Top iPhone Productivity Apps

Got that nice, shiny, new ( be careful how you hold it! ) iPhone 4 and you aren’t sure what to do with it? Well, we are here to help.

Below is our completely biased list of productivity apps. We’ve cut it down to 10, because we only include the ones we actually use! There may be ‘better’ ones out there, but these are our faves.

Special note: we favor price and ease of use. There are great apps out there, some charging yearly fees for services, we largely ignore them, as there are great apps doing nearly the same job for free; ya’ just gotta look! Also we tried to make note of the ones that are iPad compatible, as there is lots of crossover here.

NOTE: Click on app icons for iTunes link

Tasks, Lists & Notes

Notifyme2

This is one of our favorite apps, and gets almost daily use. Need to remember the Milk? Set up a notification. They‚Äôve updated it recently so that it works locally ( on the phone ), previously it would save your notification to the cloud. That was fine, but invariably we found ourselves creating reminders on the run and out of Wi-Fi or cell service. $5.99 for premium and also a free version, it only works on the iPhone right now, as they upgraded to support iOS 4.

Evernote is an insanely popular notes app that lets you take quick, geo-aware, voice, text, and image notes. The app can sync with Evernote’s desktop and web versions. Available on both the iPad and iPhone; the iPad version looks sweet and slick, whilst the iPhone version has iOS 4 support! It has all the bells and whistles, and offers a premium version.

Checklist  doesn‚Äôt offer much, it‚Äôs just a list app, but it‚Äôs a very simple alternative for managing a to-do list. Some of these kinds of apps have turned us off, we want a list app, not another roommate that we have to keep up with. This fills the bill and at only $ 0.99

Account and password management

eWallet offers password management with 256-bit AES encryption, and the ability to sync information to a PC. You cab store your passwords, PIN numbers, user names, bank accounts, travel clubs, etc.m  and on and on. We used this when travelling overseas, we stored all important information on it. You can password protect all the information. At $9.99 it‚Äôs pricey, but worth it.

editor note:  password1 is another great alternative for mac users.

File/computer resources

?FileMagnet lets you copy files from your PC or Mac onto the iPhone, making it a veritable portable drive. You can also transfer files wirelessly with their FileMagnet Uploader, it’s an additional download. $4.99 in the app store.

ACTPrinter this app, with the free companion software, lets Mac users “print” documents for easy iPhone access. As a nice bonus, all bar codes from documents can be scanned right from the iPhone’s screen, making it more convenient than printing physical copies of boarding passes or electronic tickets. $0.99

Search

Google Mobile App when it comes to search we are ‘old school’ we love the Google machine. Along with the myriad of other things you can do, the Google Mobile App lets you search with your voice. Open the app, select the Search tab at the bottom, lift the phone to your ear and speak very clearly. Make sure you really enunciate those voice queries, though, because the voice recognition software can be temperamental.?

Reading Online and Off

Read It Later lets you save pages to read later, it provides complete access to your reading list wherever you are. Read It Later can download offline copies of your pages so you can still read when you are offline or in airplane mode.

Instapaper lets users create offline versions of web articles for easy access and viewing when the web is just out of reach. You’ll need to visit the Instapaper website to create an account and get the Read Later bookmark, but once that’s done you can use the app to view your bookmarked pages. The pro version costs $9.99 ( !! ) but adds position-saving, tilt scrolling, and adjustable fonts.

Goodreader is a PDF reader for the iPad and iPhone, comes in free and premium versions, made a little redundant by the improvements to the iBooks app, but it is sleek with a natural intuitive interface that we like. We always us it over the native options.