View the full text of more than 7,000 textbooks on your iPhone — for free. CourseSmart makes its money through the licensing of e-textbooks, which expire after a certain access period, typically about 180 days. The books cost roughly half as much as their print equivalents, although there's no way to resell or keep the books past the subscription period. As for the virtues of reading textbooks on the iPhone? Well, you need sharp eyes. But with persistent rumors of an Apple tablet computer coming in the near future, CourseSmart is likely a harbinger of reader applications to come.
Not sold on reading on the iPhone? Give it a shot for free with Stanza. In addition to including magazine and newspaper content, the program links to the massive Project Gutenburg, which maintains free copies of more than 30,000 classic books that have fallen into the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired. That includes a lot of the reading list in a typical class: the full works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Nietzsche and a diverse slate of classic authors. Stanza keeps track of your progress and lets you adjust the text size to avoid eyestrain.
A godsend for the organizationally challenged, Evernote lets you type and synchronize notes, photos and voice memos from your iPhone to the Web. Everything can be accessed later from the Evernote application or the Evernote website, where the company offers a free desktop client for Apple and Windows PCs. Notes are searchable and tagable, and Evernote even tries to recognize and index text in photo snapshots. There's no better application to keep class notes on hand at all times.
This flash-card application allows you to use Google Spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel to create decks of cards, which are able to include sound clips or YouTube video. gFlashPro also links to a flash-card directory, enabling you to share and download premade decks with your friends or the community. There's a free version available, but the ads are intrusive enough — and the program is useful enough — that the $4.99 price is worth it
Somewhere between the iPhone's built-in calculator and those Texas Instruments behemoths lies the Graphing Calculator app. Along with an expanded scientific calculator, the app includes the ability to graph multiple equations and e-mail the results. It may not be able to handle an advanced-calculus class, but for high school students, it's a cheap and slick solution.
This app makes it simple to organize and keep track of your class schedule and upcoming assignments, color-coding them automatically according to their due date. It also syncs with a desktop counterpart, keeping your iPhone and computer up to date on what's due.
For everything that happens after class lets out, Facebook is still king. The iPhone application is a smart port of the popular social-networking site, making it easy to keep tabs on friends and events and share photos using the iPhone camera. Let's see Twitter do that. (Facebook, free)
Save your back and download the Dictionary.com app. The program includes nearly 400,000 definitions and a thesaurus, eliminating at least two books from your backpack. And it's free. (Dictionary.com, free)
If you're looking to view or save documents on your iPhone, you're out of luck without an application. Enter Documents to Go. The program has the ability to sync and view Microsoft Office files, PDFs and more to your phone or iPod touch, making it a convenient storage place for syllabi, class notes and more. And though we'd be loath to write much more than a text message on the iPhone, on Documents to Go you can create and format Microsoft Word documents as well. (Documents to Go, $4.99)
Wikipedia in the classroom? Sacrilege. Fact is, there's often no better jumping-off point to quickly learn a lot about just about anything. Wikipanion makes it easy to search and bookmark articles in the massive open-source encyclopedia, and the app is free. Just don't let your teachers see. (Wikipanion, free)
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