So in three years of using these phones, I have played with a lot of apps. Some are fun. Some are silly. Some are as useful as a corded phone. Some have been invaluable to me and I am a little shocked at how handy they have been in my day to day life. If you want to look any of these up, just do a web search or look in your app store on your phone.
Here are my favorites:
1) Kindle. Even if you don't have a smartphone, if you are reading this on a computer/laptop, you are missing out if you have not downloaded this app that is available on anything that plugs in. Thousands and thousands of books are free through the Kindle app. Not just classics anymore either. Many new authors cut their teeth in the market by making their first few books free. I have over 2,000 books in my Kindle app, and very few I have paid for. I love to read, and this is an amazing app. I also recommend downloading the Nook app (Barnes & Noble's version of the same thing). Free books as well. I rate this very high because I have six, yes six, devices in my possession that have this downloaded. I never stand in line bored ever, I always have a book with me.
2) Shazam. This is a fun one. How many times are you in your car, or just somewhere and you hear a song, you love it, you want it, and you have no idea who it is and no one else seems to know either. It is usually a new artist who has a great first hit and it takes you a month or two of hearing it to finally figure it out. I have to say it took me a year to figure out the difference between Vertical Horizon and Three Doors Down songs because they are so similar. No more! Shazam is here! Click the app, hit their listen button, it does a listening scan of the song and identifies it for you. No kidding. Just a head up on this one, it takes a lot of data. Your Android will start screaming it's low on data if you have, oh let's say four other apps (oh look, there was some sarcasm in that sentence).
3) There is also all the social networking apps that I use constantly. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Messenger, Pinterest, and Foursquare. You may use all, some or none of these on your computer already, but again, having it on your phone is invaluable. Especially as our culture's communications leans away from email (don't shoot the messenger on trends, I am just saying what we already know) and moves towards networking sites. I use them all for all kinds of various reasons. These are all available for free making it so I can use them on my phone and be mobile.
4) I like games...a lot. About ten years ago, I found myself just kind of foggy in my memory and really started to wonder if I was going crazy a little. I read somewhere that playing simple word games helps keep you sharp. So I found a silly little handheld game for Scrabble, which I love anyway, and played it. Sure enough, found the memory getting sharper, and not worse. With the onset of smartphones, I can play those games in spades. My favorites are Words With Friends (another company's version of Scrabble, and yes, Alec Baldwin is known for playing it), Angry Birds (Asteroids with birds), and Bejeweled (again, one of the games mentioned that keeps over-30-somethings mentally sharp).
5) Kids games. Boy is it nice to hand the phone or any small device to a kid who has been standing in the DMV with me for an hour and let them play a game. Cool games for kids include Angry Birds as well. But the same creators have a cool little game called Cut the Rope. This one is a dollar or two but it is fun! Picture a piece of candy hanging from a rope and it swings. It swings over a little critter that opens its mouth hoping to catch the candy. The player must cut the rope at exactly the right time to land the candy in the critter's mouth. Okay, now add in rubber bands, balloons and all kinds of variables to make this hard to do. I have stretched my geometry skills playing this game and the kids love it.
Lego lovers, oh the apps you can find. We have Creationary which is a Lego app game where you create a thing with Legos and others have to guess what it is.
I am sure I haven't even touched the kid game market for apps. Not sure I want to either.
6) Fitness apps. This is where I have found invaluable tools, for free, at my finger tips. I would not have made the progress I have made in my weight loss/regaining of my health in the last year without the apps. Here are the two I use, daily:
a) My Fitness Pal (MFP) is simple yet genius. It is a simple calorie and nutrition counter with as huge database of calorie and nutritional information. I have always done good on diets where I count calories. This app is great, because it is on my phone. So I can sit at a restaurant or anywhere, have a meal put in front of me and count my calories. In the past, I had a huge paperback book with me and hoped what I was looking for was in it.
Now, for those who don't have smartphones, again, this is an easy program you can do online as well. You track your daily food intake, keep track of your weight/measurements and your progress, and share with friends. The thing about diets and plans. In my 43 years of wisdom, not everything is for everybody. You have to find your "thing" that works for you. Some of my friends have joined me (and we can connect and encourage each other on it as well) and it just isn't for them. That is fine. Once nice thing with MFP, it is free to try. If it doesn't work for you, you are not out money unlike huge diet plans.
b) Endomondo. This has been fun with the running I have been doing since December. You need to have gps capability on your phone.. But no matter what the sport, running, walking, biking, skating....it will track your distance and calories burned. You take those calories burned and enter it into MFP and you now have a really efficient way to track your nutrition and exercise. So even if I do a power walk, which I have been doing lately, I have turned it on just to see what kind of distance I am traveling and what kind of calories I am burning. It's been interesting.
Side note. I want to inspire those of you who started like I did just over a year ago. Very discouraged, slightly scared, and concerned how to get my health back. I couldn't walk six blocks without serious leg/calf pain that made it impossible to do anything remotely fitness related. I decided to get some of the weight off first, and that made all the difference. Simple walks are a great way to get started. You can easily burn 100 calories walking a mile. It is great to see the progress, in numbers, officially recorded somewhere and see that simple actions create outcomes.
Okay, I will quit channeling Jillian Michaels, back to apps...
There is the simple free app for Endomondo that I used for a long time. I plunked down the $4 recently to upgrade it. But the basic app is great. Nike also has a similar app but I like my Endomondo very much. I use it almost daily.
7) Real Estate apps. Those apps where you can look up real estate listings. The most popular one right now is Zillow. I use it so I can dream a little.
8) GPS. I use my GPS daily. And I mean daily. When I switched from the Android to the Iphone I lost my plan's GPS, which didn't set well with me. So I have had to go on the app market and find one that works, and it's been a challenge. Once I find one...or does anyone know one?
9) Radio stations now allow you to stream in their radio programs via free apps. Nice if you live right outside the listening area, or on vacation, you can listen to favorite programs.
9) Then there are all kinds of little ones I use every now and then. I have a crockpot recipe app, a scanner for all those stamp sized bar codes you see everywhere, Netflix (login using your account, and watch movies on your phone) and the Weather Channel.
There is truth in the statement, "There's an app for that."
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