Back in July, I took the time to highlight my favorite top 5 Android Apps. The criteria for it to be a Top five app was that I had to use it almost daily. Even though I'm still enjoying my Nexus One, many apps have come and gone. So I figured it should be time to re-visit my apps and determine just what has survived the test of time, and what hasn't. So as of today, here are the top 5 apps I depend on daily, as well as the apps that have fallen from favor.
Weather Bug - It's been a tough winter here in Northeast TN! The Weatherbug radar feature has been awesome to let me know about fronts coming in or going out! If you need weather updates on the run, check this out! The free version includes all the necessaries but includes some advertising! Launching the App gives you current conditions, the immediate forecast, a ten day forecast and satellite views are also included. An additional feature is severe weather alerts. You can turn these off, but it's really nice for your phone to alert you to any kind of pending severe weather! Another nice feature is the local web cams that you can open and look at to see what's doing in near-by locations. The download also includes two Widgets. A small and a large. The large is still kind of small and provides at quick "at a glance" that gives you the current Temperature, conditions and expected lows and highs. I've tried a few other weather apps, but this one always gets my approval. A solid app for weather! Survived!
Tweetdeck - This is my favorite app for Twitter/Facebook. This app basically replaced both Twidriod and Pingdroid on my Nexus. It's not as feature rich as Twidroid, but it's still got a ton of features and is by far the most visually appealing of all the twitter clients available for the platform. It supports Lists, saved searches, multiple columns, and includes excellent support for other apps such as Facebook, Foursquare, Latitude, buzz and MORE! My only problem with it, is I have several columns built and I do experience some lagging issues. This doesn't stop me from choosing another app twitter app however.
Googlebooks - Recently Google announced it's bookstore. I've installed it and bought a book or two and currently this is my reader of choice. But the truth is, I have nothing against Amazon's Kindle! Google's book app is just fine on both my Nexus and my PC's. I've done some comparison shopping and generally, I've found Google's offerings a little cheaper than those in the Amazon Book store. The Google app functions very similar to Amazons Kindle app for Android. But when I'm ready to purchase an electronic book, I shop on price. Whichever book is cheapest is pretty much determining which app I am using . . . ..
Joooid - I will admit that this app probably won't have broad appeal. But it is certainly one I use almost daily! The site that you are reading this in, is built on a platform called Joomla. And this Android app allows me to basically post articles from my Nexus directly to this site. Through it, I can post photos, either as a single photo or within a gallery. I can control the size of the images, I can add hyperlinks, bold and italic fonts, and more. I use this app for two functions: 1- Lot of times, what I tweet, I drop into joooid and send to what you see on the left as "Mobile Thoughts". 2- my own mobile photo gallery. When I take a mobile photo, rather than send to a location such as Twitpic or tweetphoto, I just drop them to my own site and share them from it. for a better example, here is my mobile photo gallery page.
Google Voice - I now give out a public phone number from Google. This number forwards to phones that I specify within my account! Even though I text through twitter, I use my Google Voice number to text family. I can text to a group, from either my phone or my computer. Google Voice also includes a couple of great widgets that speed up the process. I could say a whole lot more about this app, but I already have. Google Voice is the type of app that works so well, and is integrated into the phone so good, you forget that you are using it.
So there you have them! My Top 5 Android apps! I'll try and do this again in 6 months to see how this list is continuing to change.
Buds who Blog