SmallBizResource Blog -- Mobility

Free Apps For Your iPhone

Posted by Gayle Kesten Monday, Oct 27, 2008, 12:25 PM ET

Now that my cell-phone plan is up and I'm free to choose a new one sans penalty, InformationWeek's roundup of cool Web applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch is putting me in an Apple kind of mood.

Its baker's dozen of free apps, available from Apple's Apple Store, are:

1. Facebook: Lets you do many of the things you can do from your desktop, including checking out your friends' status updates, use Facebook Chat, upload your own photos, read your News Feed and comments, run a search, manage friend requests, view your in-box, and more.

2. LinkedIn: Tap into your professional network on the go. Get updates from your network, find needed contact information, read profiles, update your status and review your own profile. The iPhone app integrates with your address book -- you can find a contact on your network, then quickly copy their contact information to your address book.

3. Pandora: Build and listen to free, streaming radio stations on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

4. Remote: Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a remote-control for your desktop iTunes or Apple TV. You can select music, play, pause, skip, shuffle, view album art, edit playlists, search your iTunes library, control AirTunes speakers, and more.

5. NYTimes: Read the latest articles. The app stores content locally on your iPhone or Touch, so you can access the Times even when you're offline.

6. Sportacular: Up-to-the minute scores, standings, stats, and news for major pro and college sports, including MLB, NHL, MLS, and NCAA football and basketball games.

7. Instapaper: Bookmarks and copies Web articles to your iPhone or Touch to read when you're away from your computer, formatted for the smaller mobile display and accessible even when you don't have an Internet connection.

8. Now Playing: Shows you local movie schedules and summaries, plays trailers, and lets you order tickets from participating theaters.

9. Stanza: An e-book reader that connects with Internet libraries of millions of free titles. Browse and download the volumes directly from your iPhone or Touch, then read them at your leisure, even when you're disconnected from the Internet. Or you can use Stanza's desktop application to convert files in Word, PDF, or other popular formats for reading on your mobile device.

10. Twitterific: Keep up with all your Twitter friends when you're out and about. Send and view messages, photos, and location updates. Twiterific includes its own mini-browser, so you don't have to shut down Twitterific and launch the iPhone's built-in Web browser just to view links people post to Twitter.

11. Wikipanion: Access Wikipedia articles formatted for easy reading on the iPhone or iPod Touch. You can run searches directly from Wikipedia without having to first navigate to the Wikipedia page.

12. Yelp: Access the Web-based social networking service for reviews of local restaurants, businesses, services, parks -- just about everything under the sun -- all over the U.S. and Canada. With your permission, Yelp accesses your location using the iPhone or iPod Touch's location awareness, and then runs searches near you.

13. 1Password: Keeps an encrypted store of your logins and passwords, and the URLs associated with them, along with credit-card and bank account numbers, and freeform text notes.

Any others you'd like to add?

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