Technology

We don’t need a card-counting app for our smartphones. Nor do we need an app that can hook us up with cheap Criss Angel tickets. What we need are apps that make living in this town easier. Here are a few apps do just that:

Of all the e-mail services available—Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and a few others—Google’s Gmail is my favorite. It’s free, provides more storage than I’ll ever need and has been simple to access from every mobile phone I’ve tried. Plus, it is consistently improved. I’ve added two new features in recent weeks—one from Google, one from a third party—that have made Gmail even better.

One of the most confounding aspects of our gadget-loving society is managing the chargers that keep our gadgets running. We need to charge our mobile phones, our music players, our Bluetooth earpieces and our cameras.

If your house is like mine, there’s a counter in the kitchen where each outlet holds a charger. I have an organizer to keep the cords under control and the gadgets in the same place, but that doesn’t decrease the need for outlets. And there is an energy drain called “vampire energy” or “vampire draw,” a reference to the power wasted by leaving chargers plugged in when they are not being used.

Sometimes, it’s unclear if a new product is innovative, or just better than its predecessors. In the case of new music-making “toys” from WowWee Robotics, a better approach to a familiar product resulted in something that delivers a lot of fun.

Paper Jamz is a series of faux instruments—guitar, drums and amps—that lets kids pretend they are rock stars. We’ve all seen such electronic instruments; if you have kids, you probably own one. But what’s innovative here is the presentation. The Paper Jamz products are remarkably thin, portable and a joy for kids to play loudly—much to the chagrin of Mom and Dad.