Tech Essentials | The best business mobile apps for your phone

The best in new business technology

Jul 1, 2010  

by Gunnar Blodgett

Apply Yourself

Mobile application stores may have just celebrated their second year of existence, but they’re already all grown up. Yet while mobile applications – “apps” – for smart phones (iPhone, Blackberry, and Google’s new Android) have made the move from niche to normal, that evolution has also produced a dizzying array of competing and often confusing apps.

The increasingly dense universe of smart phone apps range from the pointless to the productive, but while the former can be amusing – a game that times your attempt to unspool a virtual roll of toilet paper, for example – it is the latter in which Alberta Venture was most interested. The more productive apps aren’t just colourful time wasters, either, but tools that can make their already-powerful smart phones even more useful.

Many of the most popular smart phone apps focus on leveraging the built-in features of the phone itself, whether it’s the location-based mapping services use of the phones’ portability and built-in GPS technology or the attempts of the various media players to harness the ever-improving audio/video output.

There are others, though, that seek to add a layer of pragmatic functionality to the multimedia capacities that are now standard features on the average smart phone. A few of these more practical apps, listed under “Business” in the iTunes App Store, the BlackBerry App World and the Android App Market may turn out to be keepers. We have presented a few of the more interesting entries in this important new category.

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