If you’re like most freelancers or small business owners these days, juggling your to-do list with life is like fighting off a dragon and ninjas at the same time (which is theoretically impossible). The second is what if a client’s website crashes, and the worst situation, what if somebody calls me offering free money? Wishful thinking, but its possible. To help solve our office dilemma we recently have an HTC Android phone to help manage my life better. Also, its very important you find some reliable and safe applications. Some of the interesting Android business applications were listed below:
Delicious:
Just a simple plugin that gives us the ability to share items on Delicious in addition to the Android’s default share options. Nothing really fancy, but its great to have access to bookmarking files on the fly. Not an official plugin by Yahoo, but can you expect them to develop an application for Google? We’ll probably never see an official application, but this one works perfectly fine.
Remember The Milk:
Remember The Milk’s mobile version syncs with their database so we don’t have to leave our task list at the computer. The application does cost money, but it goes straight towards development costs for Remember The Milk. We can try it out free for 15 days, be warned though, you’ll probably get hooked. It also integrates with item locations to make traveling easier.
Skype Mobile:
Skype’s Google Android application is phenomenal. We can check our address book (or combine it with your existing phone’s contacts), voicemail, and missed calls. What makes this application shine for business use is its ability to route calls from Skype to your mobile phone. This solution is significantly better than using Google Voice due to Skype’s larger number of call features. This way we can shut off our Skype account and control the flow of phone calls.
PayPal:
With PayPal’s new Android application we can access a mini version of our PayPal account on the fly. Sessions time out fast, which is good to. This application’s largest standing problem is the inability to request money from others. Although this is great to have if we run a small business and want to look through your PayPal account.
Dropbox:
If we’re running a business then you probably have hundreds of files that require organization and sharing. Sometimes clients even ask if we remember particular obscure data from project documents and materials when we’re computerless. Usually we’ll have to respond with a guess, but not anymore! Dropbox’s mobile version allows you to look up and save items to their server via our Google Android Phone. This is quite a big deal, especially if we’re collecting pictures of an event since you can drop them into your account and instantly access them on a home computer. Now we can have access to all of your important documents without being locked in front of our computer.
AK Notepad:
At the core of every good phone OS is the ability to create notes about important meetings, passwords, and other dataThis application blows every text program out of the water for the Android. It takes great notes, auto saves, has themes, allows text size adjustment, and a boat load of other options for complete customization. If that isn’t enough, we can export notes with the share function to Twitter, Gmail, and a slew of other programs. A must have for everyone.
Where’s My Droid:
If any one looses cell phone, usually it ends up buried in an abyss of papers, other times inside a shoe. This usually isn’t too big of a deal because you just need to call your phone right? But what if you put your phone on silent? Where’s My Droid gives you the ability to override your phone, max out the sound, and let it ring. In addition to this its capable of generating GPS coordinates of your phone’s location. The greatest part about this is this is all possible via sending your phone a simple text message with a keyword. Simple and wonderfully amazing.
WiFi Analyzer:
On several occasions we’ve been so desperate for a good internet connection we’ve held my arms out in an antenna like format. Hoping that our signal will just increase a few bytes and properly send our email. Those days are no more. The Wifi Analyzer allows us to look at the signal strength of all the connections near our phone. What’s even better is it will tell us how strong the signal is. Great for people who are desperate to get every drop possible out of their wireless’s signal. If you run a business this will definitely come in handy when you need a stable connection in who knows where.
ASTROFile Manager/Beta
The Astro File Manager is only in beta, but its by far the best file management program for Google’s Android. Its so amazing it should be built into the Android CMS core. A few features are generating thumbnails for images and sorting everything (including your memory card). It also gives your the ability to share, delete, move, and search through your files. Probably the most interesting feature though is the ability to jack into a network anywhere with your login data and drop/retrieve files. I question how secure it is though (especially due to its beta status). Great for storing and managing your business’s files on the fly.
WordPress for Android
Ever shown off our blog and found a typo that you were dieing to fix? WordPress for Android gives you the ability edit/write new posts, moderate comments, and even modify our page structure. This is an extremely powerful piece of software that appears to be evolving weekly. Updates are very frequent and they keep on adding more features. This is the quality of a paid application without having to pay anything. Can be a little tricky to initially setup, but well worth the effort when everything is in motion.
