I love my iPhone and I thought it might be help­ful to oth­ers who use iPhones to list the top 10 apps that I find use­ful for research.

1. Gmail. It is easy to sync the native iPhone email app with your gmail account and this works pretty well for most pur­poses. But if you want to search more than the last 50 mes­sages, or you want to see the whole con­ver­sa­tion, it is also help­ful to have the app from Google. See http://​www​.google​.com/​m​o​b​i​l​e​/​mail/
2. Google sync. It is also very help­ful to sync your iPhone cal­en­dar with Google cal­en­dar, and the iPhone con­tacts with Google con­tacts. Some instruc­tions are given here. (This is not an app, but a sug­ges­tion for how to use the con­tacts and cal­en­dar apps more effectively.)
3. While we’re dis­cussing all things Google, read­ing research blogs is becom­ing an impor­tant part of my day and hav­ing a good app for that is impor­tant. The web app from Google itself is pretty good, but it has no facil­ity for read­ing offline. For that, you’ll need a native app with sync­ing to Google Reader.  I’m using Byline.
4. I use my iPhone as a notepad and I like to have my notes avail­able on my com­puter as well. Unfor­tu­nately, the native notepad app doesn’t sync with PCs. I’ve tried a few other solu­tions, and the best I’ve found is Sim­pleNote which syncs online.
5. As I’ve pre­vi­ously explained, I like to use task-​​list soft­ware to stay orga­nized. I use Too­dleDo, and there is a nice app which syncs with my online to-​​do list. It’s not free, but worth a few dollars.
6. A good sci­en­tific cal­cu­la­tor is handy. I’m using Touch­Calc which seems to work pretty well.
7. I keep all my files backed up on Drop­box. I can access every file stored on my PC via my iPhone using the Drop­box app.
8. I can update this web­site, and my other sites, using the Word­Press app.
9. Occa­sion­ally I need a dic­tio­nary, and the dic​tio​nary​.com app is great. It also has a thesaurus.
10. Time­Scroller is use­ful when I have a phone meet­ing with some­one in another time zone.

While I’m dis­cussing apps, the fol­low­ing will prob­a­bly never be used for research pur­poses, but I find them useful.

1. Pocket Weather: much bet­ter than the native app and it access Bureau fore­casts so it is more accu­rate. It also shows cur­rent weather read­ings and fore­casts for nearby suburbs.
2. Mobi­cast: the cricinfo app for cricket scores.
3. Olive­tree Bible reader: the best Bible read­ing app available.
4. ABC: for news (that’s the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion for the Amer­i­cans who are read­ing this).
5. Wikipedia: there are sev­eral apps out there. One nice one is Wikipan­ion
6. Cycleme­ter: for the cyclists out there.

Related Posts:

• Take note
• In praise of Dropbox
• Orga­niz­ing travel
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references
• Some use­ful exten­sions for Gmail