apps | Shweta Taneja

February 13, 2014June 16, 2016

The story of us

There’s nothing more romantic than remembering the things you did together as a couple, be it something as simple as holding hands or jumping off a plane to skydive. This Valentine’s Day, we suggest you put together your memories in a beautiful personal story for your partner. Here are the apps that can help you in the process.

Glossi

Announce your love through an online glossy. Create a magazine of your relationship with Glossi, a free digital platform which lets you drag and drop images, videos, PDFs, audio and animations into layouts inspired by fashion magazines, catalogues and even travelogues. Then add in links, headlines and write a poem or two and you are ready to gift a personal magazine to your partner. This online format can be shared on all major social networks, embedded on blogs and websites and viewed on tablets and mobiles.

Glossi.com, free.

Timehop

How about a time capsule of your relationship? Especially apt for relationships which have seen a few years, you can walk down the memory lane together by seeing the photos and updates from last year’s or last to last year’s Valentine’s Day that you spent together. The app takes your content from Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Dropbox, Flickr and iPhoto. Then it syncs your images together on a Mac. Once you’ve got everything set up, Timehop will show you all social activity on a particular day. It also automatically shows you good times from your past—the app will pick up a post or a photograph which was popular with your friends and feed it into your phone’s app.

Timehop.com, free on iTunes.

Heyday

Forgot to make an extra effort before Valentine’s Day? Plan the day with your partner and then using Heyday automatically record all your moments together. Launched in December, Heyday will stitch your moments with each other by keeping track of the places you go to and the things you see. It also automatically picks up the photos you took with your phone in all these places and creates collages with them putting it all together in a timeline. You can customize the collage with layouts and filters and then surprise your partner by mailing it to her/him.

Hey.co, free on iTunes.

Memloom

Tell your partner how special she is by creating a personal story for her using Memloom. Launched in January, Memloom is a storytelling tool where you can upload the various moments in your relationship, including pictures, audios and videos. Now using one of the layouts offered, stitch them together in a magazine-like format. Add audio narration to give it a personal touch.

Memloom.com, $2.95-9.95 (around Rs.190-620) a month—free for up to five stories— available on the iPad and Web.

Read the complete article on Livemint.com

January 23, 2014June 16, 2016

Supercharge for office

More and more people are using their cellphones as computers, and if you’re carrying a “computer” in your pocket, why not put it to work? A phone isn’t always a good replacement for a computer—good luck filling in giant Excel sheets on a 4-inch screen—but there are some ways in which phones can really simplify your work life, or just take a little of the stress away. We look at new apps that can bust work stress.

RescueTime

If you’ve ever had a day where you go in with 10 items on your agenda and end with all 10 untouched, then you need to look at this free app. RescueTime helps you track how you’re using your phone, and can be used to identify the major distractions that keep you from getting work done. RescueTime is a popular app on Google play, with over 700,000 downloads, and its iOS version is expected to launch in February. The app is simple—all you have to do is install it and it will run in the background. You go about your daily usage without having to check the app, and whenever you want to analyse your phone usage, just open RescueTime and you can see an efficiency score that helps you easily track your progress in cutting down on distractions. RescueTime will tell you which apps you’ve been using, how much time you spend on each, and will also track phone calls, so you know exactly how you’ve been spending your time—it even lists your top distractions. There’s also a handy stopwatch to use in meetings or during exercise.

RescueTime is free with some paid features at $9 (around Rs.550) a month, on Android and browser. The iOS app will launch in February.

Talygen Business Intelligence

Location awareness and being online all the time make phones a great way for employees on the road to check in with their office. Talygen is a paid app that helps employees manage all the paperwork without any paper, so they can focus on the important parts of their job. This tool is useful for small business owners who want to keep track of on-the-road employees or time spent in a client’s office. You can track billable time, work on customer relationship management, expense accounting, manage leave and many other administrative issues.

The app, launched last month, makes it really easy for your employee to check in on the go so that you, as the manager, save time tracking. Everything is organized on the cloud and the data can be accessed through the app. The data can also generate an advanced report which can then be exported into a PDF or an Excel file.

Talygen, $20 a month onwards, on iTunes, Google play, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

Agent

Is your smartphone’s battery always dying on you? Install this personal Agent, a smartphone app which does little things to make your phone, well, smarter. The app runs in the background and saves the battery by automatically dimming the screen when your battery signals low, automatically silences your phone during meetings, remembers where you parked your car and puts your phone to auto-respond when you’re driving. It also allows only urgent calls or messages when you’re sleeping. The app is triggered by Bluetooth and it can also read your SMSes aloud or send automatic responses, or reply to a select list of contacts only. It was launched in November, and the makers are adding more features. “In 2014, the app will be able to call you a cab right before your next meeting,” says Kulveer Taggar, CEO and co-founder, “or pay for your coffee before you get to work.”

Agent, free on Google play.

Limitless

Limitless is meant for anyone who wants to manage their time on devices better. The productivity tool, which works on Google Chrome, gives an update on how much time of the day was spent productively and how much of it on Facebook and Twitter. “We are a behavioural science company that helps users get work done,” says Anup Gosavi, co-founder, Limitless. “If the person has the desire to become more efficient in how they use their devices, Limitless can be the right productivity companion.” The tool categorizes the various websites you visited on your Chrome browser and differentiates with tags like work, social and other learning. At the end of the day, it shows you the percentage you spent in each of those sections. It also has nudges, albeit gentle, to get you back to work. Launched in December, the tool is still in its early stages, releasing updates and building up Limitless for Safari, Firefox and mobiles.

Complete article on www.livemint.com

January 23, 2014June 16, 2016

Rearrange your online life

Click. Share. Like. Comment. Post. Redo. If keeping pace with your multiple virtual lives is getting too much for you, use these tools to reorganize them and get back to your real one. Believe us, you will thank us for it.

Swayy

This one is for the share hogs—the ones who would like to read things from the Net and share but want to avoid hopping from site to site. Swayy, which was launched in September, is a sixth-sense curating site that reads your interests, scans the Web and then serves you the best articles, videos and infographics, also sharing them with your social networks. All you have to do is log into your Twitter, add in your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts via Swayy and let its codes work in the dark to figure out what you like and who you are. “By analysing a user’s social audience and understanding what topics his/her audience are interested in, Swayy can match the user with the most relevant and trending content to help him/her share better and grow his/her online presence,” explains Lior Degani, vice-president, marketing, Swayy. That’s not all, you also get served social analytics—clicks, likes, retweets, new followers, etc.—to share better in future and figure out which of your content worked well with the audience.

Free for two social accounts; $9 (around Rs.550) a month for a paid account, which allows for scheduled posts too.

ThinkUp

Tired of the time they were spending on Facebook and Twitter, the founders of ThinkUp decided to build an app to connect all social networking accounts and sort out the crazy stuff that is posted on them every day. ThinkUp, which launches today, uses bots and smart code to show the most relevant information from your social networks on your screen. So you don’t have to scroll Facebook and then Twitter, and then Instagram, to find out the things that are most important. More than that, ThinkUp also tells you who your biggest online fans were per week, whether your old profile picture was better than the new one, or if your friends like it when you post quotes from famous people. It gets the delight back into the social.

A paid service that costs $60 a year.

RebelMouse

An open-ended space, in its simplest form RebelMouse can be used to collate all your social media streams and put them together in one place for you to see. But that’s not all it does. “We are a full publishing platform that lets you simply create great content and have a beautiful site, mobile Web experience, engagement tools and an analytics suite that is actionable,” says Paul Berry, founder and CEO, in an email interview. With three simple clicks, you get your content from all over the Web on one page. After that, it’s up to you. Do you want to make a website of all the content you are constantly getting? Do you want to curate and clean up and then share it seamlessly with all your social networks? Or embed in an existing website? Or do you want to make a campaign out of it? RebelMouse lets you do all this and more. No wonder the site reached 17.5 million unique visitors in December.

Free for individuals to curate, create and share across social networks. $500 upwards a month for brands.

Flavors

Instead of giving multiple LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Ids to a stranger who wants to connect with you, give them one: your website address. As the name suggests, Flavors.me brings together all your myriad faces in the digital world on to one website and gives you a unique URL to print on your visiting card. The platforms they recognize include social networks (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn), location-based networks (Foursquare), blogs (Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and Typepad), photo-sharing sites (Flickr and Picasa), video-sharing sites (Vimeo and YouTube), even audio-sharing sites (SoundCloud, Last.fm, 8tracks and Mixcloud). Basically, anywhere you might be present. Once you create a log-in Id, go step by step in choosing a template and finalizing how your site looks with social media streams…

Read the complete story on the livemint.com site

April 17, 2013June 16, 2016

Time to augment your world

Augmented reality apps raise the bar by putting a virtual layer of information over your real world.

You see the Taj Mahal, point your phone at it, and facts about it come up on screen. Or, through the screen, virtual spaceships and robots can dance in your empty living room. You can also take pictures with them.
Augmented reality (AR) puts a virtual layer of information over your real world. It supplements your everyday life with information, images, sounds, and other sensory information from your device.
It’s been around for a while now, but we’re still figuring out how to use it. Google Glass has given us a glimpse of what could be possible with augmented reality when brought straight to your vision, without the need to hold up your phone. Microsoft has patented augmented reality glasses that will enhance sports and live events with streams of information directly beamed in front of the user’s eye (including action replays).
But till these devices are available, here are some of the AR apps you can use on your smartphone.

HP Live Photo
Send a postcard with an embedded video using this app—you can print a photograph that comes alive when someone holds their smartphone over it. To do this, you need an iPhone, a video and the HP Live Photo app, and an Airprint-enabled HP printer. Choose the video and then pick a frame to print, using the app. The app prints it with a marker, so that when the image is scanned by another iPhone with the app, the video will play.
Free, iPhone only.
BallStrike
Combining fitness with AR, BallStrike makes you kick and punch virtual balls, keeping you fit. Once the app is installed, stand in front of your device’s front camera and you’ll show up on screen, along with your surroundings. Just make sure the room’s well lit, there’s enough space for free movement, and you stand at a distance from the device.
The screen will fill with colourful balls, and you have to hit them—each hit is worth points, but you have to avoid obstacles like bombs, so you’re going to have to twist, turn and jump to hit every ball. The app detects motion using the camera, and uses that to calculate the calories burnt after each of the 12 rounds. It can also take pictures of the game that you can share online later.
Free, on iOS; Android and Windows Phone 8 versions are coming soon.
Reading Lens
Reading Lens is a simple AR app that helps people who need reading glasses. If you’ve forgotten your glasses at home just pull out your phone and point it at the text you want to read—the app will automatically enlarge the text, and can even use the phone’s flashlight as a lamp in case the lighting is poor.
$0.99 (around Rs.55), on Windows Phone 8.
Nasa’s Spacecraft 3D
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Spacecraft 3D is amazing. First it lets us see live images sent by the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now, it takes AR a step further, letting you imagine you are the captain of one of the spacecraft Nasa operates across the solar system. Choose from Curiosity on Mars, Grail on the Moon, Cassini on Saturn, Juno cruising to Jupiter, Dawn cruising to Ceres, or Voyager, which plans to leave the solar system. Once you have decided which one, print an image of Nasa’s AR Target on a piece of paper and point your device camera at the target.
On your screen, the paper will turn into a spacecraft that you can control. See the robotic explorers, raise and lower one of their robotic arms, manoeuvre the high-gain antenna, and do other fun stuff. To add to the fun, the app has an option where you can take your photograph with the spacecraft by putting yourself in the picture.
Free, on Android and iOS.
Ingress
A game created by Google, Ingress is about a war between two factions, the Enlightened and the Resistance. You have to choose your side at the beginning of the game. Once you have, your immediate environment and space (you could be anywhere in the world) becomes your gameplay. You have to physically reach a public space which is designated as a portal. The portal could be held by you or your enemy. If it’s an enemy spot, you hack into the portal and make it yours. As you play, your phone directs you to the portals through GPS and leads the way with pointers and maps.
The objective is to collect objects around you, tap sources of energy or capture enemy territory. As a player you can send photos of locations to Google to be included as a portal, but there’s no guarantee that it will be, so you might not have many currently in your city to start playing. But it’s an exciting new game nonetheless. Ingress is in closed beta right now. You can request an invite at Ingress.com. It will be available for free on Google Play soon.
Free (limited availability for now), on Android.
Read the complete article in HT Mint.
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Live-browse your world
Most of the existing AR apps have fun uses, or are very helpful in highly specific scenarios, but they don’t change your day-to-day life. Apps like Wikitude and Layar, which can change your life, are being developed, but not too many people know about them yet.
If you are in a new neighbourhood or exploring a new city, instead of using Google to find something to do, look through an AR browser and you will find restaurants, monuments, hotels and other places of interest. Apps like Wikitude, Layar, Junaio and Nokia City Lens throw live information on your device’s screen. All you need to do is to point your camera in a certain direction and everything, from a coffee shop to an ATM, will pop up on your screen.

Read the complete article in HT Mint.

December 31, 2012June 16, 2016

Boring party survival 101

Bring in some cheer at a lacklustre get-together with the help of your smartphone

It’s that time of the year again—when long-lost aunts, bosses you can’t stand for more than 5 minutes in a day, and colleagues whose names you don’t remember invite you to parties you cannot always refuse to attend. So you dress up and head out for evenings that are full of forced festive cheer. Instead of skulking in a corner and morosely nursing a drink, here’s how you can convert your phone into a one-stop entertainment hub and perhaps scrape through the dull dos. And no, our entertainment means are not restricted to watching a movie, checking notifications or playing a game on a smartphone.

Break the ice

It’s easier to slip into the virtual world in a place where you are a stranger or snoop around other people’s lives on social networks. Instead, try something a bit harder—like starting a conversation with someone new. Take banter cues from Conversation Shaker (iOS only) which offers interesting topics based on different situations. Shake the phone to see the next conversation starter. If your style is witty, head on to Hypotheticals, an iPhone app with a huge collection of funny conversation starters.

Conversation Shaker and Hypotheticals are available for free on iTunes.

Gaze at the stars

Not able to come up with clever quips? Get people to look at the night sky instead. Head out into the open to see all the constellations you have heard of (and some you haven’t) with Google Sky Map (www.google.com/mobile/skymap). Sky Map turns your Android-device into a window to the night sky. All you need to do is launch the app and point it to the sky. The app reflects the night accurately in terms of stars, constellations, planets, meteor showers and more. You can zoom in to the Sky Map, turn on the night mode so your eyes don’t need to adjust and even “time travel” by seeing how the same sky looked in another time and date. The perfect way to happily spend time without saying a word.

Google Sky Map (www.google.com/mobile/skymap), available for free on Google Play.

Meet a stranger

There are others out there in the party, equally socially-challenged, bored and looking for some company. The Locals’ button in MeetMe, a proximity-based chat app and social network, uses your location through GPS to tell you of people in the same area as you. Start chatting and you might just hit it off. If you don’t find anyone in your party on the app, try Twoo, yet another app which helps you meet new people using your GPS. Play a game, hangout in the virtual world and you might just want to meet in the real one. Or choose to keep it anonymous with WhosHere, which allows you to chat with people nearby without revealing your phone number, email or instant messaging (IM) address.

MeetMe and Twoo are available for free on iTunes and Google Play. You can also visitwww.meetme.com and www.twoo.com. WhosHere is available for free on iTunes and Google Play.

Swap faces

A good laugh can turn a boring party into a fun one in seconds. Click a picture of the people in front of you and swap their faces in the photo. Face Swap automatically detects faces and makes it easy for you to switch, rotate, and adjust the heads on other bodies. If you prefer replacing faces with zombie cartoons, do it with Trollolol, which automatically detects faces in pictures and swaps them with troll and zombie faces. Share the images with the new friends you make.

Face Swap is available for Rs.110 on Google Play and Amazon, and for Rs.55 on iTunes. Trollolol is available for free on iTunes and Google Play.

Have some fun with drinks

If the party is so boring that there’s no other option than to give in and get drunk, why not drink in style? Ask the bartender for the list of spirits available and then choose the most exotic cocktail name for him to make. Take help from Mixology Drink & Cocktail Recipes (www.mixologyapp.com),which helps you browse through more than 7,900 cocktails, martinis, shooters, jello shots, hot drinks and punches. There’s a Random Drinks tab if you want to explore drinks and recipes and a Liquor Cabinet tab that lets you enter all the liquor you have and then gives you a recipe accordingly. Or choose to get drunk in spy style with The Covert Cocktail(www.spymixology.com), which catalogues…

Read the complete article on Live Mint website

December 19, 2012June 16, 2016

Beyond Instagram

Looking for image-editing apps to share your photos along with your tweets? Skim through our list.

Twitter and Instagram might have started off as a match made in heaven, but over the last couple of months, signs of a break up have been showing. First, Twitter deactivated the ability to transfer your Twitter friends’ list to Instagram, and this month, Instagram removed the ability to post images directly into your Twitter feed, forcing you to visit the Instagram site to see images.

At the same time, Twitter also added Instagram-style image filters to its iPhone and Android apps, and it doesn’t seem like the two networks are going to see eye to eye again anytime soon. But if you don’t want to use the official Twitter app, there are still plenty of alternatives with image editing and timeline image-sharing built in. We list some of our favourites.

Pixlr Express

Free

One of the smoothest edit apps in the market, Pixlr Express offers you capability to minutely edit your photos in a simple, clean and easy-touch layout. It has four levels of editing. Adjustment can sharpen, whiten, remove red eye, touch up, focus, blur, crop, rotate and autofix. In Effect you can choose vintage, creative or default effects. Overlay adds masks to your photograph and Border adds various styles of borders.

Shareability: Pixlr supports Twitter, Facebook and some other photo-sharing networks, and has a feature that lets you share large, medium or small versions of the picture, depending on whether you want a fast upload or a high-detail picture online.

What we like: It’s simple, clean and has an easy-to-manoeuvre layout.

Get it: Pixlr Express is available on Google Play, iTunes, and web

Aviary Photo Editor

Free

One of the most popular photo editors on Android, Aviary Photo Editor comes loaded with simple features like auto enhance to beautify your photographs with a single tap. Other features include enhance, effects, stickers, orientation and crop. You can edit colour brightness, warmth, contrast, saturation as well as draw and add stickers on to the image.

The Aviary Photo Editor is made by the same company which also created the image-editing filters for the official Twitter app.

Shareability: The app automatically picks up social networking apps on your phone to share with. You need to choose one by one to share as there is no share-all option.

What we like: The layout is simple and changes made to the photos are fast. The editor gives you a high-resolution output and you can customize your tools.

Get it: Aviary Photo Editor is available for free on iTunes, Google Play and Windows Phone. Effects packs such as Grunge and Nostalgia cost Rs.53.72 per pack (each pack comes with six filters).

Decim8

Rs.55

If you are tired of photographs that look pretty, opt for Decim8, an editing app which lets you systematically destroy the photographs you have taken. The app applies filters which make your photos look glitchy on purpose. When you apply a filter through Decim8, it goes into the image file and corrupts the data resulting in hi-resolution messy images.

Shareability: Direct upload to Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, and Postagram.

What we like: You can save combinations of your own favourite effects and use them on more photographs. And the fact that the app comes with a warning sign: “This app is capable of completely destroying an image. If this doesn’t appeal to you, there are lots of apps out there to provide all the ‘safe’ effects you could ever want.”

Get it: Decim8 is available on iTunes. A desktop version will launch in 2013.

Snapseed

Free

A popular editing app for professionals on iPhone, Snapseed was recently bought over by Google and made available on Google Play free of cost. Earlier this year, it was designated the Best Mobile Photo App of 2012 by the Technical Image Press Association (Tipa). The app which is meant as an editing tool for professional or advanced amateur photographers, comes loaded with different enhancement options for cropping, straightening, adjusting focus and fine tuning hues by adjusting white balance, saturation, contrast and more. You can even choose to use Selective Adjust and make changes to a part of the photograph (like removing shadows on people’s faces) and add on filters and borders for a finishing touch after your basic editing is done.

Shareability: With a click share to Google+, Facebook, Twitter and
others.

What we like: It gives you a stronger control on editing your photo as well as undoing edits, filters or reverting to the original.

Get it: Snapseed is available for free on iTunes and Google Play (Android OS 4.0 or later)

Hipstamatic

Rs.55

Hipstamatic makes your iPhone feel like an analog camera. You can choose the type of lens, kind of flash and the film that you want, with hundreds of different combinations possible. Once you set up the shot, the screen looks like an analog camera, complete with a small view finder with a faux leather finish. And the final photograph is a replica of what you’d get with the same combinations in a real, analog camera….

To read the complete article head to the Livemint.com website.

August 18, 2011June 16, 2016

Tweaks for tweets

Are endless tweets giving you a pain in the neck? We list some cool apps and websites that guide, curate and arrange the massive sea of information into bite-sized pieces for you

Time was when life was simpler. When all you had to do was reach office in the morning, check your emails, read some blogs, have a steaming cuppa and get on with your work. In the good old days, a message like “You’ve got mail!” brought a smile to your face. Heck, it even brought back the memory of a romantic movie.

Tracking tips: Who you should follow, and how to increase your popularity on Twitter.

In Twitterverse, the voices in your feeds never stop. According to the official Twitter blog (blog.twitter.com), as of June end the micro-blogging social network was generating a whopping 200 million tweets per day. That is equivalent to a 10-million-page book of tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 epic novel War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years, the blog tells us. Here are some efficient ways to manage the information overload on the five-year-old micro-blogging site.

Find the right people to follow

There are oodles and oodles of tweeters online, but there are only a few hundred influencers. If you don’t hear them on time, you might just miss the next big thing your fellow tweeters are talking about. Find the right influencers of your industry on Twellow (www.twellow.com) by category. The website scrounges through Twitter.com every day to come up with a list of influencers tabulated on the basis of number of followers, industry or categories such as entertainment, news, society and sports. Here you will find the people who are heard by thousands of people and whose tweets are retweeted the most, etc. TweetLevel.com, on the other hand, lets you search the right people to follow by entering a word in its search box.

Tell a tweet story

Feeling creative and want to play with your and other people’s tweets? Check Storify (http://storify.com). Still in its beta stage, the website is an innovative way of telling a story using social networks and the endless information online. You can use tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and articles from the online space to tell a story about a topic, idea or concept. The interface is simple, with a search button where you can search for tweets using hashtags or words and then drag and drop them in your story. The story is publicly available and can be embedded into a website or a blog.

Archive a hashtag

Hashtags were lying forgotten on the number “3” key of your keyboard before Twitter introduced them to create tweet groupings. Now, a hashtag before any word in a tweet makes it about a group, event, occurrence, meet-up or idea. But what happens a day, a week or a month after the hashtag has been used? If you want to save the tweets of a hashtag from being lost forever in the ocean of information that is Twitter, try the Twapper Keeper (http://twapperkeeper.com) free service. It lets you archive up to two trends by hashtags, keywords or fellow tweeters. Another such free service is The Archivist (http://archivist.visitmix.com), which focuses only on hashtags. Once you link the site to your Twitter account, it can track a hashtag for you on a daily basis, and analyse it by users, volume, sources and retweets, etc., in a fancy graph.

Mute the noise

Your stream is inundated with the tweet traffic of retweets, automatically generated tweets from Foursquare or Gowalla about where your friends are or those irritating “I am sleeping now” tweets. In between all this traffic, you could miss the tweets that may actually be relevant to you. Mixero (www.mixero.com) is a Twitter client developed with the idea of “reducing the noise” or information overload. It lets you collate the people you follow by groups and see tweets according to groups, user platforms or channels….

Continue reading “Tweaks for tweets”

July 28, 2011June 16, 2016

Powerhouse in your palm

The smartphone is bored. Day in and day out, we connect to the Internet, answer some emails, post a tweet or two and play Angry Birds. Sometimes we have long chats with friends or text angry messages to our boy/girl friends when they are late. However, most of us don’t realize the power we have in our hands. What most of us do with our smartphones is akin to driving a Ferrari or a Bugatti on a German autobahn at 40kmph—it’s simply sacrilegious.

So before your phone’s delicate touch screen gives in to the angst of its tedious existence, shift gears and make use of it the way it was meant to be used: innovatively.

Turn it into a Wi-Fi hot spot

Being ubiquitous: Don’t want to rush back to the office for a presentation? You can view the slides on your phone

It’s actually quite simple. Your phone has a 3G (or if you are still tied down to ancient technology, a 2G) Internet connection and a Wi-Fi adaptor. So why can’t it act like a Wi-Fi hot spot for your PC, tablet and other devices? All you need to do is install an app that makes use of your phone’s Internet connection and Wi-Fi adaptor and showers its Internet connectivity on to Wi-Fi-enabled devices around it. There are a lot of apps that help you do this, but the good ones offer encryption as well as password protection from lurkers— this is a must if you are using your phone Wi-Fi in a public space. Though some brands like the iPhone, HTC and the Nexus series come with built-in Wi-Fi tethering, the features are limited—it is best to download an app made for this purpose.

Start now: We like Connectify (www.connectify.me). It is a free app and can be used on Android-based systems. For Nokia phones, JoikuSpot (www.joiku.com) is a great app. Its free version turns your phone into a Wi-Fi hot spot without password protection and basic Internet protocol support (which means no emails can be checked). The premium version, which costs around Rs. 580, comes with the ability to use a password to secure the network, encrypt it, and gives you full Internet protocol support. If your iPhone is updated to iOS 4.3, you can use the new Personal HotSpot, which is password- protected. For other iOS versions, try MyWi 4.0 (intelliborn.com). It can be used on jail-broken handsets and costs $19.99 (approx. Rs. 900). IPhone does not allow users to go beyond its operating system. Jail-breaking or hacking the system to install other apps is one way to bypass this.

Use it as a debit card

Bar code-based mobile payment is fast becoming a trend. In India, Airtel Money (www.airtelmoney.in) lets users load their mobile phones with money to make payments at select stores.

Continue reading “Powerhouse in your palm”