Yesterday I asked a colleague and N95 user Sebastian about pimping my N95. He said I should check out a few applications. On his recommendation, I checked out a few apps. Here’s what I found.

Sebastian first pointed me to the Nokia Labs applications directory. I didn’t find anything particular engaging here, but do like the idea of bringing together a Digg-like interface for finding apps.

Zonetag

Zonetag is a combination mobile app and web service from Yahoo! research. The service hooks into the phone’s camera and after snapping a shot you are prompted to upload a geo-tagged photo straight to Flickr. I love how Zonetag keeps this simple. Yes, there’s a lot of power behind this service, but to the user, the setup process is quick and easy and all you do is take photos like normal. I took this photo on the train this morning and it’s automatically tagged.

Yahoo! Go

Finding the built-in Symbian email client very clunky, I stopped using it. Instead, I decided to try out Yahoo! Go. The 3.0 version was released just a few months back. On my Windows Mobile, I never found Y! Go to be very useful since native apps did a better job, but since I haven’t yet engaged with the Nokia interface, I thought it was a good time to try and “live” in Y! Go. I’m a fan of Yahoo! properties, so after typing in my username and password, I had access to much of my online life including mail, photos, local weather and news.

One feature that really exited me was “add feeds from My Yahoo!” to the news listing. I’ve been collecting feeds into my Y! profile for over a year and while I found it “neat” that both My Yahoo! and Y! Mail knew about the feeds, it wasn’t until I could click once and download all my feeds to the mobile that I really saw the power of the central feed store.

I found a few nifty widgets and added them to the Go carousel. I added Wikipedia search and a BART trip planner. This is great, I thought. I can load what I need into Go and essentially have it act as the phone’s OS, diving down into Symbian only to send text messages and to make a call.

Unfortunately, I’ve found Y! Go to be virtually unusable. It’s way too slow, and I’ve not really sure why. I don’t know if the device is underpowered or if the software is too demanding. Navigating through the app is a drag as it literally takes 30-60 seconds for response to a click. There appears to be no offline cache, so I cannot have my news loaded overnight for reading when on the train where I have limited online access. Sorry, but I don’t have the time or patience to wade through an app that performs so poorly. I am really disappointed as Y! Go has a lot of promise. The interface is beautiful and the features and integration are terrific, but performance trumps both.