Useful Applications for Smartphone?

merlinbasenji asks: "I've recently purchased an Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone for Cingular, and I'm looking for suggestions for good applications like: calendars, browsers, games, email client, etc. Anyone have a favorite, or had a bad experience with specific applications?"

Comments

Things smartphones don't do.

[Inoshiro]

Here is a list of things that any phone more advanced than a Nokia 5160 could concievably do (especially with Symbian or other smart phone OSes), but which don't ship from the manufucturer, and are thus relegated to half-written, poorly integrated shareware apps that don't work on different smart phones running the same OS:

  * Answering machine. Who needs voice mail on the provider side? Your phone probably has memory onboard + expansion slot memory. It has enough brains to record voice memos, do voice dialing, and play MP3s as ringtones. How hard is this to implement? Plus there's no monthly fee!

  * Time-of-day call ignore. Are you in a meeting for a certain time? Have lectures or classes? Doctors appointment? Your phone should automatically go into a silent mode (and kick over to the answering machine). Why let yourself be the point of failure?

  * Selective disturb. Studying, working on a project, or otherwise engaged, but don't want to drop off the face of the earth? Make it so that only certain call groups can contact you, just in case.

  * Privacy mode. Automatically reject calls from caller-id blocked numbers or long-distance (based on an area code list) numbers, or from people in certain groups.

  * Smart synchronization with Palm or WinCE PDAs. Most smart phones have bluetooth, but so far I have yet to find a way to sychronize the smartphone with the PDA in any useful way. Don't we have vcards and other standards for this?

  * Smart synchronization with a PC. Even just a stupid Windows client + some documentation would be fine. I can write something that'll let my Linux desktop sync if it's documented! This could be as simple as dumping the data from the internal memory to the expansion memory in a parsable format, and then restoring it the same way -- the PC could have a program to read the memory card and deal with the data.

  * Some kind of automation system. I have run across lots of little situations where I need to do something to a lot of contacts (move them into a group, delete duplicates, etc), and have found there's no batch interface. You have to deal with everything one click at a time.

All of this stuff is pretty simple to do, and would elevate a smartphone from a fancy phone with a colour display and better ringtones. No Symbian OS phone I know supports time-based silencing, call ignore lists, answering machine, selective disturb, or sychronizes well. You can fake some of that with custom ring tones, but that's a hack.

The most disapointing feature of mobile phones are the SDKs; you can't write this stuff if you want to, in many cases (and the Java support is terrible). Why make something programable if the only thing it'll do is load the code that shipped with it?