Smartphones are smart because of their ability to do things better than normal phones like multi-tasking, and many other things with the help of modern processors, sensors and operating system optimized for being mobile. The trend of buying the latest smartphone just for the sake of showing it off to someone doesn’t fit the description of what smartphones are meant for. The ability of smartphones have grown from being able to play a few games, browse your social network to being able to sense the weather, check your health, gyroscope, accelerometers, GPS, magnetic compass and so on.
All these features although not visible are top class military grade features that have much better use rather than just the size of the screen and the games. I have listed out some of the apps that i think everyone should use that help you in normal daily life and i hope you like them.
Here are the applications in no particular order: –
Any.do
HealthTap
Umano: Listen to News Articles
Google Keep
Software Data Cable
Pocket
Pushbullet
IFTTT
Sleepbot
Onavo Extend
Any.do
Any do is an to-do list app that simplifies the process of adding the list of things to do and managing them. While there are complicated to do list app that allows a whole a lot features, Any.do’s simplicity makes it much easier to stay in check with what you have to do. You can set up notifications, recurring reminders and manage tasks into folders. It lets you start off you day by letting you know what tasks you have to do and if you plan on doing them. Done task can be easily swiped out and your tasks are synced in the cloud.
HealthTap
HealthTap is one of the apps that you must have if you are constantly needing medical attention or require medical advice for any medical problems. It allows users to post questions anonymously to thousands of professional doctors who reply to your queries. Making a question to the point gets quick and definitive answers from doctors. Although the recent updates are moving the app towards a subscription method, we think you have to give it a try befor it goes completely subscription based.
Umano: Listen to News Articles
Umano is an app that reads out the popular articles in the web with a personalized playlists, recommendations and channels. The free version is enough to listen to unlimited articles, have 40 items to your playlist (which you can remove to make space for new articles). The paid subscription based system lets you download articles for offline listening. The voice artists are professional and read the articles in perfect way for a great listening experience even adding emotions and playing through the article. This makes it so much better than reading the article yourself.
Google Keep
Google Keep is probably the simplest way to take notes and have it available everywhere online. With Google Keep simple interface you can take notes as easy as making a phone call. You can add simple notes, list notes, voice notes and picture notes with Google Keep. You can set up reminders to get notified when you want to do something. This simple app makes tasks such as shopping list, simple to do list and note taking as simple as it can get. And having your notes available everywhere online through keep.google.com makes it convenient so you don’t even have to have the app to use it.
Software Data Cable
Software data cable is an application that makes sharing big files much easier. It uses your WiFi to create connections between the devices you want to share files to and uses the high speed wireless bandwidth to send and receive huge files in a much less time than bluetooth. This app comes in handy when your friend has a great movie or a file to share to you and you don’t have any cables. Bluetooth is inherently too slow and takes a lot of battery. New devices now come with WiFi-Direct that makes it a lot easier but with devices that don’t have this feature and with WiFi connectibility makes it a convenient way to share huge files.
Pocket is an app that lets you read your articles later without the general mess of a regular website. When you save an article to your Pocket list without applications and tools for almost all browsers, operating system you’ll get customized article only section of the site without any sidebars, ads or any thing else. I generally use this to save some data usage from links i find interesting online. I don’t even have to view the sidebards, ads and all the other things i never look at anyways. The articles you save get added to your list and you can delete them after you’ve read them. The deleted articles are added to your archive which you can search for articles you’ve read in the past. You can also tag your links so they are much easier to find.
Pushbullet
Pushbullet is an application/service that lets you manage your notifications in multiple devices and with friends. You can send custom notes, links, lists, files and even share clipboard through this service. All your notifications are saved in a list which you can go through. You can select to send notifications to all of your devices, or any single device. This is convenient when you find something interesting on a device and want to check it later on your phone or vice versa. Anothing awesome feature is a friend list which allows you to send notifications to your friends too.
IFTTT
IFTTT or if this then that is a service that allows you to automate multiple of your internet actions, devices and networks. You can set it to send you weather notification, send your tagged facebook pictures to facebook, notify you changes in your home security systems. And the channels and features you can control are constantly growing. IFTTT has an app that lets you control actions on your smarphone, like making a spreadsheet of calls you get, sending you notifications and managing and creating your own recipes. Choose from thousands of community contributed recipes (pre built trigger and actions) to choose something thats interesting or make your own.
Sleepbot
Sleep is one of the most important time of a humans life. Good sleeps have been researched and attributed to good physical and mental wellbeing. Since you can’t check how you sleep by yourself, Sleepbot runs while you sleep analyzing your movement, sounds you make and setting up an alarm for you to wake up on a set time. You can analyze your sleep patterns through the app and relate them (daily activities) to what are causing you to have bad sleep. Analyzing these pattern can help you avoid bad habits and get a proper and sound sleep.
One way i use this to analyze my sleep is to check the sleeps that have most movements and try to remember what i did that day. Making a record or something and then if the same actions are causing bad sleep, i try to avoid them next time and see if i get a better sleep.
Onavo extend is an online bandwidth compression application that allows you to compress data helping you save on your carrier data usage. This applications send HTTP data to their servers which compresses them so a smaller package is sent to you instead of a uncompressed data. You can set the image quality to low to get maximum compression while still being able to handle images in your data package. While the images are low in resolution, they aren’t that bad for the size of smart phones.
While this is a great way to save on your data packages the data is being routed through a third party server which can access your data, i would suggest not using it for private conversations, shopping and financial transacations
