Tech Insight - Must-have phone apps

Tech Insight by Mr. A.

Hello techies, its been a long while and I’m sure we all got some nice stuff for Christmas. Hope you remembered the reason for the season is Jesus Christ.

Well I realized that most of us buy phones and we don’t know which apps to use for our music, video playing, productivity check, firewalls etc. we end up installing apps that drain our batteries, swipe our data and give us little of what we need. So I did a little research into the matter and after asking around I came up with these. Feel free to make suggestions in your comment.

1. Music Apps: we know we all love music. Now for avid listeners who like their sounds good I suggest TTpod. Its got awesome visuals, favourite your songs, cool equalizers for almost any scope. Best of all you get to download lyrics to songs and cool album art. There are others like Apollo but they aren’t so good. Then if you don’t know the song title and you love it, you shouldn’t miss out on Shazam. 
       Shazam listens to a song and give you the title, album, artist, lyrics and all the details then you can go online and find it. Soundhound also offers close functionality but not as cool as Shazam.   Video apps: I know most of us know this and there are so many out there so I will just say a few. VLC and MX Player. I rank these tops because they have good support. VLC shows all videos in your phone, allows you play standard avi files and good at rendering heavy videos.

2. Security: Many of us don’t have mobile security apps which is bad especially for android users, you guys are target market for viruses. So here are a few good antiviruses:

a.    AVAST mobile security

b.    Android firewall(though you will need root access for this)

c.    Droid wall

d.    AVG

e.    TrustGo

f.     360 security

Most PC antiviruses have mobile versions for Android so sometimes its best to use the same antivirus software for PC and phone. For iPhone and Windows users you may not need any securities. Same goes for Blackberry.

3. Camera apps: These are the birth of the hot, nice pix we post all over the net. Besides the camera app that comes with the phone, we have quite a few good cameras that knock the socks off. I’ve used the Lumia 1020 and I think it’s the phone with the largest camera app collection owing to the 41MP trump card.
        I think the most useful app in this category is Camera 360 which doubles as an editor in a way, I know we all have one on our phones. Its very good and integrates easily with the phones camera. Cymera is also a good one though it’s afar from Camera 360. After the picture comes the editing.

iPhones have relatively good custom camera apps so I wont put any up since I haven’t tested them.

For windows, Super Camera, Lazy Camera, Sketch camera, HDR Photo Camera are available.

BB10 users can go for Camera++.

          4. Note Taking apps: our phones aren’t complete without something to take notes ‘cos you don’t know when that sweet idea will hit you and you don’t have pen or paper. Apps like Evernote(all), Springpad, MS OneNote(Windows), Simplenote, Catch(iOS) Notepad, Notes, Memo(BB7.1), Remember(BB10) and so on. Theres a large variety of these without their pros and cons but the best still remains Evernote ‘cos of its ability to take notes like a word processor and upload to a secure server.  

         5. Photo editing: We all have our preferred choices depending on what type of edits you into. For photo editing, I would call on Photoshop but since we hardly have a full mobile version we have other substitutes for Android like PicsArt, Aviary, Adobe Photoshop Express, Photoshop Touch, Ph.to Lab. Some use Picmix to edit their photos. 

             For iPhone users, you can use Manual or Photoshop Touch are amongst the best options. For Blackberry 10 devices, you can make use of the Android apps and also Magic Photos. Windows also share similar apps with android and aslo has Photo!, PhotoFunia.

          6. Productivity apps: These include the calculators, weather(Accuweather), tips apps, maps(Here, Nokia maps, Google maps etc), fitness apps(Sportrate), alarm clocks etc. These category you can dabble in based on reviews and your needs.

Thanks guys for sticking with us through this year. Please we would really appreciate feedback from you guys on what we could do better, help us to help you.

Sayonara (Goodbye)

Happy New Year!  

12:04