@nnci's blog

My favorite Android apps

I recently got myself a brand new mobile phone, HTC Desire with Android 2.1. And (apologies to my bf) I’m in love. Not only with the phone itself, but the OS as well. I was sick of my previous phone which was, in more ways than one, like a piece of brick – a HTC Touch Pro with Windows Mobile 6.1. I wanted a smartphone with touch screen, possibility of installing additional software (apps) and a well-functioning way of syncing contacts, mail and calendar with my PC. The choice was between an iPhone or an Android-based phone. I’m not a fan of Apple and iPhones, so I decided to give the fairly new Android OS a shot. Almost immidiately after getting myself a Android phone, I see at least five things my phone can do that iPhone can’t.

A few days after I bought my HTC Desire, a bunch of friends also bought a HTC Desire saw how awesome HTC Desire really is that they bought it. Even my boyfriend. He who spent a few days defending his beloved and trusty HTC TyTNII, only to wake up one morning and totally fall in love with my phone. So to share my excitement for Android, support the expanding app market and to tell people which apps that would totally rock their world (well, at least the phone’s world), I’m listing my favorite Android apps in this post. The application market for Android is fairly new, but is expanding fast. There are already tons of applications that make your Android phone even more awesome.

I’m warning you, this post is lengthy. I’ve tested all apps on my HTC Desire (Android v 2.1), and they are all free. I live in Norway where we haven’t made a deal about paying apps. Yet. The apps below are my absolute “must”s, mostly general tools, widgets and some games. I’ve included barcodes to each app, so if you have Barcode Scanner or Google Goggles on your Android-phone, use it to get the direct download link on your phone. Otherwise I’m providing the link to each app on Androlib, a web site where you can find all Android apps, on your PC. Enough talk, let’s get started!

Essentials (in my opinion)

Barcode Scanner

I’ll start the list with the app you’ll need in order to take advantage of these funny images/barcodes in this post, Barcode Scanner. It does as its name says, it reads barcodes. And it does it well. I’m amazed how this app can identify items such as books, DVD’s, food products and more, just by scanning their barcodes. If you want an app that can identify more than just barcodes, I suggest Google Goggles (I’ll get to it later in this list), but it is slower than Barcode Scanner. Note: If your mobile’s camera pretty much sucks, you’ll need good lighting and a steady hand in order for this app to be able to successfully scan anything. Not a problem on Desire, but I know HTC Hero is troublesome.

Apps Organizer

Apps Organizer is the app if you come into a habit of clogging all available home screens with shortcuts to your programs. With this app you can place your wanted programs into groups, say “Internet”, “Games” or “Tools”. Then you can add the group as a single icon on your home screen, and clicking on it displays a box with all shortcuts to all programs that resides in that group. Easy to use and configure, and a great space saver. Previously I used 2 and a half screen for shortcuts only, with Apps Organizer I reduced it down to 3 single icons! Yay, my phone no longer looks like an iPhone and I get more space for widgets.

Task Manager

Task Manager is a task manager with an excellent “kill apps” functionality. You can add apps to an “auto-kill” list, and all apps in this list will automatically be killed when you press the power button to turn off the screen. Yes, I know Linux is good at memory handling and that Android eventually will shut down programs I don’t use, but it’s useful for killing all software that hogs your battery life if you’re far from a charger. You can also see which apps that are currently running, manage, start and uninstall apps from this app.

SMS Backup and Restore

SMS Backup and Restore is an app where, well, you can backup and restore your SMS messages. They are being saved as a XML file on your SD card. I also used this app to import my messages from my old Windows-mobile (I had to modify the XML file somewhat in order for this app to accept it). Now I regularily backup all my messages onto the SD card, and feel pretty safe that it’ll be able to keep my old messages throughout my next mobile phones (which I suspect will be Android based phones).

Nifty tools and widgets

Battery Widget

When changing from Windows Mobile to Android I missed the opportunity to see the remaining battery life in something more accurate than a tiny tiny icon in the upper right. Battery Widget does exactly this, it displays the remaining battery life in percent, but it’s even better than that. Clicking on the battery widget gives you a popup to enable/disable Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS. I restored three widget spaces with this app, since I didn’t need three different widgets for turning on and off each of the three networks. I find this app so awesome that it resides on my main home screen.

Android Agenda Widget

Android Agenda Widget is my favorite calendar widget. It displays current and all coming events from your chosen calendars and time ahead, complete with date, time, place, calendar color and pretty much everything is customizable. The great things is, you can choose any widget size (from 2×2 to 4×4). I have dedicated a full home screen for this app only, a 4×4 widget displaying coming events, appointments and birthdays, refreshed every 15 minutes. The only downside is that events spanning more than two lines gets cut off instead of giving the event more lines. But it’s no big deal, clicking on an event takes me to calendar view for that event.

Notes

Notes is a simple and basic notes app. I wanted a simple program where you can write a note, decide its title, sort all the notes after the title or date, and not much else. No fancy stuff, like syncing the notes with your computer or disturbing ads and backgrounds. I just need a notes app where I can jot down anything that comes to mind, and keep wish lists, stuff to remember and .. well, notes. I’ve tested several popular notes-apps, but this subtle named app appealed to me the most. Edit: Seems like the recent update is a little buggy – whenever you create a new note, it gets duplicated some times until you close the note. Just delete them all but one.

Google Goggles

Google Goggles is an app which tries to identify what you take pictures of by searching the web. You can take pictures of assorted products, logos, landmarks, artwork, barcodes (just like Barcode Scanner above) and assorted texts, and it does a pretty good job about identifying the object. Logos and barcodes works very well, and with the recent update you can access Google Translate when taking pictures of text. I’m planning to test landmarks as soon as I’m near something that’d count as a well-known landmark. I live in Norway, so that could be a challenge.

Led Light

Led Light is a handy widget that allows you to use your LED light/flash on your camera as a flashlight. It’s as simple as that. Useful when in dark places and you can’t bother to keep the screen activated by regurarily touching it. 1×1 intuitive widget for turning the light on and off. NB: Works on Desire only.

3G Watchdog

3G Watchdog is simply an app that run statistics on your mobile network data transfers. It doesn’t include Wifi use, there’s other apps for that. But this app is precisely what I wanted. I was worried I’d spend much money on mobile data, seeing as my phone syncs alot and seems to download almost constantly even when I’m not using it. The 3G Watchdog icon sits in the upper left corner, and you can at all times see how many Mb you’ve received or transmitted. Set a monthly quota and see how you fulfill or exceeds it. Simple and accurate.

EStrongs File Explorer

EStrongs File Explorer is the file explorer app. Not only you get a nice file explorer for you SD card, but it can read shared LAN folders, connect to FTP servers and transfer files on Bluetooth as well. Its display settings is customizable, and you can multi-select, see the phone’s root directories, search and copy/paste. But seriously, the ability to connect to LAN and FTP makes this app pretty awesome.

SMS Backup

SMS Backup is another “backup your SMS messages app”. I have both SMS Backup and Restore and this app in my phone. Whereas the previously mentioned app, SMS Backup and Restore, saves the messages as XML files on the SD card, SMS Backup backups messages as threaded mails in your Gmail account. It adds a label in your mail account and syncs automatically, so you have access to all SMS messages when logging onto your mail account. The downside is that you can’t restore them back into your phone.

Games

Being a gamer and wanting to develop my own Android games one day, I obviously checked the Android market for games. Keep in mind that I’m more of a “thinking game” girl than “shoot kill shoot kill aargh”. I’ve mostly been looking for games that can be played as quick time killers, like when riding the bus home.

I was very excited to finally be able to play my favourite puzzle game, Griddler, on my phone. But sadly it appears that the only Griddler app available, Nonogram, pretty much sucks. Seems like I have to go through with creating my own Android based Griddler. But as for now, try some of these games:

OpenSudoku

OpenSudoku is the Android based Sudoku game. It supports different modes of filling in numbers, is ad-free (so far), simple and works very well. The app comes with 90 puzzles, 30 easy, 30 medium and 30 hard ones. The best thing is that you can download no less than 400 more puzzles, also for free, 100 puzzles in each of four difficulty levels. I will never be bored while riding the bus or waiting for someone ever again.

Trap!

Trap! is an action game that requires quick reactions and some thinking ahead. The goal is to fill more then 75% of the board. You can draw lines and blocks in order to fill the area, but the thing is, there are balls bouncing around. You can’t have any one of the balls hit the lines while they are being placed (it takes a while to draw lines). As you progress, more balls are added in each board with varying speeds. Sounds simple? It isn’t. But I love it!

Bonsai Blast

Bonsai Blast is another action game. This is the most well-made games I’ve seen on Android phones, its music and graphics are great and the game works smoothly. The gameplay is basically like so: A line of marbles with random colors are being pushed on a certain track, and your job is to pair three or more marbles of the same color, before the line of marbles reach the end of the track. “You” as in some kind of marble rocket launcher. As you advance the game features bouncing the marbles on walls, shooting them into chutes and different types of bonuses to shoot at.

Air Hockey: EM

Air Hockey: EM is simply the arcade game Air Hockey on Android. Push the hockey puck into your opponent’s goal, and prevent the opponent from shooting it into yours. You can choose to play alone against AI, or have a friend play on your screen. Physics works very well and it’s pretty much as the real thing. With the exception of dragging your finger across a mobile phone screen. And the size of the board.

Sea Battle

Sea Battle is a clone of the board game Battleship. You play against the computer AI, and the goal is to find and sink all the enemy’s ships before the opponent sinks all yours. You both place several ships, which has different lenghts, onto a grid, and neither of you can see the enemy’s arrangement. Then you simply guess by clicking twice on a cell, taking turns. The app works very well, has good graphics and works great as a temporarily time killer.

Gem Miner

I haven’t played Gem Miner as much, but it seems to be a well-working and good-looking game. You play a miner whose goal is to earn money in order to buy more advanced mining equipment. You mine in a large underground maze, trying to find coal, gems and iron which you can sell for money at the surface. You need to place a bunch of ladders to navigate and get back up to the surface, and supports to prevent falling rocks. And you can only be underground for a certain amount of time before the miner get too exhausted or short of oxygen.

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