The Wisdom of Smart Phones
Currently, there are more than 500,000 potentially life-improving apps available. Here are just a handful that can help you make the most of your smart phone’s capability to make your life richer, safer, and more interesting.
Charitable Learning
One of the most awesome things about some of the apps for smartphones is that they can actually make you smarter. There’s one app that even allows you to help feed the hungry in other parts of the world while you learn. Freerice.com was begun in 2007, but now has a mobile app which was recently updated to add even more to their astonishing collection of knowledge. Subjects include humanities, math, chemistry, geography, language and science. There’s even a section for people who want study for the SAT college entrance exam. “For every answer you get right, Freerice donates 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end world hunger.” That makes learning doubly gratifying.
Health and Fitness
There are quite a few apps out there dedicated to helping people use their smartphones to establish smart, healthy diets and exercise routines. Among them is MyFitnessApp. It includes a food diary and a feature that calculates the nutritional value of the foods entered. Food items are also shown on a graph broken down into percentages of fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Increasingly, people are using their phones to help them become organized in order to make time to devote to something they can’t buy, their physical health and well-being.
Going Paperless
Many businesses have the goal of a paperless office, but our private lives are going paperless as well. It’s no longer necessary to make sure you’ve got the theater tickets before leaving the house. Bar codes downloaded to smart phones are available in place of paper tickets and receipts for everything from concerts to airport boarding passes.
Cash is another kind of paper we won’t be carrying anymore since the advent of mobile payments. In addition to everything else they can do, our phones will soon also serve as our wallets. There are already apps, like Clipp Tab App that make carrying cash or even plastic for a night out obsolete. With this app, you can open a tab at a restaurant, split the tab with your friends, and close it out, just by tapping the screen of your smart phone. It’s probably just a matter of time before the DMV creates a digital driver’s license app.
Saving Money
One of the biggest monthly expenses for most people, especially families that participate in a lot of activities, is gasoline. GasBuddy is an app that uses your GPS location to let you know the location of the cheapest gas prices in your area. The app also encourages information sharing and community building by offering participants a chance to win free gas by reporting on gas prices in their area to help them better calculate the lowest price. This app is another great example of the multiple benefits of connectivity and communication.
Nearly all major grocery stores have mobile apps that allow you to download both store and manufacturer’s coupons onto your phone. Being able to make your weekly shopping list and plan your menus according to what’s on sale can be a huge money-saver. One single app, Weekly Ads and Sales, consolidates sales and coupon information for over 96,000 stores and 100 major retailers and makes it available in one place, your smart phone.
Making Memories
The popularity of Instagram is a testament to people’s love of photography, both in terms of appreciating others’ photos and taking their own. For those who frequently use their smartphones as cameras, you can now take your photography to the next level with the Adobe Photo Express app. Smartphone cameras continue to improve and it’s now possible to crop, flip, adjust color, filter, remove red eye, and even add an attractive border to your photo before posting it on social media or emailing it to friends and family, all from your phone.
Every time someone has a good idea, smart phones become capable of doing more. It’s fun to consider the possibilities of what might be next.
About the author:
Philip Piletic – Originally from Europe, currently situated in Brisbane, AUS where I work & live. Although my primary focus is fusion of technology, small business and marketing, I was involved in several home improvement related projects in the past, and I have a strong interest in that, too.
I love to share my experience with others by contributing to several blogs and helping others achieve success.
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