5 top mobile apps
When you find a good mobile app, it changes the utility of your device. There are other good apps on each mobile platform, but these five are my picks for the best in five genres most everyone uses. If you have your own favorite please share it in the comments below so we can all benefit from your experience.
Tweetium for Windows 8.1
Twitter is a wildly popular social network, and while the official Twitter app on each mobile platform has improved, third-party apps are often better. Tweetium for Windows 8.1 is the best Twitter app on any platform.
The interface is gorgeous, and a joy to use on a Windows tablet. It handles portrait and landscape orientations equally well, with controls where you expect them. The developer keeps making it better and it is a fantastic app. Heavy Twitter users could find Tweetium to be the reason to go Windows.
See the full review of Tweetium for Windows 8.1.
$2.99 in the Windows App Store
Mr. Reader for iPad
RSS may be an old technology, but those of us who use it depend on it heavily. Mobile RSS aggregators must handle lots of feeds, and the articles they share.
Mr. Reader on the iPad does that with flair, and through a simple yet attractive interface that takes full advantage of the iPad. It's highly configurable, so each user can make it work the way he or she prefers.
Office2 HD for iPad (Citrix ShareFile QuickEdit)
Individual and corporate tablet users almost certainly need a good office suite to deal with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. There are a few good suites on every mobile platform, but Office2 HD is one of the few with the ability to track changes on Word documents.
Those who collaborate with teams know how important it is to see the changes that team members have made to Word documents. Office2 HD shows them clearly, so there’s never a question of who changed what.
This app is a full office suite that has solid document handling capabilities for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It's not as capable as Microsoft Office, but it’s amazing what they’ve crammed into this mobile app.
This app's top listing may change with Microsoft set to unveil Office for iPad. Details of this upcoming app are sketchy, but if it's a full-featured version of Office it will likely rise to the top.
NeoCal for Android
Good utilities are a nice find in the app store, and NeoCal is such an app. This scientific calculator has every function imaginable for such a utility. It has registers and memory slots galore, and all in a totally configurable interface.
The interface is attractive, and even has themes to fit any user. Using NeoCal is like using a calculator of old, but with a large, touch interface on an Android tablet.
$7.99 in the Google Play Store
Zite for iPad
From the moment Zite was introduced a while ago, it captured a large audience. This was due to the popularity of news aggregators, and the special interface of the app.
Moving around in Zite is a wonderful experience due to the way the app fluidly builds each page of news articles. Zite builds each page on the fly with article summaries flying in and generating an attractive layout instantly.
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The app learns what you like the more you use it, and in short order presents news articles from around the web that you enjoy reading.
Zite was recently purchased by Flipboard, and unfortunately may not be long for this world.
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