Apps for your W7 Phone

Windows Phone 7 is the newest kid on the Smartphone block, but this kid comes highly recommended. WP7's got some great apps worth grabbing, even in its very young Market, and you can try them all free. These look to me to be solid picks.

That's right—with the vast majority of apps in WP7's Market, you can click the "Try" button to give a limited version of any paid app a go before committing to a purchase. There are also apps that are straight-up free.

It doesn't appear there's a way to create a link to an app from the Zune software (at least that we've seen), so you'll have to do your best at searching out the app in your phone's Marketplace, or in the Apps section of the Zune desktop software. There's also an online parallel market (unaffiliated with Microsoft), AppsFuze, that has nice, big screenshots and as-you-type searching.

Here we go. Feel free to skip down to a section you're particularly keen on here:

Winmilk: is a task manager and free. If you want your lists to show up elsewhere and be safe from your stubby delete finger, go with WinMilk. It syncs to the popular Remember the Milk service, which has extensions and apps for just about every platform out there.

OneNote (built in): Looking around the WP7 Market, there's no one note-taking app that distinguishes itself any more than the built-in OneNote app, tucked inside the "Office" link. It syncs to Microsoft's Office Live cloud and the desktop OneNote, and it's a pretty good system overall. Tip: Press and hold on any of your notes, and you can pin them to your Start page.

Adobe Reader (free): What much do you have to say about Adobe Reader's free app, other than, hey, you occasionally run across a PDF in your email, or on the web, that you need to read? The app, though, is a lot like other WP7 standards—crisp-looking and nearly full-screen, which counts when you're reading text on scanned pages.

Simpi RSS Reader (free): A nice interface for a tool that straight-up syncs with Google Reader, but can also add and manage its own feeds. Good looks, solid function, and free.

Send to WP7 (free): Formerly known as "Chrome to Windows Phone 7", Send to WP7 now supports Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8/9, through a combination of extensions and bookmarklets. Install the WP7 app, then set up your browser with an activation code from the app. Now you've got one-click, instant sharing between your desktop and Windows Phone 7 device.

Social Networking (foursquare, twitter, facebook) (all free): All three of the growing social networks had their own apps ready to launch when WP7 hit the market, and their apps are some of the best available. Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare's clients all stick with the standard WP7 design of side-by-side panels and almost spare interfaces, to good effect. Facebook, in particular, has never looked this informative and data-forward.

The Weather Channel (free): The built-in "Now" app does a decent job of providing the weather at a glance, but it doesn't, for whatever reason, update its start page icon to show the basics. The Weather Channel's own ad-supported app does just that, showing the temperature and a condition icon in its start box, and providing good forecast views, multiple location offerings, and other handy weather data.

IheartRadio (free): It depends on where you live, really, but if you happen to be in one of the cities where Clear Channel has a station you like, you might dig listening to it, free, streaming on your phone. There's also a whole lot of randomized radio you can listen to, also free.

Last.fm (free): Some people prefer Pandora, but Last.fm is a great streaming radio and recommendation service on its own terms. The mix is different, the artist information dense and well-illustrated, and since you can "scrobble" to Last.fm from just about any music player on Earth to help feed it your preferences, your stations come out very fine-tuned.

Slacker Radio (free): The dark horse of the "big three" music streaming services, but Slacker comes with a few hidden weapons. One is a catalog of pre-programmed stations that wins a fair amount of praise from fans. Another is a higher-quality bitrate for free radio listening. On some platforms, Slacker offers offline cache-ahead to keep things jamming when you go offline—here's hoping that comes to WP7.

Shazam (free): Shazam does on WP7 just what it does on other smartphone platforms: identifies songs, seemingly by magic, when you hold your phone's mic anywhere near a speaker. The bonus features on Windows Phones, though, are the tight integration with the Zune marketplace—if you've got a Zune pass, you can quickly snatch up that song you just heard for free—and, for a limited "launch" period, unlimited tagging (limited to five songs on other phones, until you get a paid account).

RealTube ($1.99) or YouTube - HTC (free for The AVMan): Windows Phone 7 doesn't handle Flash at the moment. So RealTube converts Flash to Silverlight on its servers, then streams the results from YouTube, DailyMotion, Funny or Die, and other video sites to your phone—with HD quality, when available. Microsoft offers its own "YouTube app," though it merely links to YouTube's mobile site. If you happen to own an HTC phone, you can head into the HTC market and grab the free YouTube app, too, which gets the job done equally well.

Alternate: LazyTube: If you want more integration with the actual YouTube service, LazyTube offers login, search, sorting, filtering, bookmarking, and all that good stuff. It requires Microsoft's kinda-app to function, though, and doesn't do HD, though that's "in the pipeline."

Cocktail Flow ($2.99): Put simply, this is an app that tells you how to make cocktails. But it's beautiful, and clever at what it does. You can simply look up recipes, sure, but better to enter into the app what you've got on your bar. It will tell you what you can make with what you have, then tell you what you can make with just one or two more things. Create shopping lists, mark cocktails as favorites, and get thirsty just looking at this app. Not to be used before or if driving.

LINK to the Microsoft apps page. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/apps/default.aspx

LINK to 25 top W7 phone apps. http://www.intomobile.com/2010/11/09/top-25-apps-wp7-windows-phone/

How to share links to Windows Phone 7 Without Using Zune:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-share-links-to-windows-phone-7-apps-without-using-zune