| By Kevin Purdy Lifehacker Pack for Windows Phone 7: Our List of the Best WP7 Apps
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. Away we go. You can skip down to a section you're particularly keen on here:
ProductivityWinMilk Task Manager (Free)
Alternate: To-do Tasks list Same deal, just with syncing to Toodledo, instead.
OneNote (built-in)
My Trips ($1.99)
Adobe Reader (Free)
Internet/CommunicationMetro Web Browser ($1.99)
Wonder Reader ($1.99)
Alternative: Simpi RSS Reader: 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. (Free) Newsroom ($4.99)
Send to WP7 (Free)
GoVoice ($2.99)
Alternate: GVoice One notable advantage of Gvoice is that its push notifications are available in the free trial. The downside is that they're much trickier to set up, at least if you can't get a hold of Gvoice's newer version—the developer is stuck in a kind of mid-stream Hell. Shame, too, because we'd give GVoice the edge in interface looks. ($3.99) Location-Aware and Social NetworksFacebook, Twitter and Foursquare (Free)
Alternate: Seesmic If you're regularly updating more than one Twitter account, or you weigh your Twitter and Facebook presences equally, Seesmic is, as on every platform, a viable "power user" tool. On WP7, it gets some knocks from reviewers for not offering everything on each platform—Facebook photos are often problematic, for instance—but it seems like a handy tool for scanning your social network status. (Free) Yelp (Free)
UtilitiesCardStar (Free)
The Weather Channel (Free)
Music and MediaiHeartRadio (Free)
Last.fm (Free)
Slacker Radio (Free)
Shazam (Free)
RealTube ($1.99) or YouTube (Free, HTC only)
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." Virtual Remote: Media Control ($2.99)
Food, Shopping, and EntertainmentCocktail Flow ($2.99)
Shopwise (Free)
We're open to suggestions of other must-have WP7 apps in the comments—we know we've probably put just a (deep) scratch in the surface. Let us know what you like, what you're wishing for, and what we missed down yonder!
| December 28th, 2010 Top Stories |
There are quick-fire, stand-alone task lists available in the Market—Quick Lists is a freebie that seems to have fans. But 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 
Peering 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—Jason, in particular, is a 
The good news: there's a great travel organizing app that syncs with the killer service 
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.
Why Metro over the default (and pretty good) Internet Explorer? Let us count the reasons: Private mode browsing, and a "lightweight mode" for seriously simple, quick page skimming. Near-total screen space, with all controls tucked away. An option for "lock in portrait mode" option. Customizable themes and really fancy-looking menus and controls. Better page sharing through email/SMS/Twitter, and an option to save all the pictures from a page to your local gallery. We're pretty sure there's more tucked away in here, but that's really all you need to know to make it worth your while.
The best feed reading tool for Google Reader devotees. It boasts all the features you're used to—starring, sharing, "magic" sorting, and beyond—with real-time sync to your account, so there's no lag if you open up Reader in a browser. Bonus for serious readers: built-in Instapaper and Read It Later integration.
Definitely pricey, but potentially worth it. Why? For one thing, the app pulls down full RSS feeds, even when the feed itself is truncated. The layout is mighty nice, and you can set the app to automatically send your starred items to read-it-later service Instapaper.
Formerly known (and 
We tried out all the Google Voice clients we could find in the Market. None of them could hold a candle to the current Android or iPhone apps, but WP7's unofficial clients are stronger than their earlier counterparts. The best of the bunch, on balance of ease of use and features, is Go Voice. There's an option for push notifications (both a top-bar "toast" and a badge icon update), and the controls for listening to voicemails, sending and replying to texts, and changing your account settings are pretty easy to get through. It's got its annoyances (e.g., the badge counts sometimes get stuck), but since the push notifications come through Gmail filter forwarding, they're actually pretty reliable.
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. All of them are free, too.
Sooner or later, CardStar comes to every device with a screen. Its mission is simple: take those loyalty/bonus/shopper cards, the kind you stuff in your wallet and on your keychain, and make them unnecessary. You do this by typing in the barcodes into CardStar, then using your smartphone screen as your scan-through saver at those stores. You may get occasional odd looks, an "Oh, cool" or two, but in any case, you'll always have a backup for when your actual cards and key tags get worn down.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
As noted in our 
There are lots of media-center-specific apps for various platforms: XBMC, Boxee, and so on. Virtual Remote is nifty for all the services it supports: Windows Media Center, iTunes, VLC, and Windows Media Player, out of the box. Of course, it requires a little app to run on your Windows box, but most universal remote apps will.
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.
There are barcode scanner apps that use your camera in the Marketplace, but read the reviews (or try them yourself), and you'll find they only work if you happen to be inside a sterile, all-white test lab. In the meantime, Microsoft's own Shopwise makes up for its lack of camera savvy by offering good product/price search, links to the major deals sites like FatWallet, SlickDeals, and Amazon's offerings, and a nice skin.
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