My Favorite Android Apps

So I’ve owned the Motorola Droid for just over a month now, and I’m just loving it. Yes, the phone isn’t without its shortcomings, but many of them are getting fixed via software updates. I don’t really want to post another review since there are a bunch of good ones already, but rather list my very favorite apps.

• ConnectBot is an truly excellent ssh client with plenty of features — including easy ssh tunnel managing!
• Dolphin is a good replacement web browser with lots of fancy features.
• NewsRob is the best way I’ve found to read RSS. It syncs with Google Reader (like NetNewsWire on my Mac!) and offers a very comfortable way to navigate and read the news.
• Google Voice, if you can get an invite, is amazing: free phone calls / texts in and out, visual voicemail, vm transcriptions, call recording…
• Google Listen is a really great podcast downloader/player.
• HandyCalc is a very powerful calculator with graphing, algebra, and unit conversion features.
• Google Sky Map turns your phone into a guide to the sky. By reading from the accelerometer and compass sensors in the phone, this app shows what should be seen in the sky when looking in the phone’s oriented direction.
• Pandora, Last.fm, StreamFurious, and Jamendo are all great apps for streaming music down to your phone. Amdroid lets me connect to my Ampache instance on the server back home and stream anything from my collection.
• Qik lets me stream (and archive) live video from my phone.
• SwiFTP starts up a simple ftp daemon that I can connect to from my PC to manage files on the SD card. This is more convenient than plugging it in.
• Mythmote lets me remote control my MythTV DVR software on the TV.
• SqueezeDroid lets me remote control my SqueezeBox.
• TransDroid lets me remote control my torrents running on the server.
• Seesmic is a nicer Twitter client than Twidroid, I think. Maybe not as many features, but it’s clean, totally free, and includes bit.ly API support.
• Meebo IM is my favorite IM application of the bunch. It supports all the major networks.
• MixZing is a great improvement over the native media player, though I haven’t been playing local media much on my Droid. I wouldn’t really want to use my Droid as my primary media player. While the built-in speaker is quite good, the headphone output is not the best from a portable.

The Android user base is currently growing by leaps and bounds with the release of the Droid and other exciting new phones. It seems like every day there’s a great new app and several updates to existing apps. I’m very much enjoying being a part of it!

No comments yet.

Leave a comment