Adventures of VLA – Super V.A.! Utility Belt Tools

Valerie Alba (aka VLA – Super V.A.) is a Virtual Assistant and guest blogger.  Each Tuesday she provides tools, tips, and tricks direct from her life-saving “utility belt”. 

Episode 14: Let your Android do the walking – Useful Droid & Smartphone Apps

Michelle Mangen, Yoda to the virtual assistant world, recently did a blog post on her page about useful Droid apps in celebration of her new Smartphone.  She has given me permission to share her post on my blog.  Isn’t that nice of her?  So, if you have Droid, please enjoy the following tips and tricks for your Smartphone.  If you don’t have Droid, you can probably find similar versions for your iPhone.

Useful and Fun Apps for Droid X 

Barcode Scanner – Takes a picture of product barcodes and gives you product and pricing information.

Juice Defender – Enhances battery life.

Advanced Task Killer – If you’ve had your Droid for more than five minutes you’ve probably either been tipped off by someone else or have read about Advanced Task Killer. Install it, you will be glad you did.

pdaNet – Allows your Droid to act as a “modem” for your laptop.

Astro File Manager  – Keeps everything in neat and tidy folders.  Others have suggested EverNote and SpringPad as well.

Places Directory – Neatly delivers up a list of businesses to you based on the category you select from the home screen

Gesture Search – a Google product and hands down, this is the one app I have found myself using most often, especially when it comes to finding someone in my 400+ phone contacts. Open this handy-dandy app and start writing on your screen and it will begin filtering, with every letter you write, the results. Settings can be changed to have it also find music, apps, etc.

CardioTrainer is a pretty darn cool app that will track your distance (via GPS) for workouts (in my case riding bike). It will also speak to you (I found the voice a little creepy so I turned it off after my first workout). Allows you to chose and play your desired music playlist for your workout.

Calorie Counter ~ I haven’t really gotten into this one yet as I just had it “Bumped” to me on Saturday as a practice “bump”. At this point all I’ve done is record my weight in there but it seems to have a lot of options.

I hate to cook, I really hate to cook but have been on a quest to do better ever since my son was diagnosed with liver disease and they say that a low-fat and low-sugar diet is essential so I found Healthy Recipes, Recipes BigOven and Epicurious (hopefully they will make cooking easier for me especially since Epicurious has a category called “I can barely cook”)

Google Goggles – scan pretty much anything and it will return a list of web listings (fun, not sure how practical it is though)

FetchIt Phone Finder- this will come in handy someday as I often put my phone on vibrate and later cannot locate it. Text yourself and it will start playing your ringtone until you locate your phone

Droid Light – helpful to make sure there are no alligators on the porch before I go out for a cigarette (I’m sure it has many other practical applications as well)

Sleep and Relax – has 16 or so “peaceful” sounds that you can mix and match to create your own customized night time sleeping music.

Craigslist Notifier – if you are big on watching for deals being posted on Craigslist this app will allow you to program a feed and almost instantly be notified when an item is posted matching your desired search phrase. In my case, I’m not much of a Craigslist watcher, but am currently on the look-out for a good, cheap patio set so I have found it quite practical.

Must Have Social Apps for the Droid X

Word of caution for those of you that have massive numbers of Twitter and Facebook stalkers. If you go with the default Twitter and Facebook clients you will find that all of your contacts there will flow through to your phone. Myself and @VAinParadise never could figure out how to remove the Twitter ones even after she unlinked her account.  (She also did a factory reset). 

• Seesmic – I chose Seesmic based on what I read over at Extreme John’s post on 3 Best Twitter Apps for Droid. Bonus for me: the keyboard has the smiley face emoticon on it.
• Foursquare – Venice, FL is somewhat lacking on the “social side” of things so even though I don’t go “out” all that often I’m racking up Mayorships and have added a number of venues. A few larger establishments are taking advantage of location based marketing and I hope to get more of them on board here once I get involved with businesses in the community. In addition to Foursquare I’m also trying to do more with Yelp! but may ditch that altogether in favor of Foursquare.
• Bump – not truly social but definitely cool to be able to quickly and easy share apps with other Droid users or to share my contact data. (Note: When I found their URL I noticed that they also allow for “bumping” to receive Paypal payments)
• Facebook for Android – this one will not bring all your contacts into your phone (It may offer it as an option, however, I didn’t want them all on my phone)

For even more useful business applications for iPhone, Blackberry and Droid, check out http://www.businessreviewusa.com/business-features/technology/top-5-business-apps-iphone-blackberry-and-droid

You can find Michelle Mangen and her complete blog post at www.thevirtualasst.com

Do you have a utility belt tool tip or crisis?  Call VLA – Super V.A.   Help is just a click away!