So I have been experimenting with various apps over the last one month, since I got my new Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 Mango (can’t stress the handset and the O/S enough you see :))
I shall touch upon some of the apps in this blogpost – this will be an ongoing blogpost that I shall keep updating as and when new apps are downloaded.
One really awesome feature of WP is that most of the apps can be pinned to the home page as “Live” tiles. “Live” tiles is the USP of the Metro UI. So the app in each tile keeps getting updated in the background at a predetermined frequency and shows up the latest value on the home page. Nice animations too.
Top five recommended apps:
1: Moneycontrol – Free – Brilliant app this one is. For all moneycontrol fans, this app is actually even better than the web based version! The home page of the app neatly shows all the indices – large cap, small cap, sectoral, Asian, developed markets and more than what you would want to look for. Slide right and you get a list of market movers, top losers, top gainers, active by value, volume, 52-week high/low. Slide right again and you get a bunch of commodities. The next screen is for currencies and finally a screen for all other sections – news, messages, videos, your portfolio etc.
The best thing about the app is it has a very simple, minimalistic and extremely pleasing UI – very much in-tune with the Metro concept. The live tile on the home screen even updates with the latest news and pops up a message once in a while on the Sensex/Nifty.
2: Nextgen Reader – Free – One of the finest apps installed on my phone and like moneycontrol, this is one I would much rather use on the phone than the desktop. This is a google reader app. It also gives me an option to read the text on ‘instapaper’ which almost feels like actually reading it on paper.
3: Shazam – Rs 310 -An app for music buffs and frequent visitors to pubs. So imagine you are listening to a song in the pub and you like it so much but are unable to recall the singer/album. Simply switch on Shazam and it will ‘listen’ to the song for just 10 seconds and not only identify the details but will also give you the entire lyrics, and the history of the song/album alongwith biographies of the singer. This is an extremely successful app across platforms. But I could not experiment much with it as I only have a trial version. Moreover, the lyrics part does not work in India which is a real bummer especially if you want to go for a paid version.
4: WhatsApp – Free – No description needed for this. If you are not aware of WhatsApp, please google out. This is a must have app on any phone. But honestly, the interface on the Blackberry and even the Symbian is much better than the one in WP. For e.g; it does not store my previous status updates in the system. So each time I need to change my status, I have to type it out entirely afresh. Secondly, the app takes quite sometime to start, on other O/S its always there – instantaneous.
5: Poynt – Free -Something similar to Foursquare. It helps locate restaurants, coffee joints, movie theatres and other places of interest at whatever location you are currently in. While Poynt results are almost always relevant, foursquare had always thrown up useless ones. The thing with foursquare is it gives you the results that are ‘most popular’ among foursquare users, not every place that is necessarily closer to where you are looking for or what might be of interest to you.
Note: While all these are great apps, except for Nextgen Reader, I do not use the others very actively.
Top five personal favorites:
6: Daily Horoscope – Free – I realize I may come across as a horoscope freak here, but I think it is fun to read them! So this app gives the daily horoscope for each sun sign, compatibility between different signs, and horoscope for Chinese signs.
7: My Expenses – Free – As the name suggests. The app allows you to enter the expense header (Personal/Official etc), description (eg. BBQ nation), amount, and category (there are a lot of pre-defined categories like Food/Transportation/Household, but you can add your own as well). The app gives you a weekly view, monthly view and even chart views of your expenses. There is also an option to email the details.
8: a)Shopping list – Free – This is a single page app All you can do is add your list of shopping items or delete them.
b)My Shopping List – Free -This allows you to categorize your lists. E.g: you can have ‘Household items’ as one and “Gifts” as another list. But then the more features you add in an app, the more time consuming it gets to use them. While the first app is just – ‘enter app’, ‘click +’, ‘enter name’ the second app involves ‘enter app’, ‘click new list’, ‘click +’, ‘enter name’, ‘click save’. Already two steps more.
Both the apps don’t allow you to edit existing items. You need to delete and add afresh.
All the above three apps I use on a daily basis. In my Symbian phone, 7 and 8 used to be written on notes, so I find these apps quite handy.
9: SleepMaster – Rs 110/- Monitors your sleeping pattern. Set up the alarm for the time you want to wake up and start the app, keep it next to your pillow. Make sure it is plugged into the charger as this is a real battery drainer. Or alternatively, switch to flight mode to save battery. When you wake up, you get to know how you slept 🙂 – sleep rate percentage, the times when you actually woke up in the middle of your sleep, all charted out nicely.
10: The Weather Channel – Free – I use this app on a daily basis and its generally fun to compare weather conditions across cities at different times during the day. It was this app that told me that it was 12 degrees Celsius at 8 am in the morning with a humidity of 10% a few days ago! You can add as many cities as you want in the list to compare the ‘current temperature’. The only issue I have is with the frequency of update – it is different for different cities and does not give a very accurate comparison in that sense.
To be continued…
Juggling my thoughts... 