This article was written on December 31, 2008 by CyberNet.
For this installment of the 2008 CyberNet Awards we are taking a look at some of my Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps that are free. I think most of the ones on my list weren’t released this year, but they are new to me and I wanted to share my thoughts on them.
Without further ado here’s what I believe are the best time-saving iPhone apps that don’t cost a dime…
Note: All links point directly to the app’s iTunes page.
The new version of the Google Mobile app is actually really nice since it includes voice recognition. What you can essentially do is start the app, hold it up to your ear, and speak what you want to search for. I’d say that the recognition is correct about 95% of the time, which isn’t bad.
One of the biggest reasons this is a timesaver for me is that I can also use this to do conversions. For example, I can say “18 miles in kilometers” and the application will perform the standard Google search. The only difference is that the first result shown is the answer to your conversion!
I use Wikipedia for a lot of stuff, and Wikipanion makes me a lot more efficient at searching Wikipedia for the content I need. I think I use this the most for looking up television show schedules to see when the next one comes on (e.g., next week, a few weeks from now), or to recap the plot of some past episodes. Thanks to Wikipanion I don’t have to bust out my computer to do this.
This is one of those apps that I’ve used only about a dozen times, but it has saved me a lot of time. It’s basically an enormous directory of companies that people have assembled, and each listing specifies the steps necessary to talk to a human being. If a bunch of menus are involved you will be told exactly what numbers you need to press at each prompt so that you don’t have to waste time listening to them all.
Mocha VNC makes it possible to control both my Mac and Windows computers from my iPhone. On my Vista machine I installed UltraVNC so that I could connect to it whenever needed, and with Mocha VNC Lite it has absolutely no troubles. I can zoom and pan around the remote desktop, click the mouse, and type anything I want.
The main reason someone would want to buy the full version of the app would be if they need the ability to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete in order to login. I don’t need to do that so this free version is right up my alley.
–1st Place: Yelp–
A lot of times Ashley and I will be out and about around the suburbs of Chicago, and we’ll be looking for a new restaurant to try. The old fashioned way of finding a good restaurant would be to start asking some people, but nowadays we can turn to the web.
Using my iPhone’s location lookup capabilities, I can have Yelp show me a list of restaurants that are close by, and for each one I can read reviews that people have left. We have found some incredible restaurants using this program, and you’d have to fight me pretty hard to take this app off my iPhone.
The latest release of the app adds support for viewing multiple pages of results, which was previously one of biggest complaints. Seeing 20 results just wasn’t enough most of the time, but now I can go from one page to another until I see something that catches my eye. Now the only feature I want them to add is the ability to write reviews from within the application, which would definitely get me writing a lot more reviews as these places are on my mind.
–-And Your Winners–-
Now it is time for you to chime in! Let us know in the comments what earned your “Best Time-Saving iPhone Apps” award.
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It’s Labor Day here in the United States, the unofficial end to Summer, so we just wanted to take a minute to tell those of you celebrating Labor Day to have a great day! I don’t know about where you live, but where we are in the Chicago suburbs, there’s no end to Summer in sight. In fact, we’re having some of the warmest weather we’ve had yet this year.
