1st Impressions

Smartphones have revolutionized the way we live. Now we can use our phones to access the internet, write articles and emails using their word processing capabilities, take photos and a whole host of other functionalities . They have become personal digital information hold-alls, they can also improve our brain power.

Many of us like playing games on our smart phones. Angry Birds is probably our first thought when it comes to whiling away a few minutes using a mobile phone, but there are lots of other games that people love to play from racing games like Real Racing to gaming apps like Foxy Bingo. There are also some games that are said to work on your mind and improve your brain power. Here we give you an example of the top brain boosting apps.

Sudoku
Any brain-bender has to start with sudoku. The puzzle has been credited with warding off mental illness, memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease all the while strengthening reasoning and logical skills, according to studies by a variety of universities. One of the most popular is the Electronic Arts sudoku, but look around and find one that suits you.

General knowledge apps
Test your trivia and the breadth of your knowledge base with a general knowledge quiz. The quiz by Obaid inc is a recommended one. A broad general knowledge is a great base for creativity, the more you can see the links between things, the easier ideas will flow. It is also associated by greater openness to experience and fluid intelligence.

Physics games
Physics games help you learn the laws of physics and use your brain at the same time. One of the best ones is Newton which uses a powerful physics engine.

Catch all puzzles
Puzzles are still a fine way to give your head a little work out and the PuzzleManiak is a grab bag of some fiendishly inventive ones. It’s available at a reasonable price and should keep you occupied for all those long journeys and long mornings in the dentist’s waiting room.

DeskSMS is a utility application that I am absolutely in love with.  It allows you to send, receive, and reply to SMS messages in a number of ways from your computer.  The advantages to this are huge.  Is you work doesn’t allow you to “play with your phone” in the office, or if your spouse is playing with your phone and you get a text message or want to send one, or if you are just lazy don’t want to pick up your phone because you are already on your laptop or tablet, this is the app for you.

DeskSMS is a quality product brought to you by the same developer that is infamous for his ROM Manager for rooted Android phones.  But, unlike ROM Manager, this app is not free.  Someone has to pay for all be bandwidth it generates.  There IS a free trial period of a couple of weeks, but after that, the service is a very reasonable $4.99 a year.

The key to DeskSMS is that it links the texts to/from your phone to your Google account.  This allows you to access your SMS (and contacts) via a number of ways.  You can send/receive them via Gmail, via Google Chat, via Google Talk, via Google Chrome extension (there is also one for Firefox), and via an independent web page.  I’ve tried other apps that allow you to do this via a web site, but nothing I’ve found is so easy to set up and has so many different delivery options.  Because you can access your SMS messages and contacts via a web page, you can also create an application shortcut to that page and even run it as a separate app on your computer.  And, because you can access it via Google Talk, any Jabber IM client on your phone, computer, or tablet can be used to access them.  That means that you can even cross-platforms and do things like respond to SMS messages to your Android phone via an Apple iPad, for example.   And the person you are conversing with has no idea that you are not typing at 70wpm on your Android phone.  To them, it all is from your phone.

Setup could not be easier.  Install the app, log in to your Google account, and tell the app whether to send your SMS to Gmail, Google Talk, or to the Browser/extension channels – or any combination of these.  You need to choose these wisely though based on how you have alerts set up though.  The last thing you want is to have Gmail, Google Chat, Google Talk, and browser extension alerts on your laptop going off simultaneously with the SMS alerts, mail alerts, and IM alerts on your phone.  You don’t want to get overloaded with alerts, so it is best to limit them.  Right now, for example, I have Google Talk on my laptop pop up when I get a SMS message, but that means it ALSO pops up on my phone – along with the SMS alert.  I don’t want to block the alerts on my phone in Google Talk because that will also block the contact on my laptop.  So I use GoSMS to set custom alerts for those SMS contacts to not give me the audible alert and that way the GTalk alert on my phone is the only audible one I receive.  So you need to think through how you do this if you have your SMS sent multiple places on multiple devices.

There *is* a little lag time as the SMS is forwarded to and from your phone, but I have found that to be minimum.  And, since I can type a whole lot faster on my laptop than I can on my phone, the person waiting for a response doesn’t really notice any lag in the end results.

The benefits of this system go beyond convenience though.  Say you leave your phone at a friend’s house and can’t call him because he not only has your phone, but his number is stored in your phone.  If you have ever had a SMS conversation with him, you can text him from any internet connection by accessing your email or GTalk or the browser site.  And, just in case you can’t remember the web site URL and need to access it from somewhere, I created a bit.ly/desksms  short URL to it.  :)  Also, since SMS conversations are sent to your GMail account and/or GTalk, there is an online archive of them should you ever need to search them for that phone number or address that someone shared with you some time back.  This archive can quickly fill your inbox though, so creative use of filters to label and archive them are probably best.

The way the system works via Gmail or GTalk is by creating a unique email address for the people you are sending and receiving text messages from.  This address is their number followed by @desksms.appspotchat.com.  So as long as you are using your gmail account to send something to 1235551212@desksms.appspotchat.com, the owner of the 1235551212 number is going to get the message as a text from your Android phone.  And this “desksms.appspotchat.com” domain makes it easy to set up filters for these messages in your gmail.

My suggestions for this app are very few.  It is absolutely perfect at what it does, but I would love to see it expanded.  I would love to see the ability to add an additional email account to your desksms.appspotchat.com settings so that you could send/receive texts via more than just your primary Gmail account.  That way, you could add something like a work email in case you work places that block things like access to Gmail or GTalk.    I’d also love to see the app, where possible, to be able to create contact names and pictures in my Google contacts called “SMS Firstname Lastname” or something similar for selected folks already in my SMS history or my address book.  Maybe it could put them in a separate Gmail contact group or something.  Right now, every time I get a call or SMS, I am prompted whether or not I’d like to add that number@desksms.appspotchat.com address to my GTalk contacts.  If I have already chosen a lot of them to add to my SMS group in my Google Contacts, a lot of these notices could be avoided.  And if I had the option to NOT forward these messages or calls to my GTalk, Gmail, and Web destination unless they were on this “white list” or could, conversely, set it to to automatically block contacts that are already in my contact list as being work numbers or home numbers, that would cut down on the requests to add/block every new contact.  Finally, and associated with this “black list” idea, I’d love to have some way to automatically block the forwarding of things on a formal black list (like text alerts from my bank or my current data usage from ATT) or to even filter on things like “Reply with your comment or “like”” so that you could filter out things from FaceBook.  I seriously don’t need a separate GTalk contact for every status update from every FaceBook or Twitter account I follow.  Maybe some option to not forward texts unless it is a full 10-digit phone number would block a lot of this as well.

Overall though, I’d give this app a full five stars (and did).  It is solid, dependable, and highly configurable.  So the 4.4 rating on the Android market is well deserved.  So I’d highly recommend everyone take this app for a spin.  If you don’t like it, you still have two seeks to play with it at no charge whatsoever.