It’s true, I still use an iPhone (although the Nexus One is my primary phone, and I love it!). When it come to discussing apps on mobile, my natural inclination is to focus on how many crap apps there are out there (and most of them are crap, even if the idea might be good, the execution is usually horribly poor) but this time I’m going to talk about apps that I like and use very frequently (~daily is my criteria).

1. Amazon Kindle. This is my all-time favorite mobile app! I have an actual Kindle, and love it too, but the convenience of being able to read a few pages while in line at the grocery store, or waiting for my daughter to finish her ballet lesson has allowed to actually start reading books again. This is my new “email” app for mobile (think about it, when you see someone standing and checking their phone, you probably assume they’re checking email – for me, it would be reading 5 more pages of Swimming Across – which I just finished by the way, and highly recommend)
   I can’t think of anything I’d like to change in this app, it’s got shared reading progress synchronized with my real Kindle, synchronized bookmarks, the Amazon e-book convenience (buy through your computer, read instantly on your device), just pure magic, although still waiting for the Android version Mr. Bezos! :)
2. OmniFocus. I paid through the nose for this one (something like $15?) and for a long time I hated how long it took to start up, but it’s gotten better over time, and since my life is in OmniFocus, it’s pretty important that I can bring it along when I leave the house.
   There’s lots I’d like to improve though. The perspectives I create on my desktop version don’t get synchronized, the whole synchronizing process is slow and cumbersome (I have to manually synchronize while on the same wi-fi network as my computer, while it’s on? That’s so 1999), but it’s still better than nothing and I use it a LOT.
3. Facebook. I don’t think I use FB quite daily on my mobile phone, but it’s still a pretty darn well designed app, and if I was a FB addict (I’m not, really, it’s not true, or it is… now I’m confused) I’d probably keep it open all the time. Has most of the features one would need on the go, and the photo sharing is nice (although too slow imho).
4. Google Maps. Ok, I’m biased since I used to be the product manager for Google Maps for mobile, but still, I use it all the time to get phone numbers, see exact locations of businesses, get directions (even trivial ones) etc etc.
5. Google Search. Be that voice search in Google Mobile App, or just plain typed search through google.com, I use Google all the time on my mobile phone. Life just throws so many surprises at you every day, and search is always there to help figure out answers to these little puzzles.

So that’s the list as it stands today, but I’m constantly trying new apps and I’m pretty confident the list will have changed 6 months from now (although I’m having a hard time seeing anything topple Kindle from the list at the moment). There are some interesting ones like Foursquare, Gowalla, Siri, and even Amazon (the shopping app), but none of them has yet made it into my daily usage patterns, which I think is the greatest challenge of any mobile application.

Also, you’ll notice that there are no games on the list – somehow I haven’t gotten addicted to any game (yet :) ), although I’ve tried quite a few.

Do you have any mobile app favorites? Please share in the comments.

- Gummi