Work smarter by going green with your smartphone

Mobility has gone a notch higher with smartphones. But with mobility comes the additional cost of maintaining and powering the mobile gadgets.

With studies showing that people are now spending more time on their smartphones than on their computers and with more than 500,000 mobile apps available, there are thousands of apps to help you save money.

You can do a lot more with your handset than just make calls, browse the Web or attend to work email.

The tiny gadget can also help you save money when shopping for new products, provide free video calling to friends and family around the world or serve as a replacement for other digital devices like video/still camera, audio recorder, calculator and calendar.

What many users take for granted is the amount of energy consumed by smartphones which can lead to unnecessarily bloated power bills.

In the Nokia’s Ovi store, you find Green Charging, an energy saving app that ensures you do not waste power while charging your phone.

The motivation behind this app is to curb Global Warming.

As per its name, the Green Charging application will notify a user (with sound effects) when the battery is fully charged.

The app displays other important information like the battery status, standby time and talk-time to enable the user to make charging decisions in good time.

More often, users discover that their phones were fully-charged long after a lot of power has been wasted or get inconvenienced by a flat battery when they least expect it.

Blunder

We also have portable mobile solar chargers that come in handy when outdoors on a sunny day. One such gadget is Suntrica portable and bendable chargers which best suit the adventurous type or people who spend more time roaming the countryside but still want to remain connected via their phones.

Another blunder that smartphone users commit that costs time and even money is installation of too many applications that eat into the phone’s memory slowing it down even to the level of malfunctioning (commonly referred to as hunging).

A phone that ‘hungs’ can cost you time and even opportunity if it happens in the middle of an important conversation with a client or business partner.

That is why you should be prudent by installing few apps that gives you maximum value.

One such marvelous application especially for news lovers, social networking addicts and journalists who want to keep abreast with breaking news is Snaptu.

The application is a fast all-in-one platform that includes your mobile essentials in one place: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, News, Weather, Sports (Cricket, Soccer…) Movies, Sudoku and much more.

Instead of cramming your phone with lots of individual apps that eat into your battery, waste space and slow things down, you can have Snaptu, and keep your phone running full speed ahead.

The news platform in Snaptu, for instance, allows a user to key in links of news feeds from multiple websites of interest.

With the links in one place, all updates on the chosen sites will automatically pop up on your phone instead of you navigating across your favourite sites for updates.
You can also leave your face book and twitter accounts open on Snaptu for quick access and instant chats or contact with colleagues, business partners or clients.

However, be aware that leaving such applications to automatically remain open on your phone may cost you in terms of bandwidth hence you should consider turning them to manual mode so that you control bandwidth consumption.

Store contacts

Another amazing application is Funambol, a Symbian Sync Client that enables you to quickly synchronize a variety of data between a Symbian device and the Funambol server.

The application synchronises (sharing content across phones) contacts, calendar events and tasks, notes with native applications on your Symbian device hence saving you the agony of manually transferring data between phones.

On most Nokia E and N-series smartphones, for instance, you can store your contacts online through ovi sync so that you can always download them to a different handset if you lose your phone. This eradicates the pain of losing contacts collected over a long period of time should you lose your lose a phone.

With Google Sync app, if you have an iPhone, Windows Mobile Device or a Blackberry you can choose to sync both your contacts and calendar, or just one of the two. Similar apps are available in the android market.

Call for free

If, by any chance, you have subscribed to unlimited bandwidth data plan or you are connected to Wi-Fi, then Skype can save you money in a big way.

So long as you have a good means of keeping your phone connected, you can start making VOIP calls to save your minutes.

Apart from Skype (for iPhone, Android and Blackberry, and Windows Mobile (for Nokia smartphones)) you can use Talkatone that lets you make free Google Voice VOIP calls on your iPhone while GrooVe IP does that same for Android.

With these VOIP apps, you not only can make calls anywhere in the world for free, but you have the added benefit of video, too. With Skype — which can also be used via your cellular service — you can also swap files and text with the person you’re chatting with.

Another iPhone app called Fring lets up to four people video chat at the same time.

If you consider all the money you may be spending on long-distance calling, free apps like Skype, FaceTime and Fring make sense and save cents.