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.

Hoax Email

Message claims that you can help pay medical costs for baby Manuela, a child with a rare disease who needs an operation, just by forwarding the email to at least three people.

This message is a hoax. No money will be raised by forwarding an email. Any message that makes such a claim is almost certainly bogus. The photographs attached to this message appear to be genuine. However, regardless of the severity of this unidentified child's condition, rest assured that forwarding this message will not help her in anyway whatsoever.


Example
Subject: FW: FOTOS MANUELA - help

Dear All

Please see pics below:

The mother is 29 years old her baby girl by the name Manuela has a very rare disease and she needs to have an operation but the parents cannot afford, so if you can send at least to three people this E-mail she will get 32 centimos per E-mail.

[Photographs of baby with severe skin condition removed]



Detailed Analysis
This message, which includes a series of photographs depicting a baby with a severe skin condition or burns, claims that you can pay her medical bills simply by sending on the email. The email claims that the child - identified only as "Manuela" - will receive 32 centimos per email if it is forwarded to three or more recipients.

However, the claims in the email are untrue. In fact, this message is just one more in a long line of similar hoaxes that claim that a sick child will receive donations every time a particular message is forwarded. Any message that makes such a claim is certain to be a hoax. No legitimate company or charitable organization is ever likely to participate in a fund-raising scheme that is based on how many times an email is forwarded. Any such claim is simply absurd. As is often the case in such hoaxes, the message does not provide any means of verifying the information in the message. In fact, this variant of the hoax is even vaguer than others of its ilk in that the entity supposedly donating the 32 centimos is not even identified. Nor is the child identified other than by her first name.

Moreover, even in the extremely unlikely event that some entity did agree to participate in such a ridiculous charity scheme there would be simply no reliable method of tracking how many times the message was actually forwarded. Thus, accurately tracking how much money was due to be donated would be virtually impossible.

This version of the hoax comes with a series of photographs showing a baby with a severe skin condition that may be the result of disease or very serious burns. The photographs themselves appear to be genuine. I have not included copies of these disturbing images in this article, because the moronic and heartless prankster who created this hoax may well have used them without the permission or knowledge of the baby's family.

With so little information to go on, it is difficult to identify the child in the photographs or report on her current condition. However, regardless of this poor child's current status, rest assured that forwarding this email will do nothing whatsoever to aid her predicament. "Manuela" will not receive one single centimo as a result of forwarding this message. In fact, the continued circulation of the child's images may do no more than add to the distress of her family and carers.

Charity prank emails of this nature are among the most heinous and nasty of all Internet hoaxes. If you receive a message that claims that money will be raised to help a sick child just by forwarding an email, please help to stop its continued circulation. Do not forward the message to others. And take a moment to let the sender know that the message is a hoax.