I’ve had my iPhone 3GS now for nearly 6 months and although I miss the qwerty keyboard a bit from my Sony Ericsson X1, I’m very happy with it. What I love about my iPhone is that when I’m away from my home PC I’m still able to perform most functions and keep my little business going. Here are my favourite iPhone productivity applications:
Lastpass
I’ve only been using lastpass on my PC for a few weeks and after using it for 5 minutes I upgraded to the premium lastpass service that lets you autologin to web sites – ideal for the iPhone as it also doubles up as a bookmark sync tool. Great value at $1 per month as my passwords are very strong with a mixture of uppercase, lowercase, special characters and numbers so logging on with an iPhone is very difficult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0ywFSKX1k8
IM+ Instant Messaging
This month I did a massive cleanup of my IM contacts as I has so many contacts I barely knew that it was impossible for me to work if I ever logged in. Now with fewer IM contacts I can concentrate so I’m using IM+ on my iPhone again as it allows me to stay logged into all networks in one client: MSN, google talk, skype, twitter, myspace, facebook, jabber, ICQ , Yahoo and AIM. Not free, but well worth the money.
ReQall
After searching for a good note/task manager I eventually settled upon ReQall and I haven’t regretted it. This great intelligent app allows me to quickly store powerful notes and tasks e.g I can type:
‘Ask Sara To Call Sonia on Monday’
will automatically add a task for my wife on her ReQall to call Sonia our bank manager on Monday.
Notes can be left by voice, email, IM and even SMS, so anytime I think of something I just quickly write a note and ReQall automatically organises it for me.
The corny video below shows ReQall in action:
SugarSync
Out of the box the online backup and synchronisation service doesn’t support Windows Home Servers, but after some tinkering I managed to install Sugarsync on my WHS box. Now using the Sugarsync iPhone application I can access all my documents, music and photos easily on the move.
WHS Mobile
With my SugarSync account I can only backup 250GB of data, but with the WHS Mobile app I can access remotely the full contents of my WHS as well as:
- manage files stored in the shared folders
- stream mediastart/stop FTP sites with FTP Manager
- upload files to my home server
There are a number of apps I would love to get on my iPhone:
- A banking app from Royal Bank of Scotland. Natwest who are owned by RBS have just released one, so I hope RBS won’t be far behind
- Apps from Google to track Google Adsense, Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager
- An app from Disqus to help me manage comments on my site
What productivity apps could you not live without on your iPhone?
