LinkedIn
The daddy of business social networking is, of course, available on the iPhone. Keep up with contacts, make new ones, network, exchange information, update your status and more. You can also hook the app up to Twitter to keep up with the social networking phenomenon, and sync the names, email addresses and photos of your LinkedIn connections directly into your iPhone address book. The ‘In Person’ feature means you can automatically swap contact info with someone over Bluetooth, and the app will let you know when a contact updates any of their information so you are always up-to-date with the latest news.
Mocha Remote Desktop
Available both free of charge and paid for, this app lets you connect to your desktop when away from the office. It’ll let you access all your important documents and files on any PC running Windows XP Professional or Vista/Windows 7. It enables you to have full, secure access to your work computer through Wi-Fi or the phone’s own network. The paid-for version features additional pop-up keyboards, mouse functions (right button, drag and hover), text macro support and can support 20 different host configurations.
Dragon Dictation
If you find it difficult to type on the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard, this may be the app for you. It lets you dictate emails, text messages, notes, status updates for social networks or text for any iPhone application using the clipboard feature. The company behind it claims that it is five times faster than typing. No training or set-up is required and results are very impressive right from the start. All the work is done on the company’s servers rather than the phone itself so there is a slight delay in processing the results, but we found that a good Wi-Fi connection can return your transcribed text in a little over one second.
Documents to Go
OK, so one of the big attractions of the iPhone is that it’s an Apple, which means ease of use and very good looks. Unfortunately, the business world is still very much a Microsoft-shop, so getting rid of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the rest is not yet an option. This app lets you create, view and edit the aforementioned documents, and view PDFs and Apple iWork documents. It also integration with web-based apps, too, such as Google Docs. You also get a desktop application to provide two-way file synchronisation. Also available on the iPad, like many on this list.
Salesforce Mobile
Being out and about no longer has to mean being away from your key salesforce.com information, as this app lets you instantly access and update it on the go. You can look up account activity before calls or meetings, log details from phone calls and meetings right after they take place, and respond immediately to new leads and customer requests. The Lite version features full create, edit and delete capabilities on the standard CRM data while the Full version is fully customisable with mobile access to custom objects and configurations.
Also worth a mention
You might also want to take a look at these: Dropbox for cloud storage, back-up and synchronisation; JetSet Expenses to keep track of expenses when out of the office; SIO To Go from Cisco, which lets users know about and react to network threats; Scanner Pro, which turns your iPhone camera into a little scanner, perfect for business cards, receipts and other documents.
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