When phones are just too smart

New York: If Caroline Cua's iPhone looked anything like her closet, where she keeps her dozens of pairs of shoes, she would have screen after screen of applications.

But instead her iPhone is all but empty. Since she bought it nearly a year ago, Cua, 27, who works for a transportation service in San Francisco, has downloaded precisely five programs. And though she uses four of those apps "religiously," she says, the ones she favors - Pandora, the radio station, and Shazam, the music identifier - are your basic black pumps.

And that's just fine with her, until she finds herself among friends whose iPhones are studded with icons. When a fellow iPhone owner asked recently to see her apps, she grew self-conscious. "I said to him, 'OK, now I'm officially feeling like a loser,' " she recalled.
Cua is not an exception. She is the rule. The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.

Last week's announcement of the Apple iPad, a tablet device that runs iPhone applications and will not be available until March, has already spurred the development of more, including a version of a drawing app called Brushes; Nova, a shooter game; and Apple's own app called iBooks, which will connect to its new online e-bookstore.

But that doesn't mean that people will change their habits. Actually, it may just make them feel a tad more overwhelmed. The next generation of gadget users might prove different, but for now it is clear that people prefer fewer choices, and that they gravitate consistently toward the same small number of things that they like. Owners of iPhone are no different from cable TV subscribers with hundreds of channels to choose from who end up watching the same half-dozen.

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So, for every zealous owner whose iPhone is loaded with little-known programs that predict asteroid fly-bys, there are many more Caroline Cuas, who seldom venture outside the predictable. Most say they're too busy, too lazy or just plain flummoxed by the choices.
"I think I'm supposed to want more of them than I have," said Julie Graham, a psychotherapist in San Francisco who echoed Cua's vague anxiety. "There's this sense that I'm missing out on something I didn't know I needed."

Graham, 50, said friends were shocked when she confessed to having failed to download Urban Spoon, a compendium of restaurant reviews. She now has it - and seldom uses it. "I don't have time," she said.

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Since apps were introduced in 2008, rivals like Palm, Microsoft, Google and Research in Motion have all rushed out their own catalog of mobile applications.

A survey of iPhones, iPod Touch and Android users conducted in July 2009 by AdMob, an advertising network that helps people promote their applications on smartphones, found that people discover apps most often by browsing app stores. And even though the iTunes store is bloated with offerings, people tend to gravitate to the most popular.``

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''For all the tens of thousands of apps out there, the odds of being exposed to more than a thousand are very small,`` said Stewart Putney, the founder and chief  executive of Moblyng, a company in Redwood City, Calif., that develops applications for mobile devices.

''The top apps featured at the store do change out," Putney said. "But most users will never see more than one percent of the total apps available.``

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A study last year by Pinch Media found that most people stop using their applications pretty quickly, particularly if those apps are free. And three out of every four applications people download are free, even though analysts say that Apple and its developers receive $1 billion a year in revenue from selling applications (Apple itself won't say).

Jon Lebkowsky, 60, who runs a technology company in Austin, Texas, has a few dozen apps on his phone but uses only a handful, he said. He discovered a few when he saw friends using them. Others he found by searching the app store. ''I'm a Buddhist, so I searched for 'Buddhism' and 'Buddha' to see what I could find," he said. "I found a cool meditation app and a set of the Buddha's writings.``

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Some apps become the electronic equivalent of comfort food. Cua said her social inclinations were well served by a game called Words With Friends, a popular Scrabble derivative that she plays with others. Dana Delany, the actress, has the same game, which Delany said is played among word-oriented people on the set of ''Desperate Housewives.``

''Your personal interests certainly drive what you're interested in," said Peter Farago, vice president for marketing at Flurry. "But people can't always find the things they're interested in."

At the app-happy end of the spectrum is Phil Minasian, 18, a freshman at Purdue in West Lafayette, Ind. Minasian said his iPhone is loaded with games, including racing games, Texas hold 'em, and numerous word puzzles. He said that while the majority of his games are free, he still pays about $15 a month for those that aren't.

Minasian said he believed that who don't download apps in abundance are missing out. ''If people put the time in, they can definitely find apps they'll like, and that help with everyday life,`` he said. With the help of - you guessed it - an app for finding apps, he found the Weather Channel app, which he prefers to the weather program that came with his iPhone.

Simon Sinek, 36, a leadership and management consultant in New York, has 130 apps, having collected them with a tried-and-true strategy.

Every night, Sinek said, he goes to the iTunes store to look at the most popular apps. ''If one looks appealing, I see if there is a free version to try first," he said. He also looks at the number of stars next to the app. If more than 5,000 people have downloaded an app, and 60 percent have given it the maximum of five stars, Sinek downloads it. "I might even pay for it, even if it's over 99 cents,`` he said.

Sometimes he goes completely rogue, entering random words in the search box, just to see what pops up. Typing ''brain`` yielded one of his favorite apps, a simple, elegant and free program called 3D Brain. John Connolly, a media producer who created 3D Brain for the Dolan DNA Learning Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, said he was delighted to hear that Sinek downloaded the app, which is used mostly by science educators and students.

''I think most people are inherently interested in how their brain works, in what makes them tick,'` he said. And, of course, there's an app for that.