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My Five Favorite Free iPhone Apps

As you may have heard Apple announced this past week that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the App Store for iPhone® and iPod touch®.  "Now customers in 77 countries can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. App Store users have downloaded well over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store."

In talking with friends though it is a daunting task to find apps for your iPhone that are useful... so I wanted to share with you today my Five Favorite Free iPhone Apps.  At least one of them you already have but there are some cool options it provides and wanted to ensure you knew about these as well.  These 5 apps are not necessarily revolutionary and definitely not mind-blowing but I find these very practical and useful.

  • Clock
  • Cell Tracker
  • The Weather Channel
  • Flashlight
  • Flixster

IMG_0299

Clock

This app comes pre-loaded with/on your iPhone (and is one of the apps that cannot be deleted).  So the clock is not earth-shattering but it is cool that you can add other time-zones.  Because I have customers in many different time zones I can quickly glance at this app and see the relative time where they are.

And the screen shots below highlight the other neat functions available in this application:

              Stop watch function (with lap function)                                     Timer Function

               I used this at Soccer practice this Fall                         I love the spinning dial & the different tones

IMG_0300                                            IMG_0301

Cell Tracker

IMG_0296 It is helpful to be able to quickly check how many minutes you've racked up in your current billing cycle, isn't it?  I downloaded and tried the AT&T application but frankly found it cumbersome, and took too long to provide me the info I wanted quickly. 

So I found a great free app called 'Cell Tracker'.  It's by a company called 'PageOnce'.  I also use their application on my computers that is an online database of sorts, providing a one-screen glance at all your info (more on that computer application in a future post).  But this free app shows you the current billing cycle, your minutes used vs. plan minutes, your messages and text history (by quantity, not info). 

When launching the first time you need to connect to your online AT&T account but after that it shows the info after a minute or two.  Since the app is free, it does regularly start up with a screen 'Want to see our other apps?.  Just click 'back' at the top left and it takes you to your Cell Minute Tracker.

The Weather Channel

Now there is another free app dealing with Weather and it even comes with your iPhone.  It is appropriately called 'Weather'  It provides a real time update of the weather for the next 6 days (including today) and is fed by Yahoo Weather.  The neat thing about that app is you can add other cities pretty easily (by clicking on the tiny 'i' at bottom right corner.  Then you can slide back and forth between cities (something I do when I am planning a trip out of state) so I know how best to pack.IMG_0297

But I like the Weather Channel app even better.  It provides (what I think) is more accurate  weather conditions and has the ability right in the app to view hour by hour as well as 36-hour and 10-day weather forecasts. There's also severe weather alerts, weather maps, videos available in the app from the Weather Channel.



Flashlight

Flashlight icon This is one of the most basic of apps but one I have used on several occasions. I think it may also have been one of the first I loaded when I got my new iPhone.  Flashlight, when pressed simply brings a solid white screen to your iPhone.  This again is VERY helpful for a quick light at night or in dark spots (like behind the entertainment center, etc).  It won't replace your halogen or new LED flashlight but is very handy to have available.


Flixster

This free iPhone app is from the good folks at NetFlix... if you like to go to the movies this is a helpful application to have with you.  There are several screens to choose from: Box IMG_0302Office with what is new , what's popular and the ability to search a title; Upcoming which shows the soon to be released movies by date; DVD which displays movies on DVD in categories (New, Coming Soon, search) and the category I use the most... Theaters.

This lets you set your zip code and see the movies playing in the theaters nearest you.  Click on the Theater name and up pops the contact info as well as the titles & show times for that day. Very handy indeed!

Note: I should mention that each time the Flixster app launches there is a move advert but you can easily press the 'skip' button at bottom to go to the application.

You can find and download each of the above four applications in the Apps store at iTunes.


You may also be interested in these previous articles from Your Technology Tutor:

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