The days of a mobile device living or dying on the strength of its operating system are gone. Now, it’s all about the apps. An OS will make it pleasant to use those apps, and will probably give you a reason to use the device more, but the real value-add is the apps available in the device’s ecosystem. Apple’s iOS is undoubtedly the king when it comes to sheer volume of class-A apps. The list of marquee apps for the platform that are simply delightful to use is long. That’s not necessarily the case for Android, where the lower barrier-of-entry for app makers can at times be difficult to wade through the crap to find the gold. That’s why this list of ‘Android niceties‘ is welcome. It’s a Tumblr, shared by developers Steven Troughton Smith and Sam Steele on Twitter that I feel is pretty packed with good examples of Android apps that don’t suck. The list is focused on showing off apps that utilize Android user interface conventions, or come up with their own, in a good way. Some of the examples that I thought were solid: So, not every app on here is a complete home run when it comes to usability, and I certainly don’t agree with some of the selections, but a good UI is normally priority one on a mobile device. Some of the apps are also available on iOS in a similar form, but are translated well to the framework of Android. In these days of small screens and a market place glutted with choices in apps, a good and standout UI is almost a pre-requisite for success. So whether you’re a desinger looking for inspiration, or an Android user that just wants some cool apps to use, check out the list here for yourself. Read More
India’s leading local search engine Justdial has launched a free Android app which lets you search for businesses in your neighbourhood or city, just like its website or call-in service. The app is available to Justdial users both in India and the United States, the only two countries it currently operates in. Justdial, like its name suggests, lets you call a number from any phone and request information about businesses in your city. Want to know the name of the nearest restaurant or the phone number of that car showroom you visited yesterday? Call Justdial and make your request, and it sends the requested information to you via a free text message. It also gives you options to find more similar shops in your area. If you consent, it will even directly connect you to one of the businesses on its list. If you want to buy a product or service, Justdial offers to send your contact information to five businesses and have them compete to offer you the best price. With the Android app, Justdial users get all of the features of the website and call-in service, and then some. The “Near Me” feature allows you to look up businesses near you, and you get options to see them plotted on Google Maps or call them from within the app. You can search for information by entering the city’s name manually as well. Though quite similar in features to MapmyIndia ShowNearby and plenty of other local search apps, Justdial benefits from having a comprehensive database that is far more complete, at least within India, than the Google Places database used by most other apps. It also includes reviews for its listings, but they have never been particularly trustworthy, in our experience. Other features of the app include the ability to save Read More
We covered TeliportMe earlier this year, the ambitious Indian startup that aims to combine a crowd-sourced database of street-level images from across the world into a Google Street View-like product, and were fascinated by its 360 Android app for taking panoramic photos. Yesterday, the company launched a newer, faster website and a new version of the Android app with significantly upgraded photography chops. It includes settings to take a normal quality panorama, like it did before, and adds a new higher quality option. When set to normal quality, you can just pan the phone around as the camera keeps snapping pictures. It’s fast, but the pictures aren’t as great as with the newer option. With the higher quality setting, you have to stop and let the camera take a decent picture before you move on to the next one, thus resulting in a much sharper panorama overall. More importantly, the app now allows shooting of panoramas in portrait mode. A portrait orientation for each shot means that you have to take a higher number of photos to cover the same stretch, but the higher vertical pixel count results in a much larger panorama once you are done shooting. TeliportMe has doubled its user-base in the past couple of months and claims to be “easily the fastest panorama capturing app on any platform”. Vineet Devaiah, a co-founder of the company, also told us that the 360 app was soon going to become the official panorama app be available on Samsung phones. That should happen in about three months’ time. If you want to lay your hands on it now, the 360 app is available from the Android Market for free. Go stitch some panoramas! Update: Updated the story to issue a correction from the developer. TeliportMe will soon be available on Android-powered Read More
Spotify went mobile almost two years ago exactly. The iOS and Android apps were released simultaneously to premium subscribers in September 2009, and today the music streaming service has announced a “small, yet important” update to its Android app. In a blog post earlier, it announced that language support for French and Spanish was being added to the Android app, but you will have to follow special installation instructions whilst it’s still in testing mode. To install it, users must set their Android handsets to allow installations from ‘Unknown Sources’ by going to the Settings>Applications >Unknown sources menu. Then, you can download the file to your Androd phone or use the QR code to preview the update. Once it leaves its testing phase, it will be released for all users in the Android Market. Whilst this will be good news for Spotify users in France and Spain, it’s also good news for the millions of Spanish speakers in the USA. The service was launched Stateside back in mid-July, and given that Spanish is the second most common tongue in the USA with over 35m native speakers, this update may not be all that ‘small’ after all as Android handsets now outnumber iPhones in the US. Read More
Nearly a month ago to the day, FLUD, a fantastic, free, iOS news consumption app received several super updates, but if you own an Android device you may have felt left out. At the time of the iOS updates we noted, “For Android users, FLUD has released its Android app for private beta testing and will be releasing the app to the public this month.” True to their word, the team at FLUD has launched an Android version of their app with the same splendid features of its iOS brethren: After spending the past weekend using FLUD for Android having used it on both the iPhone and iPad, I found it to be equally as great as the iOS versons, providing the latest news from one’s favorite sources in an easy-to-use, wonderfully designed, user interface. Whether you scan headlines or read entire pieces, FLUD enhances reading of news and allows you to share the stories you find most interesting with its integrated social-sharing options. In the coming weeks FLUD will also launch a web application, which you can expect to hear about here first! Pick up FLUD for Android and let us know what you think of the app in the comments! Read More
Contrary to popular belief, the 21st century journalist isn’t all that different to the hacks of days gone by. The skills required today are broadly similar to what was needed 50 years ago – they must have meticulous attention to detail, leave no stone unturned as they strive to unravel the truth behind a story. And above all else, they must be ethically-inclined…in theory, at least. But the tools of the trade today are very different. Out is the payphone and little black book of contacts, and in is the Twitter account, smartphone and other gadgets that can transform a simple hack into an editor, reporter, cameraman, photographer…and whatever else may be required to submit a story. And in a week it was revealed that Android has almost half of the total smartphone market sewn up, here’s a look at a handful of Android apps that can help journalists harness the power of their pocket rocket to get a story from the streets onto the Web. Any self-respecting hack will require easy, instant access to a recording device. Tape-a-Talk is a simple, but pretty good quality voice recorder. You can set the app to record high quality (.wav/pcm) and low quality (3gp) recordings, and it will let you pause recordings too (for .wav files), something that many of the basic recorders don’t allow. And long-clicking on a recorded file gives you the option of sending, renaming or deleting the file. You can also set the sample rate (8-44khz) and sample format (8/16 bit). The basic version of Tape-a-Talk is free, but you can upgrade to a pro version for about £3.50, which has additional features such as fast-forward/rewind recordings, and you can also splice recordings too. There are countless other simple audio recording apps too, such as Voice Recorder and VoiceTask, Read More
Contrary to popular belief, the 21st century journalist isn’t all that different to the hacks of days gone by. The skills required today are broadly similar to what was needed 50 years ago – they must have meticulous attention to detail, leave no stone unturned as they strive to unravel the truth behind a story. And above all else, they must be ethically-inclined…in theory, at least. But the tools of the trade today are very different. Out is the payphone and little black book of contacts, and in is the Twitter account, smartphone and other gadgets that can transform a simple hack into an editor, reporter, cameraman, photographer…and whatever else may be required to submit a story. And in a week it was revealed that Android has almost half of the total smartphone market sewn up, here’s a look at a handful of Android apps that can help journalists harness the power of their pocket rocket to get a story from the streets onto the Web. Any self-respecting hack will require easy, instant access to a recording device. Tape-a-Talk is a simple, but pretty good quality voice recorder. You can set the app to record high quality (.wav/pcm) and low quality (3gp) recordings, and it will let you pause recordings too (for .wav files), something that many of the basic recorders don’t allow. And long-clicking on a recorded file gives you the option of sending, renaming or deleting the file. You can also set the sample rate (8-44khz) and sample format (8/16 bit). The basic version of Tape-a-Talk is free, but you can upgrade to a pro version for about £3.50, which has additional features such as fast-forward/rewind recordings, and you can also splice recordings too. There are countless other simple audio recording apps too, such as Voice Recorder and VoiceTask, Read More
Podcasts are a great way of staying up to date with your favourite topics and expanding your mind by listening to new points of view or discovering new music. Your phone is the perfect device for listening to podcasts on the go, but a good app to keep track of, and play, your downloads is essential. Here we take a look at some of the best choices on Android and iOS. Free, Windows and OS X, syncs to iPhone (and Android, unofficially) Before we go any further, it’s well worth mentioning the best known podcast manager there is – iTunes. Apple has done a great job of making its iTunes Store the go-to directory for podcast producers, meaning that you can find just about anything you want on its store. If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod, it’s a simple case of syncing up your device to iTunes and any podcasts you’ve subscribed to will be copied to your device for listening on the go. If you have an Android device, you can use a number of solutions such as Salling Media Sync to push iTunes content on to your handset. It’s not all rosy in iTunes land, though. It’s impossible to subscribe to podcasts on the go using Apple’s mobile iTunes Store, and you can’t download new episodes straight from your handset either. This means that you’re forever reliant on desktop syncs to get your latest fix of This American Life or This Week in Tech. Fingers crossed Apple incorporates podcast subscriptions into its iCloud service when it launches later this year. While not the cheapest ‘podcatcher’ around, DoggCatcher is a beautifully realised app for Android that handles audio and video along with RSS feeds too. You can search across a number of popular podcast directories right from the Read More
It’s been a long, interesting road for Path. If you’re not familiar, Path is a mobile-based social network where you’re encouraged to share to a small circle of friends. It is hard-limited to 50 people in each person’s network, and it’s based primarily on the sharing of photos and videos. I’ve been in the Path for Android beta for the past few weeks. It’s what got me addicted to the services that Path is offering. However, it was closed and by invitation only so I couldn’t share that with you. Now, according to the blog over at the Path site, it is available to all in the Android Market: We will continue to iterate and release updates with more features frequently. As we move through this beta period, expect things to improve rapidly. We first took a look at Path a few months ago, before the Android beta opened. Soon after, Path joined up with Facebook in order to encourage more connections. It’s found its niche, and continues to grow. Over the past few months, it’s become my favorite way to share moments with my closest friends. Path is the brain child of former Facebooker Dave Morin. He started Path in February of 2010 and has since watched its sometimes-rocky rise in popularity. Give it a shot, but do so with an open mind. You can download it now, for free, from the Android Market. Read More
Camera360, an Android photo-sharing app that pretty much functions like Instagram, has reportedly reached 6 million users globally, half of which are from China, in just 12 months since launch. TechNode has predicted before that the app, developed by Chengdu-based startup PinGuo Digital Entertainment, can be much better than Instagram with its robust selection of effects, filters and quick processing. True enough, judging from the user figures, Camera360 has already surpassed Instagram, whose iPhone user base is at 4.25 million. What worked for Camera360 compared to the other Instagram-clones in China is that it focused more on its image processing capabilities rather than simply copying the “social” framework of Instagram. While Mr.Xu admits that sharing is indeed “the trend of the future,” he believes that social networks should only be formed once there’s a large enough user base and content for the users to be active enough in. Mr. Xu also announced that an iPhone version is coming very soon, which includes new features such as one hand sidelight control, fast continuous capture modes at around 180 shoots per min, and multi-camera, among others. It’s too early to say that Camera360 is indeed better than Instagram but I’m very excited myself to give the iPhone version a try. Maybe when the playing field has evened out (eg. Instagram gets an Android version) we can tell which one is the superior photo-sharing app. Read More
