Productivity
Intelligently manage your work and life.
Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite
- CNET editors' rating: 4.5 stars
Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite continues to play leap frog with its rival, Documents to Go (with or without support for Microsoft Exchange Attachments.) At the time of writing, Quickoffice was faster to implement support for creating and editing Microsoft Excel documents, giving it the best all-around-value as a productivity mainstay. (But check back later. They may just flip again.)
Vlingo for iPhone
- CNET editors' rating: 4.5 stars
Vlingo (free) is one of the better voice search engines for mobile phones. Speak into the phone to search Google or Yahoo, to dial a contact, find a spot on a map, and update your status on Twitter and Facebook. And yes, you'll be able to edit status updates before you send them, in case Vlingo didn't get it right.
What we still want: a built-in browser, because we hate getting kicked to Safari and having to start all over again if we want to pursue subsequent searches. Sometimes one round just isn't enough.
A Personal Assistant
- CNET editors' rating: 4.5 stars
Although more a record-keeper than a true assistant, Pageonce's ad-supported A Personal Assistant is a dashboard for all your online accounts. After adding an impressive array of social, financial, productive, and shopping services, you can view a history of purchases, transactions, and communications, as well as your travel itineraries, Netflix queue, and stock status. To help keep data secure, Pageonce has 256-bit encryption and settings to determine how passwords are saved, to limit data to just your iPhone, and to disable your mobile account if you lose your phone. There's also a pro version with greater security and feature enhancements.
Todo
- CNET editors' rating: 4.5 stars
The iTunes App Store is glutted with to-do lists and time managers, but many are so simple they're ineffective. Appigo's Todo ($9.99) has the highest price of its cohort, but is also more complete than the budget offerings. Unlike other to-do lists, you can have Todo assign a due date and priority ranking; it will winningly associate tasks with mobile numbers and Web sites. You can further synchronize your lists with your pro Remember the Milk account and with Toodledo, both Web-based task organizers. The addition of push notification, and optional e-mail alerts, imparts a valuable mechanism for following-through.
A free, Lite app is also available.
LogMeIn Ignition
- CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars
Here's one aimed at the business set. Need to do work on your computer or laptop when you're out of the office? Boom--done. LogMeIn Ignition makes itself a useful key to desperate professionals, but beware--it's on the high end of the iPhone price scale and your remote computer needs to be logged on for it to work.
