PhotoMath
Platform: Android, iOS
Price: Free
Focus your smartphone on a math problem or equation. Blink and the answer pops up! Before students shout hurrah and teachers do a facepalm, read on. The app easily solves simple equations but it still has to figure out high-school equations. And something like Riemann zeta function is still galaxies away.
MightyText
Platform: Android
Price: Free
Browsing the phone every two minutes to read new messages is irritating. This is where the creation of Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani come in. Install the app on the mobile and download an extension for your desktop browser. Make sure your phone’s data mode is on. This way, every message that arrives on your phone gets displayed on your desktop. You can even send messages and dial numbers from your desktop. That’s not all. The entire phone book can be viewed on the computer. The same goes for the phone’s battery level.
Lux Auto Brightness
Platform: Android
Price: Rs 225
Just the app you require to turn down the brightness of your phone –– below the minimum allowed –– for reading at night. Switch to night mode which makes the display appear ‘warm’ rather than too blue. And to reduce battery consumption, the intelligent backlight adjustment ensures the display is never brighter than it needs to be.
Tango
Platform: Android, iOS
Price: Free
Tango has certainly upped the competition in the smartphone messaging service space with the Ma of the hour –– who else but Jack Ma! –– investing $280 million in March. It’s a WhatsApp-like service and if you are glued to your desktop for long hours, install the app on your computer… and chat away! As of March 2014, there are 200 million registered users.
Super
Platform: Android, iOS
Price: Free
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently launched Super, which lets you share short ideas with friends. So, if you have a picture, mark it, say, “The Best” before you share it with friends on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. Stone told the website TechCrunch that he’s “not going to proclaim that it’s the most innovative thing ever or that it’s going to save the world. It’s not, it’s just fun.” But if the app doesn’t get downloaded in big numbers in the next few days, chances are, it would go poof.
Tasker
Platform: Android
Price: Rs 199.99
It’s an automation tool with 200-plus built-in actions. So, if an app needs to be executed at a certain time every day or your phone needs to be put on silent mode every night at 10pm or the phone’s volume needs to be adjusted whenever headphones are plugged in, this is just the app for you.
VLC for Android Beta
Platform: Android
Price: Free
This is the ultimate music and video player that plays almost any file format under the sun. Finally you can stop worrying about phone and browser support issues.
