8 must have mobile applications and services

Think your cellphone can work a trifle more harder than you do? Think it can keep you that much more connected to work, friends and family? Here’s a list of applications that you should have on your cellphone to keep you happy.



FoxyTag is a collaborative application which warns you 15 seconds before a speed camera. Now before you go all crazy and get a Bugatti Veyron from somewhere and go berserk on the roads after you get FoxyTag, read this from their website.
“FoxyTag motivates neither speeding nor any other risky behavior, but allows the driver to concentrate on the road instead of having their eyes fixed on the speedometer.” Right said.




With ZYB, you can be sure that you’ll never lose your contacts and calendar ever again. It safely stores all your calender/contacts online and you can synchronize it with a single click. Can be a boon when you are migrating cell phones or have just plain lost it; mind and/or mobile.


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Fring is to the mobile what Digsby is to the PC. It can keep you connected to Skype, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and Twitter. You’ve also got push mail and video streaming for screaming out loud! Agreed most of you don’t use most of things mentioned here, but a long options list is never a bad thing. Over and above that you can make VoIP calls as well, but in India, you’re going to get royally screwed with the exorbitant data transfer rates when making calls via VoIP. So, if you’re an Indian and have escaped recession, make VoIP calls only when you are in Wi-Fi hotspots.
(If you are having connectivity issues with Fring, you can also give eBuddy a shot. Head to m.ebuddy.com for a quick WAP fix or download the application from their site.)




Shozu is basically a photo and video upload application with quite a comprehensive list of destinations to where you can upload them. Flickr, Picasa and PhotoBucket are just the tip of the iceberg. It also brings Facebook right in your hands and you can do a fair bit with it. Upload images, update descriptions, check out friends’ photo feeds and keep track of events. Shozu can also double up as a mobile blogger’s paradise with support for Wordpress, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, Live Journal and what have you. And if you happen to have been bitten by the reporter bug, you can also report to BBC, CNN and Reuters with your pictures and videos. This thing also allows you to upload via FTP. Just falls short of taking your dog for a walk.



Like using Google Maps to find directions from your PC and laptop? You’re going to love Google Maps on Mobile then. It offers you the complete functionality of Google Maps right in the palm of your hands. You can switch from maps to terrain view to satellite view with a click and also find the best routes. And your phone need not have GPS inbuilt for using this. It uses approximation to well, approximate your location within 500 mts. Also, it’d have been great if Google compressed the data before sending it to us hapless Indian users. One simple map loading, zoom-in and zoom-out sequence takes up a good 0.25MB of data. What? Don’t look at me like that.

If you ask me, Opera Mini can easily be called the best innovation after the cellphone phone itself. A mid-server sitting somewhere in the Obama-land compresses all your web pages and sends it to you at just 1/10th of the size of the original web page. Also you can store all your bookmarks on Opera’s server and synchronize them between your PC and mobile; very useful when upgrading or such like. Supports uploading files, saving web pages, has a RSS reader and has a few themes in the latest version to suit your whims and fancies

If you are a Windows Mobile or Symbian S60 user, you could also try Skyfire.

GMail for Mobile is a simple Java application to access your Gmail account. It’s definitely faster and more efficient than trying to access it from your browser. Only problem is, you can’t attach anything.

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Wouldn’t the world be a better place if you could read your voice mail rather than hear it? This text could then be organized in so many ways and you could build a humongous archive of all your voice mails for future reference. Alright, this thing is still in the making but looks promising. Do signup and get yourself on the waiting list.
And oh yeah, if you’re a developer, they have a big buck challenge happening.