Apps
8 apps to use when working from home
Conquer your to-do list and maintain your productivity!
The outbreak of COVID-19 shows no sign of stopping. With no end in sight for the deadly disease, companies are resorting to a remote working environment for their employees. After all, most employees use smartphones and laptops that makes work from home possible.
For employees working at home for the first time, it can be a difficult task on where to start. There are many apps out there that could potentially distract you from reaching your full productivity levels. That’s why we compiled apps which can help you on your daily grind at the comfort of your home.
Tide (meditation and timer app)
Working for hours can be draining. As such, you tend to lose focus and your productivity levels suffer as a result. This is where Tide comes in. The name itself invokes a familiar sight on a calm beach. For the app itself, the combination of meditation and productivity timer in one makes it a great tool for everyone working at home.
You can set different timers for focusing on your work. By default, the app uses the pomodoro technique where tasks are divided into 25-minute sessions with breaks in between. The app’s breathe mode allows you to meditate and focus on your breath. Meanwhile, the sleep and nap timer tracks and helps you achieve that elusive sleep after a long day of grinding at work.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Slack (work collaboration app)
Slack is a household name for remote work collaboration. As a matter of fact, we use this app at GadgetMatch for updates and pitching in articles. The app is straightforward to use — it’s comparable to most chat apps on the market, but better. You can reply to someone’s message, which will become a thread in itself where you can also react and reply to keep the conversation going.
Slack shines the most when used as a collaboration tool for work teams. As such, the app may not be useful to you if your company doesn’t have its own Slack workspace. You’ll need an invite to join a workspace and a channel. Once you’re invited, you can say anything to the channel you’re allowed in. Plus, you can also message a fellow user directly and privately.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Gmail (email app)
Who doesn’t use Gmail to handle their email inbox? Google’s mail service has been around for a long time, making it a popular tool for sending and receiving emails. To utilize Gmail for best productivity, you can create automatic filters and labels which does the job of sorting out important work emails from personal ones.
Gmail’s smart compose feature is also a plus when typing new emails to your colleagues and bosses. And with the intelligent features baked in, you will see important emails right in front of your inbox. That makes it perfect for dealing with tasks with tight deadlines.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Microsoft To-Do (to-do list app)
A day’s work is more exciting if you have a to-do list to conquer. Microsoft To-Do is basically that: a to-do list app, but with added features so you can conquer the day with confidence. By default, the app takes you to the “My Day” tab, where you can add your own to-do for the day. You have the option to create a sub-task within a certain task too, making it a versatile companion for focusing on your daily hustle.
The app’s versatility doesn’t stop there. You can remind yourself of an upcoming to-do, and even set it to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Plus, you can even set it to repeat at a custom time. The biggest advantage of this app, however, is the option to set a due date. Setting a deadline for a certain task is very useful especially when working at home where numerous distractions abound.
And unlike other to-do list app, you can add images, notes, and files directly to a certain task.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Microsoft Office (document creation app)
If you ever need a mobile companion for editing documents on the go, Microsoft Office app will more than suit your needs. Almost everything that you would expect from the desktop app is on the mobile app too. In the past, Microsoft used to offer three different apps for editing document, spreadsheet, and presentation files just like in the desktop. However, the company recently released a brand-new app which bundles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even Lens in one.
From the app, you can open and edit any documents from the local file directory or your OneDrive account. Microsoft Office even supports opening and converting PDFs, so you can view and edit an important document from your email inbox.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Google Keep (note-taking app)
Keeping tabs of notes while working on a certain task can be daunting. While some of us may opt for a physical sticky-notes to keep tabs of the important stuff, some prefer a digital solution. After all, it’s much easier to use a digital note-taking app that synchronizes your notes on all devices.
That is what Google Keep does for its users. It’s dead simple to use and you can jot your notes within the app in no time. Additionally, you can change the color and label of your own notes if you’re obsessed with organizing stuffs. The biggest advantage of this app yet over its traditional counterpart is the ability to store and sync your notes from the cloud. Worrying over a sticky-note that you were supposed to pin on a board is now a thing of the past with this app.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Toggl (time tracking app)
It can be a struggle to keep track of the time you work on something while at home. Toggl is a timesheet app that simplifies time tracking for you. You can set the app to automatically track the time while you work on a certain task. The time tracked can be displayed on your calendar too.
At the end of the day, the app will nudge you with stats and reports so you can see how productive you are for the day. This is useful if you always struggle completing a task because you had numerous distractions at home.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
LinkedIn (work social networking app)
LinkedIn is a social networking site just like Facebook. However, it’s more focused on work-related stuff. Here, you can follow a company’s profile for any updates related to work and daily operations. Plus, you can also follow a colleague. Following a colleague allows you to message him/her at any time of the day too. This is useful for getting in touch with a workmate regarding any company announcement that you missed while at home.
You could also search for new jobs on LinkedIn. The job search feature allows you to search for a part-time freelancing gig. More importantly, you could build connections with other people who can vouch you for a job you’re applying. And since this is a social networking site for work, your own profile will serve as a resume where you can post your achievements and boast your real-life skills.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
Bonus: Forest (productivity gaming app)
Who says that work at home can’t be fun? This app literally gamifies your work session. It works by letting you grow a virtual tree within a 25-minute period. The tree slowly grows as time progresses. However, once you leave the app, the tree dies. You wouldn’t want a tree to die, so you’ll be left with no other choice but to stick to the app and let the timer finish.
As such, you will be forced to focus on your work while the tree grows. It’s relaxing and satisfying to watch your tree grow while you conquer your task within the given time. The app cultivates a habit of productivity too, since any tree you’ve successfully grown will earn you coins that you can use to purchase another tree species. And the best part about this is that you can donate that coin to tree planting and conservation efforts for our planet.
Download on Google Play Store or Apple App Store
SEE ALSO:
How to disinfect your tech from the coronavirus
Apple: Coronavirus might cause iPhone shortage
COVID-19 effect: Facebook, Twitter employees advised to work from home
As general rules, the CDC or The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed these to help with preventing the spread of COVID-19:
- Stay home when sick
- Cover coughs and sneezes
- Frequently wash hands with soap and water
- Clean frequently touched surfaces
Apps
Canva teams up with SB19 to turn A’TIN’s passion into creativity
Campaign lets fans access assets, editable templates, more
Canva Philippines has joined forces with SB19 and Sony Music Entertainment to launch the “Kaya sa Canva” campaign.
This first-of-its-kind initiative is aimed at transforming the popular Filipino boy band’s fanbase into creators by giving them access to official design assets, exclusive templates, and powerful creative tools.
That’s of course as fans have a way of creating artwork, banners, and more outputs to honor their idols.
As such, the partnership enables the A’TIN (SB19’s fanbase) to access the Canva-exclusive SB19’s Creative Hub.
This dedicated space lets fans access assets, including SB19-inspired sticker packs, custom typography, and editable templates inspired by the group.
Fans around the world will initially have access to templates for photo-booth strips, wallpapers, posters, and videos.
The campaign will then expand with Canva-exclusive assets celebrating the group’s New Era, as well as their latest single, “Lawless”.
Meanwhile, the original song “KAYA” is accompanied with an upbeat music video, doubling as a love letter to A’TIN and a masterclass in Canva’s tools.
Every visual and animation is fan-inspired, a celebration of the creativity, passion, and dedication that’s defined in the community from day one.
Apps
Samsung’s bet on the future of connected health: Less data, more action
Inside Samsung’s plan to close the gap between your wearable and your doctor
Here’s a paradox worth sitting with: Wearable adoption keeps climbing. A lot of people now walk around with a sensor on their wrist, tracking heart rate, sleep, steps, sometimes ECG. And yet chronic disease rates haven’t moved.
That’s the problem Dr. Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Digital Health globally, opened with at a recent panel on the future of connected care. More data hasn’t meant better healthcare. His diagnosis: a first-mile, last-mile issue.
The first mile is that all this wearable data rarely makes it to a doctor in any usable form. The last mile is that even when a doctor says “lose weight, eat better, move more,” that advice tends to dissolve the moment real life takes over.
Picking up kids, caring for parents, getting through a Tuesday, it’s not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that knowing and doing are two different problems.
Samsung’s answer involves three things it says connected care needs to mature: meeting people where they actually are, building enough trust that people rely on the data, and using AI to turn that data into something a person can act on rather than just look at.
The Tuesday evening problem
Karthik Poriya, Head of Product at Samsung Food, framed the everyday failure point clearly. Picture it: long day, you’re tired, staring into the fridge. You’re not reaching for the healthiest option in that moment, you’re reaching for whatever’s fastest and most satisfying.
For years, nutrition tracking has focused on logging what already happened. Poriya’s team wants to intervene right at that decision point instead, pairing Samsung Health’s underlying data (BMI, antioxidant index, glycation markers) with Samsung Food’s recipe index of roughly 40,000 dishes mapped across 34 nutrients, so a health number turns into an actual dinner suggestion rather than another stat to check later.
Dr. Pak backed this with a small, concrete example from his own family: moving leftover cheesecake out of eye-level in the fridge and putting washed, sliced carrots there instead.
Kevin Duffy, CEO of connected fitness company iFit, made a similar point about exercise. The most effective tool for sticking to a fitness plan is a personal trainer, he said, citing roughly 80% higher adherence compared to going it alone.
The problem is cost: US$100 an hour or more in a major city puts that out of reach for most people. iFit’s bet is that AI can deliver something closer to a personal trainer’s precision and motivation at a price that isn’t elitist.
Duffy pointed to three reasons his company partners with Samsung specifically: reach (Samsung hardware is already in people’s homes, on their wrists and TVs), access to the biomarker data needed to build an accurate plan, and the fact that fitness goals don’t exist in isolation from sleep and nutrition data.
Trust has to come before any of this works
None of the behavior-change ambitions matter if people don’t trust the data or the company holding it. Rohit R. L., who heads Samsung’s Technology Innovation Lab in the UK, laid out how his team approaches that.
Privacy comes first: Samsung, he said, treats itself as a custodian of user data rather than an owner of it. On top of that sits clinical validation, meaning published, peer-reviewed evidence that a feature actually works in the real world, not just in a lab.
He gave a specific example: Samsung’s ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications have been clinically validated and cleared by regulators to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. He was careful with the wording there, detect signs of, not diagnose, since that distinction matters both medically and legally.
A separate study on fall detection for elderly users turned up a more human finding. The detection algorithm worked well in testing, but in real life people don’t wear their watches around the clock, and falls don’t happen on a schedule.
Dr. Pak drew a useful comparison: nobody tells their MRI technician they’re going to fidget through the scan, but with a wearable, you don’t get to control how or when someone wears it. Real-world validation has to account for that.
On the infrastructure side, Rohit described a three-layer privacy approach: on-device protection through Samsung’s Knox security framework, GDPR-compliant data handling, and alignment with the European Health Data Space, including a decentralized clinical trial system where patient identity stays with the hospital rather than moving to Samsung’s side.
Where AI actually comes in
The most technically dense part of the discussion came from Otavio Penatti, who leads Samsung’s Health AI R&D team in Brazil.
His team works on foundation models, the same category of large-scale AI models trained on unlabeled data that underpin most of today’s popular AI systems. Trained once on a huge amount of sensor data, these models can then be fine-tuned for many specific health applications, which tends to make them more accurate than models built for a single narrow task.
Penatti’s team is training these models on wearable sensor data (PPG, ECG, accelerometer) with the goal of getting the model to, as he put it, understand the body’s own signals well enough to translate them into something useful. Longer term, he sees potential in correlating that sensor data with clinical records to flag disease risk before symptoms show up.
Dr. Pak added a striking data point from Stanford research: a foundation model trained on sleep study data was able to look at just a 24-hour window of sleep and predict risk across more than 130 different diseases.
His takeaway was that the signals for a lot of future health problems are already sitting in the data being collected today, we just don’t yet know how to read all of them.
He closed this part with a number worth sitting with. A recent American Medical Association survey found that 97% of physicians have looked at wearable data at some point. Only 15 to 16% actually use it in day-to-day practice.
The top reason cited wasn’t distrust of the data, it was that the data doesn’t plug into existing clinical workflows. That’s part of why Samsung acquired health data platform Xealth, to build a pipeline that gets wellness data into the systems doctors already use.
Five years out
Asked to look five years ahead, each panelist’s answer tracked closely to their own corner of the problem. Poriya described a proactive dietitian in your pocket, one that doesn’t wait to be asked.
Rohit pointed to connected care that clinicians actually trust and patients fully control. Penatti envisioned AI that continuously links everyday behavior to clinical outcomes, catching problems before they start. Duffy’s version was a constant personal wellness coach, sifting through the data noise to tell you exactly what to do next.
The throughline across all four answers is the same: less raw data, more action. Samsung’s panel made the case that the wearable industry has spent the last decade solving for collection, more sensors, more metrics, more dashboards, while the harder problem, turning that information into something a tired person actually does on a Tuesday night, has barely been touched.
Whether foundation models and better clinical integration actually close that gap is still an open question. But it’s clearly the one Samsung is choosing to spend its next five years on.
Manila weather is notoriously unpredictable during the rainy season. Clear 7 AM skies easily turn into 5 PM downpours. For motorcycle-taxi commuters, arriving at work dry is a total coin flip.
MOVE IT aims to fix this with Ride-Ready, a line of commuter essentials sold exclusively on GrabMart.
The collection features a packable rain jacket, a helmet liner scarf or cap, and a refresh kit with alcohol spray, cooling wipes, and tissues.
Addressing rider concerns
Motorcycle-taxis are now central to daily commutes. MOVE IT reported a 20% year-over-year jump in monthly active users during the first half of the year. Still, riders consistently voice the same worries: sudden rain, punishing heat, and shared helmet hygiene.
“Filipino commuters have become extraordinarily good at adapting to city life. What they should not have to accept is arriving at a meeting soaked, or starting the afternoon already behind,” says MOVE IT General Manager Wayne Jacinto.
Jacinto calls Ride-Ready a practical fix to help passengers end their ride looking as fresh as when they left home.
Price, availability
MOVE IT didn’t just launch online. From June to July, interactive booths popped up in major business hubs: Makati, BGC, Ortigas, and Cebu City. Commuters could claim items and book rides on-site.
With traffic and bad weather showing no signs of stopping, Ride-Ready offers a simple buffer so riders show up fresh instead of frazzled.
The lineup launched on GrabMart on July 13. Prices start at PhP 275, with mix-and-match savings bundles available. Check MOVE IT’s official social media channels for more details.
-
Automotive2 weeks agoVinFast debuts two-wheeler models, opens 21 e-motorcycle showrooms
-
Automotive2 weeks agoXiaomi debuts SkyNomad Series featuring new Kunlun platform
-
News1 week agoOnePlus officially leaves the United States and Canada
-
Gaming2 weeks agoCall of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 clip shows Losing Ground 1st look
-
Automotive2 weeks agoGAC launches new trio of MPVs
-
Gaming2 weeks agoGenshin Impact opens Snezhnaya in Version 7.0 this August 12
-
News1 week agoGoogle will force Android users to use Gemini next month
-
Gaming1 week agoTides of Annihilation opens first public demo at Gamescom 2026







