A Month In, How Are Those Resolution Going?

It is February, believe it or not. Just a month ago was that time many of us would like to forget when we made hopeful resolutions about things we needed to accomplish this year. How are your resolutions working out? If you are thinking perhaps you could use some help with them or perhaps need a new resolution or two, a handful of mobile apps and a good smartphone might actually be your ticket to success.

First, Get a Modern Smartphone

If you depend on keeping track of your e-mail, calendar and other important information throughout the day, you really should have a smartphone made in the last year or two. Simply put, nothing that was out before the iPhone is likely to provide you with the same level of productivity a modern device will.

We recommend either an Android or iPhone OS-based device. While you can find good devices running Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian, webOS and many other platforms, there are very few things one cannot do with an iPhone or Android phone like our editor’s choice Droid; conversely, there are quite a lot of things you cannot do (or cannot do well) on the other devices.

If your goal this year was to become more organized, Android’s built-in synchronization with Google services will help, since you’ll find your Gmail, calendar and contacts will stay synced between your phone and Google’s “cloud” apps. Best of all, Google’s synchronization service is entirely free, unless you want to sync with Microsoft Outlook. The iPhone, when paired with MobileMe offers a similarly pleasing arrangement with the added bonus that MobileMe offers dead simple, tight integration not only with cloud apps, but also your desktop calendar and address book – especially for Mac users. MobileMe, one of our Christmas Gift Editor’s Choice items of 2009, is one of the best services you will forget you subscribe to – it just magically makes things flow.

Faithful Commitments

Maybe you have decided to spend more time in prayer or Scripture reading this year. Mobile apps focused on matters of faith are bountiful. For Bible reading, the time tested BibleReader continues to be available on pretty much any platform you could want. A well respected product even back at the height of Palm OS still feels robust today. The latest entries, on Android and iPhone OS, are both well thought out – and, thankfully – share the same modules as other BibleReader platforms.

Your Droid Eris is certainly a lot more pocketable than the average Bible and far more readable than the average pocket Bible. Out of the vast array of Bible software out there, we like BibleReader since it offers modules that actually stay on your phone (so it works even if you do not have cellular connectivity), has a large selection of modules for both free and for purchase and does not require committing to a single smartphone platform. It even has an “app store” style interface for downloading and purchasing resources right from your phone (Free for basic edition, OliveTree Software, www.olivetree.com).

Organize Your Collections

Almost everyone collects something cataloged by Bruji’s very fine suite of Mac applications: Bookpedia, CDpedia, DVDpedia and Gamepedia. The programs can intelligently look up information about your books, music, movies or games to help you catalog them, even using a portable barcode scanner or the built-in iSight camera included on many Macs to avoid having to do manual entry. One of the most interesting features, however, is the iPhone/iPod touch app, Pocketpedia 2.

With Pocketpedia, you can keep your catalog close at hand, great if you want to remember the title of a book to reference in a paper or the name of an album to recommend to friends while out and about. While the catalog on your computer is handy, and alone makes it worth aiming to be more organized this year, the mobile app is where the payoff for the organizational work becomes really clear ($18-$50, Bruji, www.bruji.com).

More Apps, Less Weight

So you resolved to lose weight. And… things are not going so well so far this year. Maybe you just need a little help keeping track of what you are eating. Maybe you will even eat less if you see the nutritional information for some items (“1,600 calories and 80 grams of fat for this burger?”). Calorie Counter is a really slick utility available for free from the Android Marketplace, iPhone App Store and BlackBerry AppWorld that will help you track how much you are eating at each meal, keeping tallies of fat, calories, carbohydrates, proteins and Weight Watchers points.

For the gadget crazy folks (like myself) the real pièce de résistance is built in barcode reader, which appears to only be available on Android right now (making the Android version the cream of the crop). For foodstuffs that come with UPC barcodes, one can use the built in camera in phones such as the Droid and Droid Eris to quickly pull up whatever it is you are consuming. When using the application on a Motorola Droid, I found the barcode mechanism to be the best working one I have used that wasn’t dependent on a real barcode-scanning device (Free, FatSecret, fatsecret.com).

Timothy R. Butler is Editor-in-Chief of Open for Business.

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