Saturday, May 29, 2010

Pimp my Droid

I'm running a new HTC droid incredible. These are a list of my favorite apps.

Doubletwist
Very good audio player - syncs wirelessy over wifi with itunes. The database gets out of sync on deleted files. If I were on windows rather than mac I wouldn't have this - instead I'd get winamp.

Winamp
Very nice audio player - syncs with winamp on windows. I haven't tested the syncing ability since I'm not using windows.

Google Music
Best audio player I've tested. It also includes the best integration with Google Voice Search.

Google Voice Search

http://www.google.com/mobile/voice-actions/
It lets you navigate, play music, search the web, etc by voice recognition. This is very useful while driving. Spanish words are hit or miss, remember to pronounce street names like you are a true gringo and it works better.

Google Voice
-I replaced my Verizon voice mail with Google voice. Very nice. I get emails with links to the voicemail MP3, and an attempted voice recognition on the text. I can even scroll through the list of messages visually on the phone.

AirplaneModeTimer
SilenceModeTimer

- Awesome apps. Have you ever put your phone in silent mode and forgot to take it back off? Now when you put it in silent mode it asks for how long. Then goes back into normal mode after that time amount has passed.

Bluetooth OnOff
GPS OnOff
WiFi OnOff
- Widgets used to quickly turn features on and off, most with one click.

AK Notepad
-Nice Notepad app

Call Confirm
-Excellent and extremely simple app. Before I got this I was accidentally dialing people by clicking on their name when I was just trying to scroll past them in the display.

Amazon
- Buy stuff on Amazon

Bible from liveChurch.tv
-Awesome Bible app - contains tons of translations and reading plans, quick and easy to use. The only downside is if you use it as an concordance, the search results appear in random order.

Congress
-See what bills are up for vote in congress.

CoPilot
-Commercial navigation app like google maps but doesn't require an internet connection. Maps seem out of date, and I'm currently working with support because it uses some DRM stuff that locked me out.

Dolphin Browser HD
-Awesome web browser, worth the couple of bucks it cost. Has support for gestures, double click to zoom, and pinch to zoom.

Google Earth
- I haven't used it much, but it disappeared then re-appeared in the market.

Fandango
-Find local movies by movie title, or theater and date. The only down side is that it doesn't show which movie times are the more expensive 3d digital.

Google Finance
-Follow stocks, simple and easy.

FlashLight
-White circle of adjustable size.

Gentle Alarm
-Highly recommended alarm clock. It transitions from silent to full volume over several minutes to gently wake you up, plus you can configure multiple alarms by day of the week.

Google Sky Map
-Use it to show you what star/planet/constellation you are looking at. Simple and easy.

Handcent SMS
-Nice SMS app - simple and easy with notifications which include the text of the message in the notification bar and nice graphics. The only thing you have to know is to turn off notifications in your default messaging app or you get notifications twice.

Linpack
-Android port of the linux software for benchmarking the speed of your phone.

Live Scores
-Gives live sport scores.

Locale
-Popular app for android I haven't used it yet. You can configure it to run actions based on location. For example you could tell it to go into silent mode if you are near your church, and go out of silent mode once you leave automatically based off the phone GPS. Lots of apps can be used along with this app.

My Verizon
-Gives me stats on my Verizon account - number of SMS messages sent, minutes used, etc.

NewsRob
- Syncs with Google Reader to follow RSS feeds. This is an AWESOME app, first app which made my android phone really useful to me. I read most web pages from here instead of the browser. Browsers in android are still cumbersome to navigate an article. This app makes reading multiple web pages easy. One downside is that the sync seems to be one directional it doesn't tell Google reader what I've read locally.

Remember The Milk
-Follows my todo lists on rememberthemilk.com. Awesome todo list manager. Requires a pro account at the RTM website for $25 a year.

Scanner Radio
-Follows Police/fire radios over the internet for tons of towns across the US. Not too useful to me, but it is awesome that this is possible.

Shazam
- Get the title/album title of a song just by letting the app listen to it for a few minutes.

SpacePhysics (LITE)
- Fun game where you have to draw figures which follow physics principles to solve puzzles.

SPB TV lite
- Interesting but not useful. It streams tv channels to your phone. Most of the free or paid channels are not in English. Cool that it works though. It does include several fox stations in English (1 in the free version).

StudyDroid
-Flash card application for android which syncs with a web page.

Tip Calc
- Easy method of determine the tip even when you are splitting a bill.

Tricorder
- Nerdy app, looks and sounds like a Star Trek tricorder. Most of the sensors display real data for example GPS signal strength, wifi strength, cell tower signal strength, digital compass, etc.

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