5 Essential iPhone Apps for Students

It’s a hard life being a student, dealing with atrocities such as Snakebite, hangovers, lectures, and dare I mention the hiked-up tuition fees without inciting hatred towards the Government? Sadly, there isn’t an App that will help you eradicate the substantial debt you’ll find yourself in after your studies (just get a JOB). However, there are plenty of Apps out there that can help you finish Uni and move on to being a debt-ridden Graduate. Here are 5 of the best.

Sleep Cycle Tuner Alarm – App updated 12th November 2010, Price £0.59, Developed by Maciek Drejak Labs

A fact of student life is that you don’t get much sleep. My sleeping patterns involved going to bed at an average time of 4am, waking up at 8am for vile Student Halls breakfast, then going back to sleep with a bellyful of fry-up until 2pm; not saying this is standard or advisory, just an example. Sleep Cycle is an App that monitors your body movement in bed and wakes you up when you’re in a light state of sleep, making waking up in the mornings/afternoons a hell of a lot easier. While this will not cure the inevitable hangovers, it will certainly limit the damage, as waking up from a state of deep, drunken sleep is worse than waking up from a state of light drunken sleep. Furthermore, some say that waking up from a light state of sleep compensates for a couple of hours less sleep, making it perfect for the insomniac student lifestyle.

Imindmap – App updated 20th June 2010, Price £4.99, Developed by Buzan Online Ltd

Even though we learned how to make these at the age of 6, we can’t deny that mindmaps still come in pretty handy. What makes the iPhone one arguably better than a paper one is that you can work on it anywhere you want, can delete and add branches as you please, and can export it to e-mail addresses to be printed. Like on paper, iMindmaps are pretty, colourful, and help convert that mish-mash of jumbled ideas you come away from lectures with into something coherent. Although it should be mentioned that the developers’ decision to change iMindmap from a free into a paid App at £4.99 seems a little steep in these testing times.

Flashcards + – App updated 111th January 2011, Price Free, Developed by Connor Zwick

While mindmaps are a great way of piecing together all the scattered bits of information in your head, the best way to tell if you’re ready for an exam is by testing yourself with random questions from your given subject. Flashcards + lets you do just that. You can set up as many ‘Decks’ of cards as you like, write up the questions on one side and answers on the other, then test yourself to your heart’s content. Once you feel you’ve learned a card, you can tick it off, adding it to to your ‘Learned’ deck. As well as creating your own sets of questions, you can also download cards off Quizlet, which has a substantial library of popular topics for you to draw upon. Finally, unlike many other flashcard apps, this one is absolutely free.

MyHomework – App updated 13th October 2009, Price Free, Developed byRodrigo Neri

One of the big shocks in the switch from school to University is the sudden realisation that your education is in your hands; no more letters to mummy and daddy saying their son will be suspended if he keeps missing classes, no end-of-term reports that are destined for the bin before reaching the parents, and no fuss if you don’t take notes in lectures. As such, you need to get organised.

MyHomework lets you save all the details of all your classes, then make notes of set reading, additional seminars, and other day-to-day forgettables. If you don’t trust yourself to routinely check your to-do list, you can also send your notes and class details to friends and e-mail addresses. Sure, there are plenty of Apps like this, but MyHomework is neat, simple to use and, most importantly for the thrifty-minded students out there, FREE.

Ibooks – App updated 15th December 2010, Price Free, Developed byApple Inc.

Carrying around all the books and papers you need for uni can be a burden, as can attempting to do 2 hours worth of reading on a 15-minute commute into uni. iBooks has a decent selection of the more famous academic works for you to buy (or even get for free), meaning you can dip into them as you please since you always have your iPhone with you. Particularly useful is the PDF reader. So , assuming your lecturers are of that rare breed that actually know how to use computers to send lecture notes and readings over the internet, you can build up a library of reading on your iPhone, being able to access it whenever and wherever. Realistically, this ‘whenever’ and ‘wherever’ will still be just before your lecture on some form of public transport, but at least it’s all neatly organised on a little digital bookshelf.