reQall for the iPhone

I’ve recently started using a new and quite innovative Personal Information Manager on my iPhone: reQall. Three things about it greatly appeal to me. First it allows you to enter to-dos, appointments, and notes by voice as well as typing them into the iPhone.  Next, it stores all of these both locally on the iPhone and on the reQall servers, where you can access them via a Web interface. Finally, it supports the concept of shared to-dos in a really nice way.  My wife, Rosemarie, now uses reQall on her iPhone, too. If I enter a to-do that I want shared with her, it appears on her iPhone as well as mine. In addition, if she marks it as completed on her iPhone, it’s marked as completed on mine, too.

reQall requires signing up for an account, but the free standard version will sastisfy most people. I use the Pro version for $25.00 a year primarily because it supports syncing of my appointments with Google Calendar, which is very important to me. My wife gets along fine with the free standard version.

Favorite iPhone Travel Application

G-Map US East (and West, too) has become my absolute favorite iPhone application when I’m traveling in the US on business or for pleasure. Vastly improved since I last wrote about it here, it now provides audio turn-by-turn directions and has just about  all of the features of any dedicated GPS device. It’s completely replaced my Tom Tom GPS unit in my car and in rental cars. It’s really great having one less device to take with me when I travel!

Second Most Favorite Travel Gadget…

… has got to be my Cradlepoint PHS300 cellular to WiFi portable hotspot. As you can see in the picture above I even use it in my car. In fact, I’ve used it in my car while my wife or I was driving – both with my netbook and with my iPhone. I’ve used it to make Skype calls on my iPhone while driving myself.

It’s an awesome device that allows me to quickly and easily stay connected to the Internet, while bypassing any AT&T restrictions on iPhone applications, and just lets me get work done. I’m really loving it!

Our Most Handy Travel Accessory

Wow, it’s been a month since I’ve posted anything here! That’s primarily due to the fact that I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling and vacationing with my wife, Rosemarie. We’ve actually had two honeymoons in the past month – one in the Cayman Islands and one in Orlando.

During our travels I found one device that I carry to be of most usefullness to my wife and I – the Richard Solo 1800. This is an iPhone recharger par excellence!

It’s got enough watt-hours to top off both of our iPhones and charges them about as fast as plugging them into a power adapter. This device comes with a USB charge cable that can be plugged into a computer USB port or its own power adapter. When it’s so hooked up, if an iPhone is connected to it the device charges the iPhone first before recharging itself.

In addition it comes with a very handy car-adapter plug that can power two USB cables at once. This means that we were able  to plug the Richard Solo charger into the car-adapter, plug an iPhone into it, and then plug an Apple sync/charge cable into the second USB port and thus be able to charge the Richard Solo, my iPhone, and my wife’s iPhone all at the same  time.

I can’t tell you how many times we used this device to top off our iPhone batteries, but it was pretty much constantly in use. All-in-all, it was the most useful gadget we carried with us – making sure that no matter how much we used our iPhones they always had sufficient power.