Okay Geek Farm
5 Android Apps You Need to Download
Darryl Cobb
This is a new regular segment from one of our mobile editors Darryl Cobb giving you an up-front look at some of the best apps in the Android Marketplace. Darryl will be bringing you this new segment at various times throughout the week, and he’ll be constantly downloading and testing Android apps to make sure you get a helpful and un-opinionated list of the top 5 Android apps you need to download. See the list after the break!
VideoBox
What it does — It downloads videos from YouTube.
Why Should You Download It? — It’s very easy to use and it is also a self contained video player. VideoBox gives you a tab for your downloaded Youtube videos and a separate tab for your videos that are already on your SD card. It’s a very handy program and if a download fails, you can automatically restart it, right from the application. And when you close VideoBox, your download will continue in the background.
How much is it? — Free of charge.
FeedSquares
What it does — It collect RSS feeds from your Google reader account.
Why should you download it? — It is a very interesting way of displaying RSS articles, and if you use Google listen, your RSS podcast subscriptions. Instead of using the traditional list of links view, you get a very attractive graphic user interface of, you guessed it, colored squares. Call me a what you like but sometimes you get tired of looking at links all day. You can set your download intervals, choose between a dark and light background and even choose to compress data. They do admit that not every carrier is support but give it a shot.
How much is it? — Free of Charge
Launcher Pro Plus
What it does — It replaces your native home skin on your Android device.
Why should you download it? — If you are remotely creative, you should have this installed on your phone. First off, it gives your phone the ability to have a landscape UI when you turn your phone (EVO 4G, I’m looking at you!). Second you can choose how many home screens your want from 1 to 7 and it has pinch to jump without the need for Android 2.2. Third, it gives you customer notifications for the included icons like unread SMS, unread Gmail and missed calls. Fourth, the scrollable widgets are amazing! The widgets include Facebook, Twitter, Friends (combined Facebook & Twitter), People, SMS and a Calendar widget. And just for aesthetics, they are all transparent. And as a plus final plus, you can resize any widget you put on your screen. There’s many more things you can do with Launcher Pro Plus and I implore you to find out.
How much does it cost — It’s not free but $2.99 isn’t a bad price. Especially for how often you get updates.
TweetDeck for Android
What it Does — It is one of the best Twitter clients for Android, period.
Why should you download it? — As a beta, it was competitive with the top Twitter clients on the market and now as an official app, it’s either number one or number two. The ability to add columns, use multiple twitter accounts are just some of the things power users hunger for. And the innovations are amazing. I love seeing some of my bilingual friends Tweet in their native tongue and being able to select TweetDeck’s “translation” option and see what they are saying. It’s not perfect but it beats going out for Google Translation with copy and paste. The widgets are tastefully done and overall, the TweetDeck is first rate in design for Android apps but that is not what should make you download it. I will say it that TweetDeck for Android is the best “Facebook” client on the market. I practically do all my Facebook status updates and responses from TweetDeck. Throw in FourSquare and you have a winner.
How much does it cost? — There is no charge for this application.
TuneWiki For Android
What Does it Do — It is the ultimate music player on Android.
Why should you download it? — I wrote about this before and I am still impressed with what it can do. Being able to share your musical tastes via Twitter and Facebook with your friends is fun and being able to search YouTube for the music video to that song is cool. Being able to learn the lyrics to your favorite song so you can sing along perfectly bad is a great advantage. Being able to stream Last.fm and ShoutCAST are killer features for me. Sometimes you can’t carry every song for your every mood and you might want to listen to something new. And, seeing what songs are playing around your location is pretty cool as well. The app is very polished, the widget is stylished and you just can’t be having all of these things in one program.
How much does it cost? — There is a free version that is ad supported but you can donate $4.99 via PayPal and have the ads removed. It is worth it.
