Phoning it in with new applications

If you’re like me, and with any modicum of luck you’re not, the price of a good quality smartphone is made all the more dear by your tendency to lose the cursed thing.

The good people at SmrtGuard have my backing though. Their application, which allows you to remotely track and lock your smartphone should it turn up missing, could put an end to the lost phone blues.

In my case, nine times out of ten that would mean using satellite-powered GPS-optimised super-technology to find out that my phone is sitting in my car in the driveway... but it still might be worth it.

No matter where you come down on the whole Kindle versus iPad debate, the Kindle mobile app may hold some appeal.

This free app allows you to preview the first chapter of any available eBook so that you need never go without reading material again.

Simply sample books that interest you and purchase those that have you hooked in the first chapter, as any good book should.

When you finish catching up on the actual news at gulfnews.com, take a look at the hilariously on-point, yet completely fake, journalism of the Onion News Network. This free app will keep you up to date on the latest news from “area man,” while providing a merciless parody of celebrity culture, politics and just about everything else.

You know that song, the one with the big hook in the chorus that gets stuck in your head every time it comes on Radio 1, what’s it called again?

Well, the truth is I have no idea, but luckily there’s a little app called Shazam that allows you to hold your phone up to the speaker when the song is playing and Shazam will quickly identify both the title and the artist; no more waiting for the DJ to come back and (maybe) tell you what the set list was.

OK, so you probably already know at least one devotee of Angry Birds, a clever little game that involves a slingshot, the eponymous birds, and a bit of rough physics and geometry.

But really, this was the smartphone game of 2010. By the time you read this it will be retro and therefore even better.

Sometimes having fun actually involves breaking a sweat. Using your smartphone’s GPS radio to track the pace, distance, time, route, and elevation of your running (as well as jogging, fast walking, or power crawling, etc) the RunKeeper app helps compile a history of your exercise routine that is stored on RunKeeper’s website through sync functionality.

Armed with this information, you’ll have no choice but to admit when you’re slacking off.

Finally, chances are good that, if you reside in the UAE you probably spend at least some of your leisure time at the mall.

FastMall offers a fully-mapped floor plan of Dubai Mall on your phone, making navigation of the great retail maze that much easier to manage.

Give your phone a shake and it will offer you a path to the nearest restroom; pure genius for those with small children or, er, small bladders.

Typecasting

Word Lens combines your phone’s built in camera, optical character recognition technology (OCR), and a multi-lingual translation dictionary to instantly convert text written in one Romance language to another, thus rendering a new image with the translated text overlaid. In the online demo video for Word Lens, we see an iPhone held up to a sign in Spanish, on the screen the same sign is displayed with English text. Two small qualms though, it’s currently for iPhone only, and there’s no support for a large number of languages, including Arabic, which would be really handy. According to Word Lens publisher, Quest Visual, additional languages will be forthcoming.

Google Goggles is sort of a word lens, but instead it captures an image of a word or logo etc, and then runs a Google search for that item. If you’re a lazy typist like me, you could even use Google Goggle to navigate to gulfnews.com by simply scanning the masthead. Or, use it to import a new contact from the individual’s business card. Your fingers will thank you later.

Alternatively, Google Goggles represents a tool for learning about the world around you; hold it up to Picasso’s Guernica and Google will give you an art history lesson. Or, use Google Goggles to learn about a landmark; the online demo shows someone using Google Goggles to shoot San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge. Someone should try it on the Burj Khalifa and report back to us.

Speaking of not typing, Swype which is bundled with newer Android phones, offers an alternative data input method by which you drag your index finger in a continuous line across the virtual keyboard, connecting all the letters in the word you wish to spell, making sure to circle any double letters. This quick method uses predictive text to present a list of possible matches, and actually works quite well.

Gesture is a little bit like Swype, in that you use your index finger to “draw” in data, but in this case you draw the shape of a letter and gesture searches your phone for matches. For instance, to pull up Angry Birds you could enter an “A” into gesture. If you simply have too many results for “A”, entering a subsequent “N” should bring Angry Birds close to the top of your results.

Bar Code is a bar code scanner app that allows you to, well, scan bar codes. Why is that useful? Aside from the potential to perform price checks at your favourite retailer, which as far as we know isn’t really available yet, Bar Code is handy because many app download sites are now providing hyperlinks via barcode. Simply scan the barcode on screen and your phone will start downloading the corresponding application.