iPhones. iPads. Android. Windows Phone 7. We've updated all of our essential apps lists to include a few forgotten favorites, some long awaited arrivals and, as always, even more amazing apps. Check them out! If you want to jump to see the best apps in a specific platform, click here: The end of the month is here, and that means it's time to do a little housekeeping on our list of the absolute best iPhone apps. Who will be inducted? Added: Sprd the Note: Share song with your friends directly from your iPhone. Import the track your want to share from your iPhone/iPod touch's music library in Sprd the Note and you'll have the option to share via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or email. Is it Ready Yet?: Undercooked meat is not only gross, it's potentially dangerous. And overcooked meat? That's just wrong. Is It Ready? has 23 beef, pork, and poultry variations to help determine the proper amount of time you should keep your meat in the oven. AirCassette for iPhone: It's a music player for your iPhone that transforms CoverFlow and iTunes and mp3s into a faux cassette player. You can relive the 80s, but without the bad hair and day-glo clothing. If you're so inclined you can make a mix tape for that special someone. Astrid To-Do for iPhone: It's a full featured task manager that doesn't make you want to rip your eyeballs out. Set up individual or group projects from the app quickly and easily. Email integration includes the ability to complete tasks by email. Oh, and it's free. Go: GO is an easy-to-use and beautiful app that lets users post photos, videos and messages onto their network (no cheating with backdated photos!). What's great about GO is that it offers an anonymous option so you can feel Read More
It's not your fault for getting sucked into the Black Friday hoopla. How can you resist all the deals? They're just so, well, cheap. The Black FlyDay Android app hops on the find-a-deal app bandwagon with a slight difference. The deal finding doesn't stop on Friday. The app encourages users to keep sharing deals long after Black Friday has become a trampled memory. What's it do? BlackFly Day is a deal sharing app for Android that ties to your Facebook account. Deals in your area are displayed on a map by a fly. Get it, FlyDay? Share any deals you find to your friends using the app or to Facebook. You can populate your town's map with flys. So many deal-finding flys. Why do we like it? The app should help you battle grandmothers on Black Friday for $5 toasters and $100 HDTVs. But more than that, once you get a few friends onboard you can save on items all year. Insisting that the app sign into Facebook to work is a bummer. But it's really the best way to share deals with your friends. Even if your friends don't jump aboard, you can check out the deals being posted by other Black FlyDay users. Just think how jealous your friends will be when you show them the $10 off-brand Blu-ray player you scored while trolling the flea market. Black FlyDay Download this app for: The Best Year round deals The Worst Mandatory Facebook Read More
The Large Hadron Collider scares me. It's the baddest monster machine on the planet and it's capable of creating material that's denser than anything but black holes, it possibly found the Higgs Boson and probably can destroy humanity. It's an unknown beast. How do you make it less scary? Get to know it. LHSee (heh) for Android shows you what's happening inside the LHC. What's it do? If you ever wanted to learn more about what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN actually does, LHSee fills you in. It shows live data inside the particle accelerator in a 3D view, you can even see protons collide with one another. The 3D View, of course, isn't some live video look in of the LHC, you're looking at 3D models here, but you can rotate it around, zoom in and zoom out to get a better look or different angle at what's going on. It can get pretty wicked. LHSee also has tutorial videos, a Hunt the Higgs Boson game, explainers and more. Why do we like it? The LHC is a great scientific achievement/experiment. That machine is going to find the Higgs Boson or prove that it doesn't exist, discover the origin of mass, the structure of space, time, etc. it's a very important part of human history and... I know so very little about it. This app presents the LHC's mission and various experiments in a much more digestible package. One where it's not intimidatingly boring. Seeing live collisions in 3D makes it exciting, learning how all the parts work is educational. It makes science cool. LHSee Download this app for: The Best Science is cool The Worst Science is hard Read More
I've always found it a little bit annoying to switch apps with my Android phone. The stock task manager/app switcher list is cumbersome. SwipePad isn't. You just take your finger, swipe from a corner of your screen and it'll magically launch a very slick app switcher. Pick your app and BAM. Switched. What's it do? SwipePad is a better app switcher for your Android phone. Instead of holding down the home button to launch your recent apps, SwipePad uses hotspots—corners and edges of your phone's screen—to trigger a new 'pad' (which is sorta like a dashboard of apps). Here's how it works. Let's say you want to switch to a recently opened app, you drag your finger from the top right corner to the center of the screen and a dashboard with all your recent apps will show up. All you have to do now is hover over the app you want to open and SwipePad will switch the app. It's quick, painless and borderline magical. The app is also customizable, you can set the top left corner to show a dashboard of your favorite apps. Bottom left edge for games. Bottom right corner for widgets. And so on. Everything and anything can be tweaked. Why do we like it? It's adding another layer to your phone. The sort of depth that'll make you wonder how you could have lived without it. Trust me, if you don't want to bother with silly app drawers and the wimpy stock task manager again, get SwipePad. The interface is completely natural and most importantly, FAST. It doesn't take more than half a second to get where you want to go. Plus, if you're set up properly and maxed out, you can have as much as 9 different hotspots with 12 different apps 'hidden' in Read More
Get the most popular stories and breaking news directly in your Twitter feed Follow @Gizmodo What price the luxury of watching Friends re-runs on your Android tablet? If you ask Sling Media, it's $30, which is what they're charging for the SlingPlayer app. Compatible with Honeycomb (and likely upcoming versions too), you must have a Slingbox to actually, y'know, sling TV shows to your tablet. [Android via TechCrunch] Read More
If you think your son's sexuality can be determined through any means other than actually having a meaningful, face-to-face conversation, then you need to waste your money on the "Is My Son Gay" French Android App. The app costs 99 Euro cents € 1.99, which if you think about it, is a great deal considering it promises to answer "the question you have been asking for perhaps too long"! Or at least it would be if it actually did something... It's basically just a game of 20 questions featuring deep and thoughtful yes or no questions pertaining to homosexual stereotypes like personal grooming, manner of dress, enjoyment of musical theater, and his interest in sports (or rather lack thereof). Lest you doubt its utility, the app "unfortunately" confirmed five-star reviewer Christopher's most-feared suspicions... Quick Christopher, you must send your son away immediately for treatment before it metastasizes and becomes contagious! [Android Market via RFI via the Awl] Read More
In this week's best Android app roundup, you have a new launcher from Samsung, a sweet fantasy RPG-ish game in Eternity Warriors, a drop dead gorgeous weather app and more. Read More
Pure Android is great, but not all of its stock apps are. MaximumTech shows you which apps are most lacking—and the best replacements for them. Many people love the vanilla Android experience. It's smoother, faster, and a lot friendlier when it comes to over-the-air (OTA) updates, but it can also be a little lacking when it comes to certain functionality. That's exactly why OEMs put custom interfaces on their Android devices. Samsung has its Touchwiz; HTC has Sense; Motorola has MotoBlur; and the list goes on. Fortunately, Android lets you customize just about every aspect of your device through the use of apps, and we've got a great list of apps to strengthen the weak points that come with an unadulterated version of Android. The stock Android browser has definitely come a long way from its original version—now sporting multi-touch zooming, faster webpage rendering, and overall smoother experience, but the interface can still feel a bit clunky. Dolphin HD delivers a desktop-like browsing experience without running into the barriers of a mobile device. You'll get everything from quick tabbed browsing and downloadable themes to add-ons and gestures. And yes, just like the stock browser, Dolphin HD does support Flash (on compatible devices). Price: Free Much like Dolphin HD, Opera Mobile focuses on bringing features to mobile browsing. If you're already a devout Opera user, Opera Mobile should be a no brainer. It will let you sync your browsing history, bookmarks, and passwords between your mobile and desktop browser using Opera Link. And if browsing speed is what you're after, Opera Mini handles all data and rendering on its own servers before pushing the compressed data to your device. Price: Free It's no surprise that one of the most popular desktop browsers has a mobile version as well. Firefox for Android Read More
If you didn't know, we love GIFs here at Gizmodo. They're little Internet treasures that you hold on to forever. But you know what needs more GIFs? Your phone. AnimGIF for Android turns your favorite GIFs into wallpapers. What's it do? It's a wallpaper "app" that lets you use any GIF you find on the world wide web as your phone's wallpaper. I put app in quotes because its actually more like a settings option, the app is only visible as another option when you want to change wallpapers. It's really smart though, I just mindlessly downloaded a bunch of GIFs straight to my phone from our cinemagraph shooting challenge and a few other sites like mmminimal and the GIFs auto-adjusted themselves just fine. The app also has settings to shuffle through your GIF collection, set intervals of the animation, adjust quality resize and more. It gives your phone a brand new personality. Why do we like it? I dare you to ask why we need a GIF wallpaper app when almost all Android phones have Live Wallpapers already? HOW DARE—I can't believe you asked! Well, young pup. Live Wallpapers try too hard. GIFs are honed by warriors of the Internet and shaped by mouse clicking artisans, they don't just capture a moment, they let it live forever. Live wallpapers, in comparison, are re-vomited by mainstream big box companies who want to kill your battery so you have to buy a new phone. GIFs are FREEDOM, live wallpapers are effects for SHEEP. More seriously, AnimGIF does a good job at letting you control how much battery you want to use with levels of options for those who happen to have battery to burn (rare on Android). More battery power, more control power over GIF quality. At the end of the day, Read More
Pano: It's a panoramic picture taking app for your Android phone. Basically, you snap a series of side-by-side individual shots together and Pano automagically stitches them together to create one super long seamless photo. Hell, you can merge together 16 pictures into one humungo 360 degree photo if you wanted! So yeah, you remember that one time you wanted to capture the entire horizon on the beach? Pano does that. Facebook Messenger: Think of it as a cross platform messaging service that enables you to easily talk to people on any platform-Android, iPhone, Facebook, SMS and everything in between. It's not dissimilar to Kik or WhatsApp in this aspect. If your friends are on Facebook, they'll get your message in the Messages (or on their Android or iPhone). If they're not on Facebook, it'll be re-directed as a SMS message (they'll get a message from a random number saying CASEY CHAN SAYS ___ ). Videos: Google's official video player for Android, long available for Honeycomb tablets, finally works with Android phones (2.2+). You can use it to watch videos you store on your phone or flicks you got from the Market. It streams over Wi-Fi and supports offline viewing too. New Yorker Goings On: In a nutshell, the Goings On app is the New Yorker's entertainment listings in app form. That means you'll be up to date with the theatre, art, music, dance, movies, restaurants, and night life scene. But there's more! You can read various New York-based artists wax poetic about the city and their own personal spots in the city and even listen to audio tours that guide you around the maze grid. Basically, if you live in New York and want to maintain some semblance of being "cultured", this should be on your phone. POP Beginner: They call Read More
LHSee for Android: Find Out What's Going On Inside the Large Hadron Collider - Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide
AnimGIF Live Wallpaper 2 for Android: Liven Up Your Phone with Some GIFs - Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide
