Hey I spent too much time figuring out what apps I should use on my phone, so here is my hard done research for your benefit:

Google Apps

• Google Maps – my phone didn’t have the latest copy so I need to grab the latest. (link)
• My Tracks – Use your GPS to track where you’ve travelled and then upload it onto a Google Map for sharing. It’s a bit stalkerish, and of niche use; but the idea is interesting. (link)
• Google Gestures – Search your phone by drawing characters on your touch screen. I don’t know why this isn’t implemented system-wide! (link)
• Google Finance – An android frontend to the Google finance site. You can pull down your portfolio, but it doesn’t seem to display correctly. I installed it, but I don’t really use it. (link)

Social Apps

• WordPress – Easiest way to moblog from my phone. (link)
• Twitter – Too lazy to figure out which is the best Twitter app for me, so I just use the official one. (link)
• Foursquare – Duh, must install (link)
• Facebook – Another must install, but make sure you have the latest version. (link)

Productivity

• Opera Mini – I had this on my E71, and I’m using it as my default browser. Maybe it’s for familiarity reasons though (although I find I use my browser a lot less when there are dedicated apps for things). (link)
• Snowstorm weather widget – I settled on this as my weather app because it had different sized widgets. Unfortunately, the time zone appears to be screwed up (it thinks I’m in Europe) so the graphics don’t always appear correctly. (link)
• Tipper – Tip Calc – After weather applications, I think the most common app is a tip calculator. This seems the best to me, although it is quite ugly. (link)
• Wikidroid – Search and browse wikipedia. (link)
• Greed Lite – This free version allows you to read your RSS feeds from Google Reader and keeps everything in sync. (link)
• Aldiko Book Reader – This is a beautiful and free app where you can download and read books. If you’ve missed any literary classics, you can get them for free! I’m still amazed that they don’t charge a dollar or two for this app. (link)
• Shazam – Shazam identifies what song is playing in the background by querying their online database. I had this on my E71 and it works pretty well. The free version limits you to something like 5 searches a month. (link)
• Movie Finder – Although I hardly ever go to the movie theatre, this is a nice app to have if you want to find movie times. (link)
• Astrid Task/Todo List – I thought this was going to be a great app, but haven’t gotten around to using it so I uninstalled it. I should make it a Todo to set this up… (link)

Settings & Configuration

• FlyScreen – This is a lock screen replacement where you can put a variety of widgets to get quick access to your information (like mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc). Great idea, but the execution is a bit incomplete. You can perform actions with your widgets which kind of defeats the purpose of a lock screen, and it is laggy. (link)
• Barcode Scanner – This open source app scans barcodes and QR codes. Android uses QR codes quite a lot! (link)
• Flashlight – Not just a flashlight app, it has a bunch of other modes as well. (link)
• Bubble – A pure novelty app that uses your phone’s accelerometer as a bubble level. (link)
• NetCounter – Tracks your data usage over 3G and wifi to ensure you stay within your data plan. (link)
• Silent Time Lite – Setup a period of time where your phone should be in silent mode. I enter my work hours into here so I don’t get disturbed by random notifications or calls. (link)
• SlideIT Soft Keyboard – I use this as my main keyboard, but unfortunately it is a demo which seems like it will expire after 30 days. (link)
• SMS Popup – When you get a text, it pops up so you don’t have to navigate through a bunch of menus to read it. (link)
• Advanced Task Killer – I’m still not convinced this type of app is necessary, but if you need to kill any tasks and free up memory, here is an ad-supported app that does the work. (link)
• ASTRO File Manager – This is a better, but ad-supported, file manager. (link)
• More Locale 2 – If you’ve ever wanted to set your phone to some weird language that you don’t understand (hello Chinese), this app will do it for you. But, it’s just the UI (and not the input). It’s also dependent upon the app having translations for that language. (link)
• Coverage Mapper – This is a crowdsource application to determine what the signal strength of your network provider is, and overlay it on a map. Pretty useless if you’re on a “reliable” network, but good if you’re on a newcomer. (link)
• Compass – It’s a compass! (link)

Games

• Frozen Bubble – It’s Bust-A-Move and it’s free! (link)
• Abduction! – Help a cow save his friends who were abducted by aliens. This uses the accelerometer for input so it’s neat, but it is ad-supported. (link)
• OpenSudoku – I don’t think I’d play Sudoku very often, but it’s good to have an open source app for it! (link)
• Sketch Wars – Hand drawn asteroids-type clone where you tap to fire and use the accelerometer to navigate. (link)
• WorldFeud – This is basically Scrabble, but on a distributed scale. You can play against a random person in the world, or your friends in real-time. It’s kind of like email Chess, which is actually a really cool idea. In theory. When I tried this with a random game, the server kept timing out. (link)

Other potentially useful apps
Here are some apps which seem interesting, but I can’t install on my device due to various reasons

• Google Goggles (link)
• Skype
• Any Cut – Setup shortcuts to a lot of different things. I wanted it so I could setup a shortcut to turn off 2G (i.e., roaming) (link)
• Scrobble Droid – Scrobbles whatever music I’m listening to to Last.fm. (link)
• Cestos – Seems to be a fun online game, with levelling capability to keep you coming back. (link)

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, games