Favorite Android Apps

This post is dedicated to Iris and all of those late-comers to the smartphone revolution. I think of it as a "start-up kit" for Android phones. If there are any apps that you guys use that are awesome, please comment so that I can have a chance to use it too! [Here is the Oatmeal's take on the pros and cons of owning a smart phone. Hilarious.]

Must-have Apps

Swiftkey
Price: $2.00

Swiftkey is an awesome keyboard that does word correction and word prediction. The idea of this app is that it remembers sequences of words that you type and tries to predict the next word for you, allowing you to choose words without even typing them out. For me, I usually don't need to type more than 3 or 4 letters (no matter how long the word) before it knows what word I want to type, even if I have typos in those previous letters. The absolute best feature of this keyboard, however, is the nifty swipe-delete feature. All you need to do to delete a words it is to simply swipe backwards. This lets you delete large amounts of text extremely quickly instead of needing to hold the backspace button and wait. If you don't want to pay for it, try out Swiftkey X Beta. I haven't actually tried this new version, but the reviews seem pretty good. Swiftkey may seem inaccurate at first, but give it some time to train and learn how you text, and you'll find that it improves dramatically.



Dolphin Browser HD
Price: Free

This is the best browser I've used by far. The stock browser is okay, but Dolphin offers a lot more features, is much more aesthetically pleasing, and is incredibly intuitive to use. The pinch-zoom is extremely smooth, switching tabs is easy and intuitive, and the novel gesture browsing is surprisingly robust. Dolphin HD is also very fast, having a speed comparable to that of Opera Mini, which has nowhere near the number of features Dolphin has. Dolphin is also very customizable, as there are a lot of different skins and such you can download, even though the color scheme for the stock Dolphin browser is already pretty sweet (green on black).

Handcent SMS
Price: Free

Handcent epitomizes the power of customization of Android. You can make your text messages look basically however you want. You can set your own background, choose your own font, and mess with the color scheme until your eyes explode. Because the stock SMS app is pretty bland, you have nothing to lose from downloading this free app and customizing your SMS to look the way you want it. Handcent also offers some nice layout changes and functionality (like splitting up group texts, batch mode, and calling), but the customization really is what makes this app special. Hopefully I'll get a chance to take a picture of my Handcent layout and post it here.

TeslaLED
Price: Free

TeslaLED is the most practically useful app I have, and the one I probably use the most often. It basically conveniently turns your camera's LED flash into an extremely bright flashlight. I use it when walking around in the dark when there are no streetlights and for illuminating my room at night without having to get up and turn on the lights. You also have the option of doing fun things like using it for a strobe light or sending messages using Morse code. TeslaLED also provides a handy little widget so that you can turn the LED on and off without needing to actually open the app. If you ever carry your phone in the dark without a flashlight (or enjoy watching your friends get seizures), you need this app.

Highly Recommended Apps

Twitter
Price: Free

The inclusion of Twitter here isn't as much for the app (even though it is very nice), but for the use of Twitter itself. I really think that everyone with a smartphone should use Twitter, where you can shamelessly update where you are, where you're going, or what you're doing. This kind of posting isn't as accepted in Facebook, but you really get to share about the little things on Twitter. Also, you get the awesome opportunity to have an look inside of the lives and thoughts of famous people you see on TV and in movies. When you have a smartphone, you are always connected, and Twitter is one of the ways you stay connected to the world.You hear the latest news and the latest jokes (about Lebron) faster than you would anywhere else. You don't need to hear the jokes and the news from your friends or on Facebook. You get it before that. Twitter rocks.

Twitter also gives you the opportunity to directly correspond with celebrities you wouldn't have a chance to talk to in real life. LOOK. DESMOND HOWARD REPLIED TO ME!

BatteryTime Lite
Price: Free

Every phone's battery meter is less descriptive than we would like it to be, and it would often be nice to exactly how much battery we have left instead of just "green", "orange", or "red". BatteryTime Lite gives you the exact percentage of battery you have left, letting you know when you may need to turn your 3G off or stop watching some video to preserve your battery for the rest of the day. BatteryTime adds a nice indicator in the notification bar of how much battery you have left, so you never actually need to open the application.

PowerAmp
Price: $5.15

One of the weakest stock apps of Android is its stock music player, which is primitive and, more importantly, ugly. PowerAmp is the most-bought Android app in the Market, and it is for a reason. PowerAmp is highly customizable and has a bunch of really useful features. For example, PowerAmp automatically downloads album art for your songs. You can also tweak the audio settings, which I don't do because I have no idea what I'm doing. All this said, the main reason I use PowerAmp is the awesome full-screen widget it provides and the neat feature of automatically playing songs when I stick my headphones in. It's really worth the five dollars; just take a look at the following sweet photos.

Good Time-Killer Apps

ESPN Radio
Price: $2.99

If you are a working sports fan that can't or don't want to access the radio at work, this is the app for you. It conveniently aggregates every ESPN radio station in the country and every ESPN podcast in one place so after listening to Mike and Mike live in the morning, you can listen to the podcast of yesterday's 1st and 10 or Around the Horn so you don't have to listen to Colin Cowherd and his ridiculous show. However, be warned that this app is far from perfect. If you are listening to a live stream of the radio, the radio will stop every time you get a text. It also stops randomly sometimes for no good reason. It also likes to keep its notification on the notification bar even after you have stopped listening or force killed it.

Reddit is fun
Price: Free

Take Reddit with you with this app. Many of us favor the funny pictures and rage comics on Reddit, but the small screens of our smartphones really hurts the viewing experience of images. For rage comics, I actually need to scroll from the left panel to the right panel and back to be able to read the words on them. That said, it's nice being able to check my inbox and the threads I am active in on the go, and viewing monster threads from AskReddit are actually quite rewarding. I know a lot of you go on Reddit, but don't have accounts. Stop lurking. Get an account...and be my friend.

Google Reader
Price: Free

Do you want to be able to follow this blog everywhere you go? Do you read stuff online? Can you read? If you've answered "yes" to any of those questions, this is that app for you! Like my little blurb for Twitter, this is as much a push for the use of Google Reader as it is for the mobile app itself. Google Reader basically aggregates all of the new articles and blog posts from your websites of choice, and it tells you when there are posts that you haven't yet read, and you have the option of sharing the pages you like with others (there's a link of the stuff I am sharing on the list on the right. It basically makes following a bunch of different sites extremely easy, but there's really no good way to show it here. A screen shot won't do it much justice, so just go to www.reader.google.com and try it out for yourself!

Funny Jokes
Price: Free

Funny Jokes is basically a collection of different walls where everyone rates and comments on the jokes that people post. Even though it seems like most of the users are middle school boys, there is surprising amount of original content, which is often actually quite funny. Most of the stuff I read on this app I've never read anywhere else before, and most of my "material" comes from this app. If you download this app, I highly recommend the "One-Liners" section, as it has probably the funniest stuff. If you can tolerate the adolescence of the users of this app, there's a lot of chuckling-on-the-inside moments to be had.

So that's a short rundown of my favorite apps. What are yours?