The Top Free Downloads for Smartphones

The best free downloads for smartphones are the applications (apps) that, inevitably, make your life easier, your schedule more in control, or even to make sure that you get the best deals on whatever you are buying. A program that you download to your smartphone is called an application, or app for short, and there are hundreds of thousands of them available. When all genres and types of apps are taken into consideration, for all smartphones, from retailer's App Stores, or even from private programmers, for the Android-powered smartphones like the Droid to Apple's iPhone to the Blackberry Pearl, there are more apps added daily, and what they can do when combined with other apps is truly amazing.

The best free downloads for smartphones will depend upon what you primarily use your smartphone for. If you were to ask 1,000 people what their favourite ten apps were, you would most likely get about a thousand different lists. With that in mind, the top, more broadly-used downloads for smartphones include, but in no way are limited to;

* GoogleShopper. For anyone who likes to get the best deal on whatever they buy, GoogleShopper is a must-have app for your smartphone. The Google brand of apps are most commonly found on the Android-powered smartphones, like the Droid or HTC Hero. GoogleShopper allows you to take a picture of the barcode, or of the product itself, and have a list of places, within a predefined distance, that carry the same or similar products, in a lowest-to-highest price order, or even by distance.

You can have the stores that offer the items you are interested overlaid on Google Maps, or even Google Street View. For items that regularly cost over $50 to $100, using GoogleShopper frequently will add up to major savings in the long run.

* MobileMe. MobileMe is an app that allows you to find your iPhone when it is lost or stolen. For such an expensive little gadget, not having at least two of this type of app on your smartphone is taking too much of a risk. When you stop to think of the social networking apps that allow people in your contacts' lists full access to everything on your smartphone, as well as everything on your contacts' contact's lists, and so on, and so on, it gets pretty scary. MobileMe can also wipe out all of the information on your iPhone, in case it is stolen by a less than honest person.

* Google. No matter what you want to do or how you want to get somewhere, Google has an app for that, and locations can be shown overlaid on Google Maps, Google Street View and other mapping related software. Google is the main search engine for the Internet, although some competitors are making a tight race of it lately, and most apps for smartphones that will use a map or web query will use Google at one point or another.

* EmailNWalk. EmailNWalk is an app that uses your smartphone's camera, and overlays the image on your touch screen, so that you can see where you are going while you are texting on the go. After all, we don't want a society full of people bumping into each other and solid, inanimate objects, like buildings and doors. Ooops, we do have that, don't we? So, it does have it's place as more than just a tacky and fun app to play around with while with your friends at the mall.

* SkypeForiPhone. Skype is a great, free long distance calling program that everyone who has any relatives or friends living in other cities should have on their smartphones. If you are more of a singular entity, or all of your friends and family live in the same area code, then an iTunes app would overtake Skype for the last of the top five free downloads for smartphones. You do gotta rock, after all.

So grab your smartphone and see what your top five free downloads are, which of the apps on your phone that you use the most and make the most positive impact in your life. Do any of these make it onto your list?