Useful Applications for Smartphone?

merlinbasenji asks: "I've recently purchased an Audiovox SMT5600 Smartphone for Cingular, and I'm looking for suggestions for good applications like: calendars, browsers, games, email client, etc. Anyone have a favorite, or had a bad experience with specific applications?"

Essentials "for a busy professional"

[abelikoff]

Congratulations on your new phone! Here's my list, although I am still using a PDA (must wait for another 6 months to get away from the Verzion yoke)

• Pocket Informant - for PIM functionality
• Ilium eWallet - indispensable for passwords.
• Resco File Explorer - for decent file manager and file encryption
• Haali Reader - for books.

Password Management

[binaryspiral]

I have to maintain an insane number of passwords and systems - Flexwallet 2006 triple encrypts the database file that stores my passwords. It also includes a PC app that it syncs with.

Highly recommended.

Jabber Messenger for Smartphones

[Anonymous Coward]

I use imov Messenger [movsoftware.com] on my Audiovox Smartphone. Its Googletalk, MSN, AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger all in one. Also works with any Jabber based system (Googletalk is Jabber based).

A few of my favorites

[Doomstalk]

Agile Messenger (all your IM needs rolled into one)
Opera for Smartphones
RJShortcut
NewsBreak (RSS Reader)
SmartIRC
RepliGo
Smartione (not a typo)

Re:SSH - What about mToken?

[Sancho]

I got a PPC-6700--one of the reasons I wanted it was ssh.

I have to say, in general, the offerings are pretty disappointing. PocketPutty can't save sessions, so you're typing in a lot of the same information every time you want to connect. Also, I didn't see an immediately obvious way to send ESC events (for example).

mToken is pretty nice, though pricey. "Scripting" is completely unintuitive, but if you work at it, I understand you can get single-button CTRL-A events sent (for use with Screen). It supports multiple font sizes, which is nice (you can get an 80x24 terminal on the screen without scroll bars). If you do want scroll bars, you're stuck with 80x25 or greater, which irritated me.

I ended up buying and using PockeTTY because it was cheap and did almost everything I wanted. It only supports plain password authentication (had problems with PAM for some reason) and public key--which was fine for me. It supports port forwarding, which I use to tunnel my IMAP connection, and it saves sessions. It only has a single font size, so an 80x24 terminal will have scroll bars.

Keep in mind that any program you use will take awhile to negotiate the connection, and the connection will be a little slow (mostly due to encryption CPU overhead) and will really destroy your battery life (I can barely get more than an hour if I leave SSH connected). I ended up setting up OPIE (FreeBSD's s/key equivalent) and using telnet for most operations. I still use SSH when I need to port forward or do things which require an encrypted connection (bouncing from one host to another, for example, when I don't want my passwords to be sniffable), but most of the time, I'm happy enough with the one-time passwords and increased speed.

Replies missing the point.

[Inoshiro]

I've had 3 replies so far. All of them are from people who didn't read my post or understand what I was saying.

1) Voicemail's not free for everyone. There is no real security in having voicemail (or any private data) on your service provider's equipment, either, as the recent Google vs. DOJ should show. Why shouldn't my phone do it, regardless of what the providers offer?

2) These are obvious features; once you go beyond a simple phone that just does DTMF based on a keypad, you would think this would become a standard functionality. 9$ shareware applications are not standard functionality. 9$ shareware applications do not move with me when I replace my Symbian phone with one running Motorola's OS or a PalmOS-based phone! 9$ shareware applications do not integrate with each other. These should be in the phone software itself. A secondary download means the phone is not a smart phone so much as a colour phone with a camera and fancy ringtones.

3) Synchronization is a big problem! Symbian phones don't synchronize in any documented way; no means exists on MacOS to correctly sync (iSync will ignore the phone's groups, randomly delete contacts, etc), and no means exists to sync it with Linux. PalmOS does not sync to MacOS (iSync destroyed or duplicated a lot of my memodb and contacts, and destroyed my calendar, when I tried syncing my T once). WinCE by design does not sync with MacOS or Linux. None of these devices will sync with each other in any standard way. Yay, I get to enter duplicate data!

4) Selective ringtones are a hack as a means of selective ignoring calls; setting someone's custom ring tone to a blank recording is not as effective as just saying, "Never accept calls from this person" in a check box somewhere.

If you're going to reply to me, give me real solutions, don't just prove you didn't read my post.