The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.