New Year's Resolutions. Everyone makes them but not everyone keeps them.
Sometimes it just takes a little help to keep your Resolution and your Windows Phone might do the trick with the right app. The most popular Resolutions likely deal with diet, fitness, financial management, better time management, stopping bad habits (drinking, smoking, betting on the horses, etc), and travel. We have compiled a list of six apps that we think will help you keep your New Year's Resolution or in the least, give you a fighting chance at success.
Eating Healthier
Whether you are trying to lose weight or just eat healthy, diet is a popular theme for many New Year's Resolutions. Livescape is a Windows Phone app that could easily help you with both diet and fitness but for our purposes, we'll recommend it for it's dietary features.
Livescape will help track your wight, calorie intake and monitor your nutritional facts from day to day. You can import nutritional facts of the foods you eat by scanning labels.
In addition to the nutritional features, Livescape will also calculate body fat lean mass, track your blood pressure, mood and stress, provide GPS tracking and logging of your exercise activities, track health issues and can be wirelessly synced with a compatible weight scale, body composition reader or blood pressure cuff using Microsoft's HealthVault.
There is a 14 day free trial available for Livescape with the full version running $4.99. You can find it here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Getting into Shape
Fitness is another popular Resolution and if you're trying to get into shape by running, walking, bicycling, kayaking or another mobile activity check out RunSat GPS Sports Tracker. The Windows Phone app tracks all your outdoor exercise activities and even includes an integrated diary so you can share your thoughts as you go along.
RunSat GPS Sports Tracker uses your Windows Phone's GPS to track your movements, map them out, and gather performance statistics. You can even share your performance online at runsaturday.com.
There are two versions of RunSat GPS Sports Tracker available. You have a free, ad-supported version that you can find here at the Windows Phone Marketplace. Then there's an ad-free version that will run you $2.99 that you can grab here at the Marketplace.
Better Financial Management
Whether it's getting out of debt, managing what you have better or looking to strike it rich many will declare Resolutions to improve their financial position. moBudget is a feature rich Windows Phone application designed to help you budget your finances better.
moBudget will organize and manage your income and expense budget. Features include:
- Transaction and bill reminders to help you pay those bills on time.
- Color-based budget bar graphs for easy reading.
- Accounts and credit card usage recording.
- Cash flow bar graphs and out of funds predictions.
- Credit Card payment estimations and warnings.
- Account balance reconciliation.
- Integrated Handyscan engine to scan receipts.
moBudget is PIN protected and you can create an encrypted backup file of your data. There are two versions available for moBudget.
You have a free, ad-supported version that has some limited functionality that you can find here at the Windows Phone Marketplace. You also have an ad-free version of moBudget that is currently on sale for $1.99 that you can find here at the Marketplace.
Time Management
Clearly there isn't enough time in the day to get everything done. Knowing that, many will pledge to manage their time better in the new year to accomplish all their daily goals. Enter Smart Goals for your Windows Phone.
Prioritize and monitor each goal status along with sharing your progress journal on Facebook and Twitter to get helpful feedback and encouragement from your friends. Features include:
- Create your own list of goals or choose from an existing list
- Filter your goals by status or by priority
- Auto publish your goal details and related journal to your Facebook wall and tweet it on Twitter
- Set reminders for your goals
- Live Tile support to pin your goals to your Start Screen
While Smart Goals can help you manage time, it can also come in handy for tackling other New Year's Resolutions such as monitoring your exercise or dieting goals. There are two versions of Smart Goals available over at the Windows Phone Marketplace. You have a free version that has some limitations (no reminders or Live Tile support) that you can find here and a $.99 full version (Smart Goals Pro) that you can grab here.
Stop those bad habits
Giving up smoking, drinking alcohol, and stopping (or reducing) other habits are often found on New Year's Resolution lists. We tried to find an app that would send an electric shock through your Windows Phone or called your wife every time you partake in your chosen bad habit but such app doesn't exist. So we decided to keep it simple with the Windows Phone app Quits.
Quits is a simply laid out app that not only helps you track how long you've kicked the habit but also how much money you've saved in doing so.
Quits does have Live Tile support that will display how long you've refrained from the habit and it may be surprising how much you can save by kicking some of these habits. If a pack of cigarettes is running $5 and you are a pack-a-day smoker, that's $1,825 a year in savings. Plus there's the health issues involved that are an added bonus.
Quits is a free application and you can grab it here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Travel
Travel resolutions range from a pledge to travel more or to travel to a specific destination. While there are plenty of travel apps in the Marketplace, we decided to choose an app that will help you get to where you're going.
NAVIGON is a feature rich, navigation app for your Windows Phone. One of the newer features to NAVIGON is the ability to download only the maps you need. So if you aren't traveling to California, that's about 95mb of data you won't have to squeeze into storage.
NAVIGON will not only plot your course but also help you find points of interest, provide traffic information and keep you updated on weather conditions. NAVIGON is a well laid out, easy to use navigation app for your Windows Phone.
The U.S. version of NAVIGON will run you $49.99 (on sale until January 5th for $29.99) and the European version is running 84.99€ (also on sale until January 5th for 59.99€). You can find the U.S. Version here and the European Version here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Naturally, there are other apps available on the Marketplace that will help you tackle your New Year's Resolution. These six apps stood out to us as being helpful in keeping your New Year's Resolution and we realize it is but a snapshot of what is available at the Marketplace. If you've run across a Windows Phone app that is helping you keep your Resolution, feel free to share in the comments.
