I recently jumped onto the Android smartphone train and can say I really like the platform. The phone (Motorola Droid) itself came with many useful applications but the Android Market has tons more. Here are a few that I found to be useful, cool, handy, neat, etc. For this list all the applications are free but a few have the obligatory “pay for no ads version” available.
- BBC News – I like the BBC just to get the news from a different angle
- NubiNews – Decent news feed aggregator
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USA TV Guide – Does what it says. You can customize the channels but don’t go looking for local ones so you’ll see ‘Local Programming’ on network listings.
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Movies – Really cool, the trailers are nice and you can connect to Netflix from it as well.
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SportsTap – Gives you a ton of scores and standings from pretty much all of the world’s major sports leagues. The LocalTap feature is cool; it shows just local teams within a set radius that are playing including college.
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Slashdot reader – Shows the stories but you need to connect to the web site to read the comments.
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Xkcd Viewer – No description is really needed. You can go through all the strips.
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Google Sky – Shows the stars and planets in the sky from your location.
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Advanced Task Killer – It runs in the status bar and allows you to stop running applications easily.
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ASTRO – A great file system viewer.
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WeatherBug – Gives all the weather information you think it would.
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Slacker – Decent internet radio. The stations I have tried all seem to have relevant music selections.
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Fast Food – A fast food finder. Great for folks like me who are in no way a “foodie”. In my area quite a few local places show up as well.
There are a few mobile designed web sites I like as well.