GLOBAL – With the Christmas and New Year festivities well and truly behind us, it’s time to head back to work and get on with another year. To help you all ease into 2012 a little easier, we’ve selected our five favourite productivity apps from the Windows Phone Marketplace for your Nokia Lumia 710, or Nokia Lumia 800.

Pocket Recorder, £0.79

 

For some jobs where recording people talking is important – when interviewing people, for example – you’ll need a good Dictaphone of some sort. However, these can be expensive. Pocket Recorder, turns your phone into a fully-fledged sound recording and editing tool.

Each soundbite you record can be pinned to your homescreen as a Live Tile for easy listening at a later date. And with full SkyDrive integration, you can upload and download your audio clips whenever you like, on your phone or computer.

Remote Desktop, £10.99

 

When you’re away from your desktop PC but need to access it, it’s impractical to go all the way home again. Why not browse your PC from your Nokia Lumia phone? With Remote Desktop, you can do exactly that.

With this app you can access, view and control your computers using your phone from anywhere in the world, while giving you full control of your computer’s mouse and keyboard.

When you connect, your phone’s touchscreen becomes a touchpad and moving your finger across your screen will move your cursor on your PC.

If you get stuck at any point in getting set up, the developers also offer free remote assistance to help you configure your computer.

SkyDrive app, £Free

 

SkyDrive is a cloud-based service that gives you heaps of storage, online. On your Nokia Lumia phone, you access it via the Office hub, but this gives you limited access to some of the files that are saved there. However, the SkyDrive app shows you everything that you’ve stored on your SkyDrive account, such as images, music files or documents.

If you want to allow another person access to a certain file or folder, press on one of items and follow the onscreen commands to send a link.

Two-tap Reminder, £0.99

 

If you’re particularly bad at remembering things – as I am – you’ll need an app that keeps you from forgetting to email that business proposal, or even just the milk and bread on the way home from work.

With as little as two taps, you can set up a reminder on your phone using the preset options, or if you wish – with more taps – you can create other reminders.

Office OneNote, built-in, £Free

 

Let’s face it, everything in life is easier if you have a checklist. Built into the Nokia Lumia range is Microsoft Office Mobile, that includes something called OneNote – a very quick and easy tool for making notes.

Located in the Office hub and under notes, you can press the plus symbol at the bottom of the page to add a new note. This can be in the format of a list, a to do, a picture or an audio. You can also create numbered lists and  increase or decrease indents. These notes can then be pinned to the homescreen for easy access when ticking things off your to do list.

Have any of these apps helped you? Tell us, using the comments section below.

image credit: alancleaver_2000