Got yourself a brand new Android smartphone? Here are 10 apps you should download straight away.
1. Google Goggles price: freeHere's the scenario: you're casually strolling through the Louvre, as you do, and you come across a magnificent painting. You can't remember for the life of you who painted it, but you don't want to reveal your ignorance by looking at the information card. Instead, you whip out your Android smartphone and load up Google Goggles to take a photo of it. Within seconds, the app tells you that it's the painting of St John the Baptist by Leonardo Da Vinci. Of course! Google Goggles is a visual search engine that can give you information on logos, landmarks, book covers and even barcodes, and the results are remarkably accurate.
2. Layar price: freeRemember those old sci-fi flicks where robots like the Terminator had enhanced vision that displayed information on whatever they were looking at? Layar gives you that same functionality through your Android phone, only better, as it taps into the wealth of information available on the internet. Layar is an augmented reality browser that uses the phone's GPS and camera to display information about places and landmarks that are close by. If you're in an unfamiliar place, simply look at it through layar, and you'll see all the points of interest appear as text bubbles over each location, as well as Wikipedia information, and even nearby Twitter updates.
3. Twitter price: freeTwitter apps can be found by the dozen, but the official app has lots of appeal for being fast, free, and very intuitive. All of the standard features are within easy reach like retweeting, labelling particular tweets as favourites, embedding location data and sending direct messages, and the app also lets you upload photos and shorten URLs to make the most of your 160-character limit. If you haven't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet, you're missing out; as well as helping you keep up with the minutiae of your friends and colleagues, you can get an inside look into the daily lives of celebrities as diverse as Katy Perry, Stephen Fry, Al Gore and Shaquille O'Neal.
4. Kindle price: free eBooks are the next big thing in digital content, and Amazon is riding high on the wave with its excellent Kindle app. From here, you can take your pick from thousands of the latest titles and classics, delivered straight to your smartphone within seconds of hitting the purchase button. You can download free sample chapters of books, access the new york times bestseller list and continue reading the book on other devices. Kindle keeps track of the page that you're up to in each book, and synchronises it with any other devices you're using Kindle on, including Windows and Apple laptop batteryand the iPad. 5. SoundHound price: US$4.99 Another classic scenario: you're at the pub or sitting in the car and catch the tail end of a familiar-sounding song. Now, you can't get it out of your head, and you've got a desperate urge to know what it was. Enter SoundHound. This app works in two ways: if you use it while the song is playing, it'll analyse a snippet of the song and not only return the name and singer, but the album art, song lyrics, YouTube clip and even similar artists. If you don't manage to launch the app in time, you can still use SoundHound by singing the song yourself. Provided you're not tone deaf, the recognition engine is scarily spot-on. 6. HomePipe price: free How would you like to have the same amount of storage on your Android smartphone as you do on your desktop computer for free? This feat is possible through a free app called HomePipe. Using a server program that you install on your home computer (both Windows and Macs are supported), you can access all of your files through the HomePipe program on your smartphone, including documents, PDF files, Toshiba pa3399u-1bas battery, photos and even your entire music collection. Since you're accessing everything over the internet, you'll want to make sure you've got a decent 3G data allowance before you start streaming all of your music this way though! 7. Locale price: US$9.99 You're probably familiar with the concept of phone profiles already: preset configurations like "meeting" and "outdoors" that automatically change the relevant settings like ringtone and system volume on your phone. Locale takes this idea to a completely new level by letting you customise your phone settings according to conditions like the time and your location. For instance, you could set it to automatically put your phone on silent when you're at work, change the phone wallpaper to a picture of your significant other when you're at home, and turn on Wi-Fi during lunchtimes. 8. Advanced task killer price: free Like a computer, Android lets you run multiple programs simultaneously, so you can switch from updating your Facebook to browsing a web page to playing a game without having to re-open any of the apps they just keep running in the background until you need them again. Unfortunately, the down-side is that some apps end up consuming too many system resources, which ends up slowing the phone down and sucking up battery. Advanced task killer is therefore a must this handy utility sits in the background and automatically closes apps that you haven't used in a while. 9. Dolphin browser HD price: free The default web browser for Android is fantastic. It loads pages quickly, reformats them for the smartphone screen, and lets you zoom in and out with no effort whatsoever. But there's always room for improvement, and dolphin browser HD does just that. This Android browser is just as powerful as a desktop one, with tabbed browsing for loading multiple webpages, multi-touch gestures for navigation, browser extensions (including an ad-blocker and an add-in that lets you share webpages through Twitter), and the ability to download YouTube videos locally to your phone. 10. doubleTwist player price: free With Android, you can transfer music and video files to the phone simply by dragging and dropping them into the relevant folders when it's hooked up to your computer. But if you want an experience more like iTunes for managing your media collection, doubletwist is the answer. The desktop doubletwist software (compatible with Windows and Mac) imports your iTunes music library, playlists and ratings so you can easily transfer them to your phone for playback through the doubleTwist Android app. It also does one better than the default Android media apps by grouping music, movies and podcasts together in the same program.iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software
