I wanted to use my article to tell you about some of the best productivity apps I have come across in the last year, which have really transformed how I work. If you are like me and constantly on the move and your Converged Mobile Device (SmartPhone and/or Tablet) has become your virtual office, then these mobile device apps could really helped you out, as they have me:

1. Evernote lets you gather notes, articles, ideas or presentations on your iPhone or Android phone and can then synch them to your computer. What makes Evernote worth the hype is the fact that whatever you note down gets almost instantaneously synced to the cloud. For instance, if you write a note on your iPad it will pop up on your Android Evernote or on Evernote.com and so on. This is very handy indeed, as the problem of transferring documents from one device to the other has been eliminated.
2. Instapaper is available on most mobile devices and lets you save online articles for later reading using a special browser bookmarklet. Launch the app, and it automatically downloads all your saved articles—up to 250 of them—for offline reading in an interface optimised for your portable device. If you travel a lot, as I do, this is an absolutely brilliant way of keeping up to date.
3. Penultimate allows you to write, sketch and draw almost anything you want to with your finger on an iPad screen. The app is similar to the notes app that you get with the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows you to record your ideas right then, and then review them later on. It also gives you the option to read through all the work that you have done in the same style that you would read an eBook on the device. Finally it gives you the option to convert your notebook to PDF format and then email it to your friends, family or colleagues.

NOTE - The suggested apps above are the Author's own personal suggestions and are no way linked with either, the App Developer, Sybase or SYS-CON

But following on.... All this talk about apps got us thinking here at Sybase...

When Apple announced that its App Store had reached 15 billion app downloads after 3 years of operation, it made us wonder if that is faster or slower than the Gold Standard for Incredible Growth of McDonald’s hamburgers? As you’ll probably remember, McDonald’s advertisements used to read “billions and billions served” but it stopped updating its signs back in 1994 when it was nearing 100 billion burgers, saying it had better things to do!

It took McDonald’s almost 26 years to reach 15 billion burgers sold, and about 46 years to hit 100 billion. That means Apple hit the 15 billion mark about 9x faster than McDonald’s and based on projections, Apple could hit 100 billion within five and a half years, or about 9x faster than McDonalds.

Bit of a fun comparison but it really shows how important apps have become to our everyday lives and in turn the importance of the App Store, as I mentioned in my last article - a nice graph below also shows this comparison well (thanks to Eric Lai)