Apps We Love #1: Food and Drink

By Susan Delson

For some of us, a hand without a smart phone in it is empty indeed. Others can’t conceive of being that wired. For still others, it’s a brave new world we’re just starting to explore. And not just brave and new—it’s big.

This past January, the number of applications offered through Apple’s online iPhone store reportedly topped 133,000. (For those without such a gadget: these programs are what makes a phone "smart," something that can help you get through your day.) The total in Google’s Android Market broke 10,000 last September. And there are thousands for BlackBerry and Palm users, too. Okay, but how many of them are even remotely interesting to someone over age 22? Worse, how many have been downloaded and turned out to be perfectly useless? For us, the question was simple: Which smart-phone apps are worth it to women like ourselves, and why? For answers, we turned to the WVFC community, asking dozens of women two questions: Which apps can’t you live without? and Which ones are the most fun? As you might imagine, the ‘Can’t Live Without’ category struck smart-phone bedrock pretty quickly: Google, email, and calendar ruled, with an occasional Facebook or Bloomberg. After that, though, the line between ‘indispensable’ and ‘fun’ started to blur, and what emerged were personal recommendations for much-used, well-loved apps. And so begins an intermittent series on “Apps We Love.” Prompted by the surprising number of respondents who put their smart phones to work in the grocery store, this first installment looks at apps for food and drink.Based on the feedback in hand, the next article will cover ‘Smart Phone as Swiss Army Knife.’ (A special heads-up to Android, BlackBerry, and Palm users: let us hear from you. So far, the input’s been almost exclusively from iPhone and iPod Touch users, and they’re an enthusiastic bunch. We’d like to present a more well-rounded picture, and for that we’ll need info from you.)

Future topics include favorite news sources and NYC-specific apps. We’d love to cover other city-specific apps—not to mention creativity-sparking apps, favorite games, and useful apps to have on hand for kids and grandkids. But for those, and any other app topics you’d like to see, we’ll need more input. If you’ve got a favorite app of any kind, let us know, and your feedback will become part of later articles.

And now: Food and Drink.

To read the rest, and  tell us your favorites, click here.