iPhone Productivity Apps

There is a great list of 20 iPhone productivity on the Web Design Schools site that should help you weed through the many choices you have on Apples App Store.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I used one of the 3G iPhones for a while and I think they are awesome devices – and part of the allure is the robust (and growing) set of choices for applications.  I used some of the apps mentioned in this article but many were new to me, and they may be new to you, as well.

Why am I not using the iPhone any more?

A friend of mine reminded me yesterday that I never wrote anything here about why I dropped my iPhone 3G and went to a Blackberry (I’m now using a Blackberry Bold, which I really like).

Here is the short reason:  Many of the business-oriented tasks I perform frequently were very difficult to achieve on the iPhone since it’s not tailored for business use.  Here are my top 3:

• I couldn’t cut & paste.  I often send excerpts from articles, emails, etc. from my mobile device so this was very inconvenient.  This is very easy on my Blackberry.
• I couldn’t invite others to appointments (i.e. initiate meeting requests).  Sure I could create an appointment, respond to calendar invites, and such on the iPhone but I could not invite others to meetings.  In contrast, on the Blackberry I can do all of this and I can click a button to find the next available time slot in which all of my invitees are available.
• I couldn’t attach / forward contact information to others.  I often need to send virtual business card information (mine and others’) to people and this couldn’t be done on my iPhone.  This is a long-time function on Blackberry devices.

So that’s the short scoop on why I no longer use an iPhone.  I can still use many of the cool apps, by the way.  I upgraded my iPod Touch to the latest firmware which allows me to use any app in the App Store that isn’t exclusively for the iPhone.

Comments

[Todd V]

The iPhone, in its current configuration, is better at displaying information than it is at manipulating it. I suspect that with OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") Apple has as one of its goals to make the OS lighter so it can work on handheld devices. It probably won't happen for at least another year, but once the main OS is light enough to fit on these smaller devices the possibilities for handheld computing--though they are already really good--will get much better.

[Dwayne Melancon]

Fingers crossed, Todd! I hope they have a much better option for me when my 2-year period ends - I would love to move back to the iPhone.