GLOBAL – Last week, Rhiain asked you about your favourite productivity apps on your Nokia device. We were looking for the best, rather than the most popular, but used the top ten results from Ovi Store and a few of the items on our own list of essentials to form the options for the poll, with space for additional suggestions as well. Hopefully, the results will provide a useful guide to how you might plug the remaining gaps in your own apps arsenal.
The results were a lot more varied than we imagined they would be, and even though everyone got three votes, no single application received more than 30 per cent of the vote. More than 1300 of you voted, so with 3900 ticks, we think we’ve got a good picture of what Conversations readers want in terms of mobile apps. Interestingly, you are different from the average user – more intelligent and sophisticated, I expect – so our top results varied quite a bit from the official charts.
Notwithstanding, the firm favourite was Ovi Maps, with 29 per cent of you opting for its on-device navigational talents. And why not? It does a great job and it’s free (you’re going to see a pattern emerging here with the rest of the results). Even if you use a different maps app, it’s well worth having Ovi Maps as well since it doesn’t need a strong signal to draw its maps: they’re side-loaded from your desktop. Quite handy if you’re lost in the big outdoors.
Second choice was Opera Mini, with 16 per cent of you installing this bijou browser. Opera Mini’s back-end servers pre-process web pages to deliver them in a form that’s friendly for smaller screens and tight bandwidth restrictions. (Note that there’s also Opera Mobile, for those on ‘all you can eat’ data contracts). Both free, of course.
In third place was Skype, a smart choice for international calls, in particular, especially if you can get access to free WiFi. And, yes, it’s free for the client and free to call if you’re phoning Skype-to-Skype.
Of the remainder, Quick Office, Joikuspot, Adobe Reader and Mail for Exchange gained over 100 votes each. Three of those probably came on your device and the fourth (one of my own favourites, Joikuspot) is available in a free incarnation.
As ever, the ‘other’ option turned up some good ideas for additional choices. Many of you pointed towards the Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google mobile applications, each of which have their own distribution arrangements.
Fascinating stuff. As you might have expected, ‘free’ rules the roost on numbers when it comes to mobile applications. But what have you actually paid for in the productivity category – or what would you pay for, if it was available?