Last year a lot of cool stuff was released for Android, with a great mix of awesome ideas and great executions for mobile. But as a user, the real test is what ended up on your home screen and which apps you use practically every day.
My Must Haves
The home screen of my phone (Samsung Galaxy S) only has nine icons: three folders and five apps, and the Power Control widget. I left four spaces on the right hand side empty because I have a bad habit of holding the phone there and accidentally opening whatever is there. The apps that made the cut are:
- Default Browser
- Advanced Task Killer
- Gmail
- Seesmic
- Foursquare
As well as these five there is another I consider a must have, Remote Notifier. It runs on both your phone and your computer, and displays alerts from your phone on your desktop using your WiFi. If, like me, you leave your phone on silent on the other side of the house, a message popping up everytime someone calls or texts or when your phone is running low on power is very useful.
The Useful
There are a couple of other apps that, while I don’t use them daily, are still very handy to have. These are the ones I keep in folders – that extra click to access them isn’t a big deal like it would be with my email.
- Dropbox
- Simplifies moving files around in general, and especially for mobile. The app lets you access your own online storage from your phone, through a browser or any computer where it is installed and you can either upload, download or share.
- Evernote
- What the name says – you make notes. But you can do with with images, text, audio and files. Then you tag and organise them for access from anywhere, and any machine.
- Google Reader/FeedSquares
- I still have not made up my mind on which is the better RSS reader. The Google one seems to perform better, but I love the navigation in Feedsquares.
- WordPress
- Write blog post drafts and publish from your phone. Very, very handy.
- Winamp
- A very good music player, and it syncs via WiFi with your computer, so you can update your music and playlists.
- Aura
- It’s an EVE Online thing. If you want to keep an eye on your assets, market orders and skill queue, it’s great. If none of this means anything to you, don’t worry about it.
- ThinkFree Office
- I am sure it does a lot of cool stuff, but mostly I use it for reading PDFs, usually after downloading them from my Dropbox account, and before tagging the interesting ones for Evernote. It does this very well, and fast.
- Daily Briefing
- It is synced to my Google Calendar and is a Samsung app that came with the phone.
I, like most smartphone users, have a lot of other apps installed on my phone. Some of them are kind of meh, and others I have not used enough to have an opinion yet. The ones listed above are the stand-outs for me.
TL;DR
If you have an Android phone, this stuff is pretty cool. Check it out.
- Advanced Task Killer
- Seesmic
- Foursquare
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- Google Reader/FeedSquares
- WordPress
- Winamp
- Aura
- ThinkFree Office
What are the ones that you love?