The Mobile Ping

Living with Android is a feature where we focus on what sets Android apart from the other guys

It’s not uncommon to find phones that have downloadable applications and stores in which to purchase said applications. However, one thing that always set Android apart for me were the types of applications that the Market strives towards. So I decided to try and create a top 10 list of applications that I use on a daily basis.

This was much more difficult that I originally thought it was going to end up being. There’s so many apps that I use regularly, so it was difficult to choose only ten to talk about while also ranking them. Anyway, here it goes:

10. Barcode Scanner

• This application is simple, but opens up a ton of possibilities if more phones took advantage of being able to scan barcodes. On the surface, this application lets you scan any type of barcode and see the contents. Maybe there’s a message, or perhaps it’s a UPC which then lets you do a product search. What’s most interesting is that you can create a QR barcode for any of your contacts, essentially creating a digital business card anyone else can quickly scan into their phone to get my two cell phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, and my physical address. Unfortunately you can’t save a .jpg of the generated barcode, because I could definitely print that on the back of my business card.

9. SNesoid

• This is simply a SNES emulator, but really, it opens up the platform to a huge catalog of amazing games. I generally don’t play games on my phone but when I do have some down time it’s great to be able to boot up some E.V.O, or with Gensoid rock some Sonic the Hedgehog. They aren’t perfect yet, and there can be some performance issues for some games, but games that don’t rely on twitch work great. Hopefully we start to see these emulators perfected now that the Native Developer Kit was released.

8. Ringdroid

• Ringdroid is a full featured audio editor that allows you to create your own ringtones from any song on your SD card. I generally don’t change my ringtone too frequently, so I use Ringdroid probably the least out of most of my apps, however I had to feature it because of how well executed it is. It’s got a great interface, and figuring in all of the processing that’s going on, it performs great, and for me has been quite stable. Definitely useful when the perfect part of a song pops in your head and you want it as a ringtone.

7. AK Notepad

• I found it odd that Android didn’t come with a built-in note-taking application, I figure it would’ve been fairly easy for Google to bang one out. Luckily there’s a large array of quality note apps available. My favorite has to be AK Notepad. It’s simple, straightforward and robust. You can easily move notes on and off of your SD card, you can e-mail the notes, SMS them, anything. If you want to be reminded of a note in the future, just setup an alarm and you’ll get notified. There’s not much to say about taking notes, you write things down for future reference, AK Notepad just does it better for me than any other app.

6. AndroZIP

• Another thing lacking from Android was any sort of file explorer. It’s not entirely necissary, but it does come in handy from time to time. I originally found AndroZIP because I needed to unzip a file that I downloaded directly onto the phone. AndroZIP did a great job, but I also noticed that it gave me more file managing capabilities than the previous app I was using just for that task. AndroZIP allows you to easily move, delete, copy, rename and unzip (including .rar and some other archive file types) files.

5. Twidroid

• This was a hard decision to make, mainly because different people want different things out of a twitter client. Some people want to be updated as soon as possible, others are more casual. If you can tell from the frequency of our own twitter account, you could probably tell that we’re fairly casual. I believe Twidroid provides the best client that caters to both types of users. It can notify you every five minutes of updates or as little as once a day, I personally have notifications turned off. The client itself supports all the photo, url and location sharing goodies you’re used to. Twidroid doesn’t stand out in it’s execution or unique features, it’s just rock solid and very customizable.

4. Gmote

• There’s been a few apps like Gmote cropping up in the iPhone/Android crop, but Gmote does it best in my experience. I personally haven’t used Air Mouse or anything similar on the iPhone, but I have seen them in action. On the surface they seem to work just as well as Gmote. The desktop client supports Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and allows you to browse the file structure on any of those operating systems and choose to launch the proper application either on the computer or directly on the phone. What ends up setting Gmote apart isn’t completely the software, it’s the G1 that provides the ideal platform. When in touchpad mode not only does the touch screen become a standard laptop trackpad, but the trackball becomes you mouse click and the great landscape keyboard provides input directly on your computer. It’s essentially the perfect remote for a computer hooked up to your TV.

3. ToggleWifi

• This is probably one of the simplest applications in the entire Android Market, but it’s one that I use almost constantly. The name says it all, you click the icon and Wifi is either toggled on or off, beauty is, this icon can be placed anywhere. Beats going through the settings menu.

2. Advanced Task Manager

• Something that will always “plague” multitasking operating systems is the need to micromanage what is running and what isn’t running. That’s where Advanced Task Manager comes in. Simply select a program to get the option to end the task, or simply choose the end all tasks currently running. It works great, and after a bit of a hiccup with the “End All” widget everything seems to be running smoothly. I personally am glad that Android essentially needs something like this. It helps weed out the newbs.

1. ConnectBot

• I probably use ConnectBot the least overall, but the capabilities it can provide essentially make the possibilities on my phone endless (as long as I have a good server to SSH into). We’re lucky enough in this area to have an ISP that fully supports open-source and believes in providing as much access to their servers as  is feasible. All of our web-hosting goes through them, so having a shell-enabled account with them allows me to easily move files around, upload files, and even access programs specific to their server (like VIM for text editing, etc) wirelessly through my phone. ConnectBot is a solid app in it’s own right, but on it’s own it’s not very impressive, but with a good server to connect to it allows me to do things on my phone that make even the most jail-broken iPhone jealous.