These days a tablet or smartphone is as essential for college students as a backpack, a meal plan, and extra long twin sheets. But it’s not the hardware that’s so important—it’s the apps. Load up your mobile device with handy apps for taking notes, sharing files, recording lectures, managing your tasks, and (of course) reading books, and your road to the Dean’s list will be a little less bumpy. Google Play Books Did you know you could, instead of buying them? You get to keep them for 180 days, and you don’t even need an Android tablet to read them and take notes— is available for as well as devices. Renting textbooks instead of buying them? With their convenient size and long battery life, tablets and phones are perfect for reading your books—and think of how much lighter your backpack will be.
If you desperately need to read a textbook on your laptop, although restrictions make this less than ideal. Not having to spend hundreds of dollars on books you might read once—or worse, expensive books that the professor only assigns one chapter of—is the very definition of “ideal.” A definition you can even get inside the Google Play Books app. Evernote The ultimate note-taking app, Evernote is perfect for students. It’s fully cross-platform, with an app for every device and an extension for every browser. Evernote lets you save content from anywhere and mark it up with notes and tags.
Prior to iOS 9, Apple’s Notes app was pretty lackluster in comparison to many note taking apps on iOS. With the new operating system, however, the app is gaining on third-party solutions.
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The Evernote apps for the, and have some unique skills, too. You can use the device’s camera to create a new note by snapping a picture, say, of a classmate’s notes, or the office hours posted on your professor’s door. Any text visible in those images becomes searchable, and Evernote can also keep track of where each picture was taken, too. Tons and tons of other apps let you save things to your Evernote account—a few of our favorites include, the cross-platform image-annotation tool, and the wildly flexible.
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Dragon Microphone Turn your smartphone into a wireless mic for use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows or Dragon Dictate for Mac. And are extremely powerful speech-to-text tools that will let you dictate your notes and research papers instead of typing them word by word. They learn your voice to improve accuracy over time, and handy transcription features can even attempt to turn an audio file of a recorded lecture into text. The free companion app, Dragon Remote Microphone for and turns your phone into a wireless microphone, perfect for pacing circles around your tiny dorm room muttering about 19th century French literature. If you can stammer out a first draft at least, you’ll avoid the dread of staring at a blank page trying not to think of the term “writer’s block.” AudioNote So where do you get those audio files of your lectures for Dragon to transcribe?
(Developer Luminant Software offers versions for.) AudioNote synchronizes your handwritten and typed notes to the audio recording. The built-in voice recorder can capture your lecture or small-group discussion, while you jot down notes that are automatically synced up to the recording. Later you can just tap a note to jump to that part of the recording. That means you no longer have to worry about scribbling down everything important that’s said, and you can be more present in the discussion instead of focusing on taking detailed notes. You can email the notes and audio files together or separately. Quickoffice Pro HD Quickoffice Pro HD isn’t cheap—it’s $20 for and the, and the smaller-screen, non-HD version is $15 for and the.
Ever wanted to create a new Excel spreadsheet on your phone? Come on, of course you have. But if you really need to create and edit Microsoft Office files (that’s Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations) on the go, it’s. Quickoffice integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Box, SugarSync, and a few more cloud services, so wherever you park your files, you’ll be able to access, edit, and share them with this app. And while the interfaces take a little while to get used to, they’re well designed and generally free of clutter.
Now that Google purchased Quickoffice, it’s too. ZotPad and Zandy Our roundup of for students includes, a cross-platform tool for managing a library of scholarly articles and creating citations from them to insert into your own research papers. There’s a mobile app for that too. A well-stocked Zotero library in ZotPad can take the place of reams of paper you'd otherwise have to haul with you., $10 for, lets you access anything in your Zotero library from your iPhone or iPad, syncing via the Zotero server, your own WebDAV server, or even Dropbox. It’s a great way to keep up with your reading while you’re commuting to and from campus. Android users should try out, a that lets you view and edit your Zotero items and their file attachments, and add new items to your Zotero library.
Dropbox Do we really have to tell you to get? Hopefully not, but if you've managed to get this far without Dropboxyou should still get Dropbox. You’ll get 2GB of cloud storage for free, and it’s probably the most versatile service out there for syncing data between your desktop, mobile, and dozens of. Keep all of your most important files effortlessly synced across every device, thanks to Dropbox. Dropbox makes sharing files easy too—the other people in your study group to send you files over the service, but if they’re smart enough to get into college, they probably have Dropbox too.
Sign up for an account and grab for your Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Kindle Fire. Wunderlist Juggling multiple deadlines and learning how to manage your time is one of the biggest practical skills you can learn in college—no matter what your major, think of yourself as a project manager in training, because that’s essentially what you are. So you’ll need a killer to-do list, and is. It looks great, works across all platforms, and strikes a balance between its rich feature set and uncluttered, easily understood interface.
Wunderlist can keep your school tasks and all your everyday life tasks side by side, so you'll always know what needs to be done. You can get free apps for and, plus a handy and of course the Web app, version, and native clients for and too.
You can spring for a to add files, assign tasks to other team members, but for most students the free account will suffice. We especially love its ability to create new tasks from email messages.