As smart phones keep getting smarter, more and more road warriors are leaving their laptops behind, leaning instead on their trusty phones to keep up with work away from the office. With over 50,000 apps in the App Store emporium, the iPhone offers an especially rich trove of ammo for roaming productivity mavens to turn mobile phones into mobile offices.
In Pictures: 10 Top iPhone Apps For Road Warriors
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It's important to keep this little revolution in perspective: A new style of device requires a new set of work habits. Your glossy gadget can't match your laptop in every respect, and it's a mistake to try to use it the same way. No matter how blazingly fast your thumbs might be, pecking delicately away at a touch-screen keyboard won't win any speed records. Though some inevitably try, the iPhone's not a great tool for writing a novel.
In Pictures: Top 10 iPhone Apps For Road Warriors
Instead, the iPhone is a device of convenience and context. Unlike laptops, notebooks or messy collections of Post-It notes, your phone rarely leaves your side, making it a handy vessel for bottling brainstorms, managing to-dos and itineraries, or capturing on-the-go information like expenses or billable hours. The best iPhone apps (and especially the best productivity apps) emphasize quick access to your ideas, contacts, tasks and info. Most of them thrive on simplicity, offering fewer features than desktop counterparts, but also making it faster and easier to get it done quickly.
Take, for instance, the Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite. It lets you edit Word and Excel files and view a slew of others. Editing a long document on your iPhone may not be ideal--but being able to make changes on the go could be a lifesaver.
Compared to traditional computer work of long, sustained work sessions, iPhone office apps are tuned for short but frequent hits, encouraging you to capture new information and ideas as they happen, to be processed and massaged later. The iPhone is likewise ideal for reading and even editing documents in the otherwise lost time of grocery-store lines or subway commutes. (This also happens to be true of iPhone games, which are nearly all designed for quick but tasty bites of gameplay, just a few minutes at a time.) In all of its contexts, in other words, the device's quick-draw convenience lets you make the most of your downtime, whether you use it for work, play or creative contemplation.
This makes the iPhone an ideal laptop substitute between the times we traditionally consider work time, and as a can-do sidekick outside the office--at conferences, for business travel or in those sparkling (and never scheduled) moments when inspiration strikes.
We've collected the best apps for making the most of those intrawork interludes, each of them earning their place with fast, efficient interfaces that are well suited to this evolving style of work.
Grab 'em--and go.
In Pictures: Top 10 iPhone Apps For Road Warriors
Josh Clark stress-tested thousands of iPhone apps to identify the 200+ apps featured in his book, Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders, available this month from O’Reilly Media . When he’s not tapping, flicking and swiping, he makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory www.globalmoxie.com in Paris, France.
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