Apple's App Store Ahead in the Race
New evidence released by Business Week and Flurry indicates that Apple is winning the mobile app war against Android. The Apple App Store now attracts three times as many app submissions than Google’s Android Market, with many developers preferring iOS mainly because of the device fragmentation issues that continue to plague Android.
There are so many innovative and novel apps for the iPhone, that occasionally it can be quite hard to choose the very best amidst all the dross. There are loads of essential utilities in the App Store that really can make you more productive, and ultimately save you time organising all those pesky little tasks and reminders.
As a wise man once said, “Work smarter, not harder”, and in the same vein as yesterday’s post on iPad apps, here are 5 essential iPhone productivity apps to help in your quest for the ultimate tidy desk.
Developer: Quickoffice, Inc.
Price: £6.99 in iTunes
The ability to view and edit Microsoft Office files such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint always comes in handy, and that’s exactly what you get with Quickoffice. Besides a tonne of features, the interface is slick and it’s a pretty reasonable alternative to Apple’s own iWork. Continue reading
Looking for ways to organise your work life and become more productive? Then here are 5 essential iPad productivity apps that no iPad owner should be without. The choices were based on both personal experience and customer reviews.
In random order, here are the five of the most essential iPad productivity apps…
Developer: Apple
Pages is Apple’s own word processor, sharing many key features with it’s larger sibling on the Mac – which is part of the iWork suite.
The latest iPad version boasts most of the editing tools and features you’d expect – such as various text formatting options and the ability to insert charts, tables and pictures. Pages can also export into Word and PDF formats, and wirelessly print documents using Apple’s AirPrint. One minor issue is that it doesn’t allow you to create sub-folders in which to store files, but unless you have absolutely dozens of folders it’s not much of a problem.
Pages on the iPad is not especially advanced stuff by any means, but regular users of Mac Pages will find the interface familiar and comfortable. Sharing documents between the two devices is simple using either iTunes or iWork.com (part of the iCloud service).
Unsurprisingly, Pages is consistently the top-grossing product in the Apple App Store, which testifies to its popularity (or the fact that there aren’t many decent alternatives).
Price: £6.99 on iTunes Continue reading
Here is a list of the top 10 must have Android Apps as of February 2012. I’ve based this on my personal experience with apps, but also based on reviews and user ratings on the Android Market. I’ve tried to only pick one app in each category to keep the list diverse (for example only one keyboard app even though there are more than one excellent apps for that).
As with the 10 Best Android Games I’ve again picked paid apps for this article, some of them are available in free versions so you can test them out before committing to the purchase. Apps tend to be a bit more expensive than games, so it’s usually worth it to test the free version out first and see if the app fit your needs.
iBooks 2 on the iPad
iBooks 2
Apple aims to shake up the lucrative education market with the unveiling of the iBooks 2 e-reader app on Thursday, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
iBooks 2 supports more interactive books with embedded multimedia clips, animation, photos and HTML.
The release was also accompanied by a brand new section in the iBookstore offering textbooks and study materials.
At launch, there are only a dozen or so iBooks textbooks available, but the collection will expand rapidly as more publishers come onboard.
Apple’s iPad has been a massive hit in the education sector – after all, it can hold hundreds of books, and credible studies have suggested that an iPad can help improve student performance. For instance, US publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt recently stated that its pilot iPad schools program helped 78% of students score the top grades, compared to just 59% that used traditional textbooks. The iTunes U store is also immensely popular with schools and universities, especially in the US, who use it as a convenient method to distribute course materials such as audio lectures and curriculum details. Continue reading
Looking for new games for your Android phone? Then look no further, this is the list of the 10 must have games for your Android device as of February 2012. I made this list with paid games only because I think it’s such small amounts we are talking about when it comes to price, so really it’s a question of buy, try and trash it if you don’t like it. Only very few of the games are more than a dollar or two. You can also get free versions of most of them, so you can try out a limited version before you commit to buying the full version.
If you have ideas for other great games, please do share them with us in the comment box below.