10 Essential Apps For Your New Android Phone
Posted: 20 June 2010
You must be thinking "Come on! Another Android app list?" Well, yes this is another list. But rather than repeat the same apps that appear regularly in all the lists, I thought I'd try my best to make this list as personal as possible by including apps that I really use and can't do without.A lot of these apps have a great replacement, which you may prefer. You should use what suits you best. Since I live in India, we don't have paid apps here; so I will be sticking to free apps: which in the Android Market is not a bad thing by any means. If you need any of these apps, click on the heading which will take you to the Cyrket page, where you can see its current version, number of downloads, rating, comments and barcode. Here we go...
1. LauncherPro (Beta)
This is certainly the best home replacement app on the Market. It simply blows away the competition purely on speed alone: this thing is fast! The author keeps updating it on almost a daily basis. Most recently, he's added the much-needed dock customization option that now makes LauncherPro the best out there. Best thing is it's still in beta. Even best-er thing, it's free.
2. Cubed
This app has no similarity anywhere in the Market, or even in the iPhone market for that matter. It's simply brilliant. I searched for months for a decent music app for Android. Meridian, MixZing, Spotify, et al just don't cut it for me. But I won't speak anymore. I like to do the screenshot do the talking...
3. Quick Uninstaller
This app is named quite misleadingly, because it takes care of all the apps, enables you to backup and restore them, install them from an SD card, and a lot more. And of course one-click uninstall. An essential app you have to install before anything else.
4. APNdroid
In India, data plans don't come cheap. With rates as high as 4p/KB, using Android on a daily basis can quickly become a costly affair, due to its frequent Internet access. APNdroid acts as an on/off switch for your device's GPRS/EDGE/3G connection by appending a suffix to your APN settings. It has a simple (and very effective) homescreen widget that lets you turn your data connection on or off with a single tap, thus helping you control your costs.
5. APN Backup & Restore
I made the mistake of ignoring an app like this, and suffered with my EDGE settings for almost 2 weeks. Now I have APN Backup & Restore to make backups of my APNs and restore them as needed. Easy as pie!
6. Timeriffic
Timeriffic is a blessing for the organised Android power-user. It basically allows you to preset your Android phone (ringer, silent, vibrate, Wi-fi, Bluetooth, screen brightness and more) based on the system time. The screenshot above demonstrates how I use it to silence the phone during weekday office hours, and for Sunday morning mass.
7. EStrongs File Explorer + EStrongs Task Manager
No app list is complete without a file manager and a task killer. There are a lot of debates on the subject of Astro vs. EStrongs. Both there are very good, but I personally find EStrongs File Explorer marginally better because of its slightly better-designed interface, and packs a few more features. Also, I found its companion app -- EStrongs Task Manager -- equally simple and effective to use. Some Android users may argue about the need for task killers in the first place. But now you know what I use on my phone.
8. 3banana Notes
Using this app for taking notes is a no-brainer. Very effective: just a text-box with a Save button for quickly making notes. It has a nice widget too, if you quickly need to take stuff down. All this combined with the ability to attach camera photos and barcodes to your notes, plus the ability to sync with a snaptic.com account make this app very useful indeed.
9. Astrid Task/ToDo List
I just couldn't leave Astrid out of this list. It's just too useful and fun to use. Well designed, with all the features you could ask for. I was looking at SSI gTasks ToDo before, but I wasn't happy with its notification options, which is a big deal in a to-do app. The only reason I looked at it was because of out-of-the-box sync functionality with Google Tasks. Astrid does this (sort of), by first syncing with Remember The Milk (RTM), which in turn has a Google Labs gadget. So you can add tasks right from GMail, just like Google Tasks. Brilliant!
10. Dolphin HD Browser
With plenty of features to boast about, Dolphin is really like the stock Android browser (which is actually sufficient) on steroids. Lots and lots of steroids. The kind that give you superpowers like tabbed browsing, multi-touch, gestures, bookmark management, etc. And it's pretty fast, even with all that. Plus there are a number of add-ons and themes you can download and use from the market.
So there you have it. My pick of essentials you gotta have on your new Android phone. Now go get them. If you think some app deserves to be here instead of the ones listed, let me know through the comments.
13 July 2010
21:27
I think you chose the most useful apps. I would personally enjoy to have such a to do list on my smart phone. It is very interesting.