Several weeks ago, I bought my first smart phone— a Lenovo A60, which I've named, “Karnak”. I was apprehensive about getting it at first; because the salespeople were hard-selling another brand and I was almost convinced that the A60 was a bad choice. Thank goodness that I'm stubborn.

I'm not really a “phone guy”. I've survived for a long time with just a Sony Ericsson W810i, making do with its music player and so-so camera. But I guess something in it broke— it still works but the music player's become choosy— and I reckoned that it's time to get a replacement.

One thing I liked about the W810i was its long battery life. With my minimal phone usage, it can stay alive for a week without recharging. And while I'm aware that smart phones typically use up more energy, battery life was an important criterion for my choice of phone and the A60 does not disappoint. Compared to that hard-sold brand/unit, which a friend of mine owns and says he charges it on a daily basis, the A60 can last for three days before it even starts to complain. And mind you, I am no longer a minimalist since I have more things to do on Karnak now, compared to my old W810i.

So, here's a list of applications that have kept me on my phone since I bought it.

Twitter and Google+. Despite being at home and on my lappie most of the time, I've discovered that if I keep my social media activity on a separate machine from my work station, I can be more productive. (It helps that our network is semi-constantly online, although I might consider getting a plan from my cell service provider— if they have offerings to match what's on www.o2.co.uk/broadband, but that's another story.)

I used to have a Facebook app but it sucks, so I just use the Dolphin Browser for surfing through Facebook's mobile site. Dolphin didn't come pre-installed on Karnak, though. But I know about it because I used to have it on an iPed/aPad thing that I bought last year.

UbuntuOne. Right now, Karnak has very limited storage— he has only an 8GB SD card. So it's nice that I can save stuff on the Cloud. Of course, when I installed the Google+ app, a Google Drive app came with it; however, Alexandria and Thebes already have UbuntuOne pre-installed (both are on Precise Pangolin), and that makes it easier for me to sync my stuff on those three machines.

LiveScore, Snes9x EX, and MX Player. Entertainment! I'm a football enthusiast, of course, and LiveScore gives me the latest updates on on-going matches. Snes9x EX is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator— enough said. MX Player is touted to be “the VLC of mobile devices”, which I find to be a fair statement.

SL4A. The “scripting layer for Android” app provides, among other things, a Python interpreter for Karnak. Right now, I just use it for running EnDecryptor, a script that I wrote for simple encryption and decryption— I use that mainly for “knowing” the passwords for my various Internet accounts. Long story.

And that's about it.