything (once again)… and that’s one major reason why we all need to pay more attention to the iPad (and all of the hype surrounding it).

Can the iPad replace laptops and all the wires that go along with them? And is this the ultimate business tool for those on the go? Well, the answer is…

Almost.

Or, as Maxwell Smart used to say: “missed it by that much!” 

Here’s a run-through of the best and the worst about the iPad. 

The great: 

• Super thin. It’s going to be hard to find a form more favourable than this for the business traveller going forward.
• Brilliantly crisp. The screen is amazing. The glare is almost  non-existent and everything looks very fresh and new.
• Great for books, movies, TV and pictures. Considering that you can’t always be hooked up to an Internet connection, it’s good to know that any type of media resident on this device plays, reads, looks and sounds great.
• Full of amazing app potential. You can rest assured that  the recent gold rush we’ve seen for iPhone apps will pale in comparison to what is being developed for the iPad. Apps like TripIt, FlightTrack Pro, Kayak, and more make this an indispensible tool for the ultraportable road warrior.
• A completely re-invented way of dealing with email. The ease of flicking through email does make going  through a lot of email fairly painless and much more visually appealing.

You can almost do everything with it – but it’s not a smartphone or a laptop, so you’re going to have to curb your apprehensions and think of it as a device that is somewhere between the two. It will take some getting used to, but after a few minutes, it will be obvious that this type of device will become the business traveller’s standard going forward. Think about sitting next to a client in an office or hotel lobby and how great it will be to demo products, review videos or even go through presentations. This is going to be perfect for on-the-go sales reps, realtors, artists, and for anybody who does small group presentations.

The not-so-great?

• Weight. It’s not as light as you may think. Granted, it’s not as heavy as your standard laptop, but there’s just too much goodness in the iPad for it not to be a little on the heavy side.
• It needs a cover. Or a slip… or something. No one wants to scratch up a screen that beautiful. If someone releases a cover that can also triple as a stand  and can be angled better for typing, that will change many people’s current complaints about what the iPad doesn’t do so well.
• Difficult to type with for those on the go.  The iPad lies flat, and it’s not easy to type while hunched over an airline food tray, or while sitting at the gate. If someone can create the ultimate slip cover from the last point that can double as an angled stand, we’ve got a winner, winner, chicken dinner!
• Lacking a camera and phone. For the road warrior, having the ability to use Skype would be a huge bonus. 
• Not seamless with wi-fi technology. No one wants to be tethered to a connection, so the 3G with wi-fi version is the only way to go. The problem is that wireless and wi-fi technology hasn’t been perfected yet. So, while it’s a negative, this is more of an indictment on our current state of connectivity.
• Lacking Flash. Flash has become a standard technology to view websites, so while Apple battles it out with Flash’s owners (Adobe), some websites will be a challenge. Apple wizard, Steve Jobs, shares his side of the story here: Thoughts On Flash.

Overall, it’s important to remember that this is only the first generation of the iPad, so it hasn’t found its legs… yet. That being said, it is an awesome piece of technology that will have your flight mates leaning over your shoulder for a look. Expect all of the bad listed above to be fixed in upcoming iterations (which won’t take too long).

The iPad is going to change mobile computing, and it is going to become an integral part of the road warrior’s arsenal. And, remember, if you can’t wait for the next generation iPad, it’s not an iPhone or a laptop… it’s an iPad, so keep your expectations in check.

The above posting is my tech and gadget column for enRoute Magazine called, Ultraportable (which will now run exclusively on the enRoute Blog). I cross-post it here with all of the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

• iPad – The Next Road Warrior Or Just Another Gadget?