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Many people, I suspect, buy the latest cellphone because of its value as a status symbol. But as time goes on, the importance of status will fade, so what will be left to make them attractive?

Judging by the following six applications, cellphones might just go back to their roots: useful as personal information managers. Only this time, they are connected to the Internet, and what they offer can be almost as sexy as an iPhone, a BlackBerry Bold or Samsung Instinct.

Poynt (free to download from http://m.mypoynt.com) is constantly being upgraded by its maker, Calgary-based Multiplied Media, which this week released its latest version, designed to take advantage of the third-generation features of the BlackBerry Bold. Poynt is based on instant messaging in a kind of conversation with the Canadian version of the Yellow Pages, Superpages.com in the United States and Infobel in Europe. It can be used on your desktop computer (within Instant Messenger) or your smartphone.

The idea is to be able to look up businesses, restaurants and movie theatres on the go, a form of instant gratification. If you run it on a BlackBerry Bold, Poynt can use its built-in GPS system to organize directions (you don't have to enter your current location first), and you can call up maps and websites, and even call them with a single click. The coolest feature of the Bold version is that you can get streaming movie previews from the theatres listed and order tickets as well.

This becomes really useful when you're trying to give family or friends directions; e-mailing them a map marked with graphic “pushpins” is a lot easier than printing out the instructions from Mapquest.

AskKinjo (free from http://www.askkinjo.com) based in Toronto, this week launched a similar service, this one supported by advertising and working on a telephone call. Users dial #kinjo and connect to an automated speech-recognition system that prompts you for what you want to know, from traffic updates to finding such things as the closest gas station, parking lot, coffee shop or junk-food emporium. So far, the service is available only in Toronto.

The automated voice asks what you want, plays a short advertisement, and then answers your questions by voice or by text message. Put AskKinjo on speed dial and it can be quite easy. (The system works for every major telco in Canada, but not yet with Rogers Wireless or Fido; for them you have to enter a 10-digit phone number and you get the same service.)

The beauty of this system is its simplicity: It does not require your phone to have a GPS system, and so it can be used on an older cellphone, as long as it can handle text messages.

But that simplicity comes at a price. AskKinjo offers you an option to register with the service, telling it your postal code, your income, the number of children you have, your marital status and annual income, as well as your favourite brand of gasoline and coffee. You can refuse to release this information, but then you won't be able to personalize AskKinjo's recommendations. Still, they're alarmingly like the kind of questions we've all been warned to avoid in phishing scams. A little creepy.

Accepting AskKinjo's assurances of privacy, I registered and asked for gas stations. AskKinjo recommended a bunch that were several kilometres away and might empty my tank before I got there; it wasn't until AskKinjo got to its eighth recommendation that it mentioned one of the two that are very close nearby. Apparently AskKinjo locates the cheapest gas closest to me, not the closest. If I want to prioritize the nearest gas rather than cheapest, I should register and customize my priorities.

Schmap (for the iPhone and iPod Touch only, free to download from http://www.schmap.com) started out as a travel guide for desktop computers, and is in the process of expanding its user base to include owners of the iPhone or iPod Touch. With this service you can plan your directions (maps courtesy of Google) when you're in a strange city, and have Schmap work out the locations and contacts for you.

Schmap has published more than 200 free online travel guides for cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, complete from local history to a list of watering holes.

The same way Poynt uses the BlackBerry's hardware, Schmap uses the iPhone and iPod Touch hardware to show off its information; it uses the iPhone's sensors and a Safari version of Javascript to determine how you're holding the device, and pivots the display to landscape or portrait mode automatically. When you hold it in portrait mode, the map displays points of interest as a list. If in landscape mode, they are shown superimposed on the local map, and you can easily switch between the two

Bear in mind that Schmap is an American company, and it tends to see other countries through the eyes of Americans travelling abroad — hence the inclusion of Niagara Falls along with Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver among the Canadian cities it knows about. It is limited to tourist-friendly cities, not necessarily to the most interesting ones — too bad Halifax, St. John's and Quebec City have been ignored.

WeatherEye and TrafficEye (free to download from http://www.theweathernetwork.com/mobile/downloads) are cellphone versions of The Weather Network and its French version, MétéoMédia, and offer mobile access to weather and traffic information. The parent company of both, Pelmorex, based in Oakville, Ont., has been very aggressive in promoting its weather services in Canada for a number of years, and now offers weather conditions across cable, satellite, the Internet, wireless and newspapers.

WeatherEye offers current conditions, including temperature, wind speed, humidity, sunrise and sunset for thousands of cities in Canada and around the world. For short- and long-term forecasts, you have to point the application to the Web-based Weather Network, where you enter your city and get details. The presentation is simple and clean, and the neatest thing about it is that when you point your cursor on the application's icon on your mobile browser, it offers you the temperature and weather (“17 degrees C; A few clouds”) without having to open the application. Clicking on the icon exposes the advertising that supports the service.

The bad news is that the application works only on all BlackBerry models that have an operating system of version 4.1 and above; owners of other cellphones will have to wait.

And I do wish it had the moon phases included in the weather.

TrafficEye is a simple application too, but works differently depending on which smartphone you are using. For cellphones that work on 3G networks (iPhone, BlackBerry Bold, Instinct), it will stream video feeds along major arteries; earlier phones will just get snapshots. I tested it out the weekend the Gardiner Expressway was closed for repairs, and the shot I saw was spooky — without cars, it looked like a scene from a post-nuclear-holocaust movie. It did keep me away from the area where cars had choked the alternate routes. Perhaps if they'd had TrafficEye, they might have stayed away too.

TrafficEye will also track scheduled incidents (road closures and construction), and unscheduled incidents (accidents, congestion) as well as traffic speed.

The bad news here is that TrafficEye works only in the greater Toronto area. I'm sure its makers are working on adding more cities, but at the moment the application will be mostly irrelevant to people outside of this city.

The application will work with all Rogers and Fido regular handsets and all BlackBerry smartphones. Palm and Windows Mobile users are out of luck.

WorldMate Live (free software download from http://www.wmlive.com; basic services free; premium services for $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year) is aimed at business travellers, and available only for the BlackBerry. It has also been recently improved since the last time I looked at it (in the spring).

Its maker, Los-Angeles-based Mobimate, describes it as a “personal travel companion” for frequent fliers, and designed it to manage an entire itinerary, including flights, meetings and ground transportation. Users enter their itineraries into the system, and WorldMate Live warns of delays or cancellations, and suggests alternate flights. This week, MobiMate announced that SingTel, a major Asian telecom company, is now supporting Worldmate services.

Also new this week is the ability to book hotel rooms directly from the BlackBerry — Worldmate Live offers hotel recommendations based on their proximity to the user's meeting places based on an algorithm created by WorldMate Live to rank and list the hotels according to geography and quality.

The interface is gorgeous, the presentation slick and surprisingly international. The only real problem I noticed was the temperature; on Monday morning it reported the weather in Toronto at 19 decrees C, which found agreement with the Reuters pixel board on King Street near Bay. But it was obviously a lot cooler than that; The Weather Network reported it as being a much more believable 10 degrees. That's a big difference.

WorldMate Live's personalized travel planning and management services are available for free. What you pay for when using the premium services includes real-time flight alerts, flight status and flight schedules.

With interactive applications like these, the old personal information managers are beginning to look like antiques.