Friday, December 9, 2011

7 Quick Apps: Loved your suggestions!

I've downloaded and played with quite a few apps in the past week, thanks to all of your suggestions, and I wanted to share my favorites so far.

1) Shazam: A few months ago, we were watching the trailer to Crazy, Stupid Love and heard a Radiohead-esque song. So we did what all cavemen do (i.e. people without smartphones and the shazam app), we went to google and searched "what is that song on the crazy stupid love trailer?" Needless to say, we never could find it. Enter Shazam. We pulled up the trailer on youtube, opened up the app, and bam! we learned it was by Muse, called Starlight, and do you want to buy the MP3 at Amazon? Do you want to see when they are on tour? Would you like the lyrics? Love it!!


2) Skype: Bogdan was traveling for work earlier this week and so almost every night we used Skype (which is normal when he's out of town) but I could use skype on my phone! Yay! I'm amazed at the video quality on the Skype app - but it does drain my battery. Still, very cool to be able to open the app on my phone and video chat with my hubby.

3) Gesture Search: This one is a huge time saver. Instead of having to open up "contacts" clicking on "Favorites" and then finding Bogdan's name to call him (or whoever) I can now open up the Gesture app and draw a huge letter "B" and up pops Bogdan's phone (as well as anything else on my phone that starts with a "B"). And it's by Google, so you know the search is good.

4) Amazon Price Checker: This one is great! I've only used it a couple of times, but I can see how very useful it will be. We were at Target this past weekend buying something and I wondered, "is this cheaper on Amazon?" We scanned the barcode and found it was $5 more on Amazon. Nice to know.

5) Keyring: Don't you hate having so many reward cards on your keyring and/or in your wallet? This app lets you scan the barcode on them and saves them on your phone. When you're at the store, pull up the keyring app, see your barcode on the phone and scan it at the store. Can't wait to use this one. It even stores my gym key card and my library card.

6) Evernote: I have to be honest, I've only just begun to understand how to really get the best use of this but so far so good. I've used the "web clipper" on my browser to save some cool sites for Christmas gifts, I've written some notes to remind myself of things, but I really think I've just seen the tip of the iceberg. Waiting to see how and if this is as good as I keep hearing it is.

7) The Google suite: I love that Google is so seamlessly integrated all over my smartphone (thanks to Android, what?). I open up my gallery on the phone and there are all my Picasa photos, I look through my contacts list and see whether my friends are on Google chat, I can quickly and easily scan my Google Reader, Google docs, my maps are google, my search is google, it's Google, Google, Google.

Read more Quick Takes posts here.

4 comments:

  1. I need to look at the google apps...
    I first learned about evernote from this video ... she has some great ideas of how to use it http://bcove.me/xzb25scm

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  2. Thanks Kat! I'll have to watch that video.

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  3. Shazam is number one, oh yeah!

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  4. Yes it is! Thanks for the suggestion!

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