Issue #69
Last Update October 31, 2010
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Technology Smartphone Apps by Sten Grynir October 24, 2009 Smart phones are the Swiss Army knives of the digital world: in one small gadget, you have every device you could need. Not that these phones really replace your laptop, camera, guitar tuner, TV, guidebook, first aid manual, ebook reader, newspaper, compass, level, GPS and piano, but if lost in the woods with only a smart phone you could make your phone function as each of these, and more. The results would, in some cases, be unsatisfactory, and certainly not as good as the dedicated device, but they would be good enough for an emergency. To give you an idea of the scope of the app offerings, here is a short roundup. There are four major smart phone platforms to consider: Apple's proprietary iPhone OS, open source Android, Palm's proprietary Palm webOS, Blackberry's Java-based platform and Windows Mobile.
Apple-approved iPhone apps are available only through the iTunes store. Finding your way through the reputed 100,000 apps used to be simple: turn on iTunes, go to the app store, then select one of the categories into which the apps are organized: books, business, education, entertainment, finance, games, healthcare and fitness, productivity, utilities, lifestyle, medical, music, navigation, news, photography, reference, social networking, sports, travel, and weather. In addition to the approved apps, unapproved apps are also available, but first you have to “jailbreak” your iPhone, that is, install a hack that frees the phone from some of Apple's restrictions. This can be risky, and lets you in for a game of Whack-A- Mole, as Apple periodically changes its OS to kill the jailbreaking, and jailbreakers then respond with a new jailbreak method. A number of software sites make apps available for jailbroken iPhones.
Android apps are available through the Android Market, as well as number of independent sites. The Android Market shows you a few of the most popular apps, and then tells you that to view all of the apps available, you must use an android-based handset. That's pretty dumb, since one of the main criteria for smart phone purchase is whether or not apps are available to do the things you consider important. If you can't view the available apps until you have an android phone, how do you make that decision?
As a PDA manufacturer, Palm had already amassed a collection of pretty good applications, including office suites and specialized applications for navigation, accepting credit card payments and many other tasks. Palm provides an interface that allows the PDA applications to run on webOS devices, as well as many native webOS apps.
Apps have been written directly for the Blackberry, and a pretty good selection of iPhone apps have been engineered to also run on the Blackberry. Blackberry Appworld is the official Blackberry app store, but many other sites sell Blackberry applications.
Windows Marketplace is the Microsoft site for Windows Mobile apps, but, since Windows Mobile has been around for quite a while, many other sites sell apps for Windows-based phones.
With iPhone apps mostly in the free to $0.99 range (some are as much as $5.99, with a few specialized apps costing real money), the temptation to download a zillion apps is almost irresistible. Smart phones have become a major games platform. Since games are so much a matter of personal taste, they will not be dealt with here, but there are a lot of them available, and many are of high quality. The remaining apps can be divided into personal and business categories. On the business side, there are office suites that include spreadsheets with Excel compatibility, word processing programs with Word compatibility (as well as other document formats), PDF readers, group calendaring and email, and a host of specialized apps for electronic design, geological surveying and other professional interests. There are translation apps for converting text from one language to another (which work surprisingly well), including one ingenious one for medical personnel that can be used to elicit information about a medical problem from a non-English speaking patient ( in the Cantonese and Mandarin versions, the user selects from a list of medical questions, which are then translated into both spoken and written Chinese. The patient is then instructed, in his or her native language, to indicate an answer by a gesture or a nod.) For IT personnel and people who are really computer-literate there are standard apps such as SSH, telnet, ftp client (and server), VPN, and remote desktop applications.
On the personal side, apps include ebook readers, photography (programs that crop and edit pictures taken with the phone's camera and allow storage and emailing of the results), finder apps for wifi sites, restaurants, gas stations, etc., lots of music apps, including tuners, metronomes and emulation of musical instruments, news apps that track feeds from newspapers, wire services and TV news, navigation apps (maps, GPS), stock and commodities prices and apps that maintain and track your investment portfolio, recording apps for music and voice, lots of reference apps (dictionaries, encyclopedias), emergency information (first aid manuals, Department of Homeland Security reference materials, pharmaceutical references, etc.), scanning applications that allow you scan bar codes and find out where that item is being sold cheapest, apps for You Tube and Facebook, video viewers and downloaders, stopwatches and timers, and many more. If all of this has worn you out, there’s a nap for that.
Although the iPhone has a big head start in the app world, it is reasonable to believe that applications for the Android will become almost as numerous (and potentially far more flexible) once Android phones become common enough to attract developers. Similarly, the popularity of the Blackberry amongst business users has already promoted the development of high-end business apps. Windows Mobile and Palm webOS face other application development problems. Windows Mobile does not have a great reputation, and may well lose out to Apple and Android, while Palm lacks market share to draw in developers, although the interoperability of its phone and PDA programs will ensure a pool of good software for Palm smart phone users.
The smart phone is poised to become the pocket computer of choice, and programmers recognize the profit potential in this. Look for the app choice to become ever larger and more sophisticated.
New York Stringer is published by NYStringer.com. For all communications, contact David Katz, Editor and Publisher, at david@nystringer.com