Well, just got one of those Samsung Galaxy Notes. It is my first smartphone, well not my first, I had an iPhone I never bothered to figure out, but it is the first one I’ve actually really gotten into.
What are some apps that you find most useful? I don’t have any to share other than speaker boost which I found wonderful.
If they are free, all the better! Thanks!
I like Announcify, which announces who is calling or texting me.
Cerberus is a fairly powerful tool that serves the same function as Find My iPhone. Mostly it lets me know my daughter has been playing with my phone - it takes her photo and emails it to me when she enters my unlock pattern incorrectly 3 times.
I use SMS Backup+ to backup my SMSs to Gmail.
Tapatalk, for the SDMB.
ADW Launcher to customise my desktop.
Mines an iphone but I use Tunein radio a lot, tons of interesting stuff from all over the world on there…I have a good unit conversion app and a carpentry calculator that are both pretty handy for work. My banks online banking app, an app that lets me access info from my remote weather station.
Wow, thanks guys. I am already in the process of downloading those thank you very much.
*SoundHound *is a must-have, in my book. Not only does it identify tunes, but also scrolls through the lyrics while you listen.
Google Sky is a nice, free, must-have on every Android phone.
LibriVox Audiobooks - crowd/open- sourced free audiobooks… can’t beat that!
Evernote. Very handy for jotting down notes, and synching them to multiple other devices.
Sounds stupid, but I love “Out of Milk” as well. If I need something, I add it to my OOM list, then when I go shopping I don’t forget to buy it.
As I tend to say in a lot of Android threads, do NOT download any kind of “Task killer” app. Lots of people (especially pushy salesmen at the Cell stores,) say you need this to kill all those pesky apps in the background, hogging resources and draining battery.
Not true. I’m not going to get into all the details (mostly because I don’t know all the details…) but the gist of it is, Android is smarter than you. It manages it’s own apps just fine without you mucking it up.
Here are a few:
AlarmDroid - a great alarm clock app
CadreBible - a great multi translation Bible app with tons of extras
Calorie Counter - lists menus and nutritional info for most chain restauants
Craigslist - mobile version
Fandango - movie play times and online tickets
Flashlight - turns your phone display and/or flash into various flashlights. Very handy.
GasBuddy - finds gas stations close by and gives current prices at each station
PicFlick - sends photos from your phone directly to your Kodak wireless printer
ScoreCenter - ESPN’s customizable score app
Swing by Swing Golf - Golf GPS with 1000’s of courses loaded
WeatherBug - weather app
Winamp - music player
Best of all, you can download all of these and have spent a grand total of $0. I loves me some free apps!
Light Flow - Lets you set up custom LED colors and custom sounds for different events (Missed call, Gmail, SMS, etc.)
Llama - Lets you set location-based behaviors based on cell towers or wifi. For example you could have your notification volumes at 10% at work, ringer at 50%. At home have both on 75%. After 11 PM all volumes at 0% except ringer.
Amazon Appstore - An anternate appstore, gives away a free app every day. Some are pretty good.
GPS Essentials - All sorts of neat widgets dealing with maps, tracks, and the GPS in your phone.
Smart Voice Recorder - A sound recorder with a very well-done “Skip silence” feature to only record when the sound is above the ambient noise level.
Google Voice - Lets you send and receive SMS for free, if you don’t have unlimited text from your carrier already. Also works on WiFi.
BeyondPod (podcast manager/downloader/player) is probably my most frequently used app. Best to set it up so it downloads podcasts automatically at night (assuming you have WiFi at home and the phone is set up to connect to it).
Yelp and Urbanspoon are useful for finding restaurants, especially during travel.
I find the Weather Channel app to be easier to use/understand than other weather apps I’ve tried.
JuiceDefender is a pretty good utility for maximizing battery life.
There are lots of apps that manage profiles (e.g. automatically enable a “Night” profile every night to silence the phone). I use Profile Scheduler +, which probably isn’t the most powerful but is fairly simple to use.
ive only had my phone a month but here are some I like
juice defender
plague inc - a pretty fun game about disease
listnote - good voice recognition for jotting down notes either by typing or speech.
skyvi - the android siri. not too useful but fun to have
an ebook reader to download library ebooks. I use overdrive media.
speedtest. - to check your 3g and 4g speeds at various times of day and locations. dl speeds can fluctuate wildly.
stumbleupon - good news outlet
lookout - free security software
Firefox - because chrome is buggy as hell on my phone.
My most generally useful app is Evernote. It basically keeps notes synchronized across several devices so you always have access to them (Phone, tablet, PC, Mac)
It gets lots of buzz, but I found that you get the most out of it when you have a clear idea of how you want to use it. It’s not the kind of app that just magically does things, you have to put some effort into planning to get the most out of it.
On another note, I’ve been looking for an app for iPhone that will alert you when you are using cellular data instead of Wifi. There are lots of apps that will keep track of your usage. However, I’ve found that many times, at home, my WiFi connection drops without my knowledge and I start racking up minutes on my data plan. Anyone know of anything like that?
A flashlight.
An electronic wallet to collect all your other passwords into.
A general purpose GPS program with nice range of features.
RSS reader.
Text file and PDF reader.
Kindle.
Measurement devices that let you move lines on the screen and read their separation.
These are all free on Android:
Bubble simulated bubble level (there are more than one)
Compass (by Catch.com, though other compasses are available)
IM+ instant message client
gStrings guitar tuner
At Bat Lite (MLB real-time game data)
NFL Mobile (live game data, also includes live radio feeds of games)
Pandora
Unit Converter by Wopnersoft
Where’s my Droid : Ever misplace your phone then try to call it and remember you had it muted? :smack: Send a request thru the webpage and it will ring your phone and automatically turn the volume to max. It will also turn on GPS and give you the coordinates on Google maps.
Shazam
When that song comes on the radio, and you just can’t for the life of you remember who sang it, or even what it’s called?
It knows.
Here are some apps that I use all the time, or find useful.
[ul]
[li]Newsrob - Syncs to google reader, and caches RSS feeds for offline reading[/li][li]Titanium Backup - Backup your apps and data[/li][li]Dropbox/Box/Googledrive - Easily share files with your computer[/li][li]K-9 Mail - A different mail reader than the built-in. Good if you don’t use gmail.[/li][li]Facebook - The latest iteration of the Android Facebook app is not completely terrible[/li][li]SkyMotion - Tell you if it’s going to rain in one square kilometer around you in the next two hours in 10 minute increments. Saves looking out the window.[/li][li]Doggcatcher - An alternative podcast aggregator to the previously mentioned BeyondPod. As of 3 months ago, there were no free podcast programs which met my needs, and these two seem to be the top paid ones.[/li][li]Your bank and credit card company might have an app which ranges from very useful (photo check depositing, balance checking) to worthless (just crashes)[/li][/ul]
Lookout Mobile Security does this too, and more: if you misplace your phone and the battery dies, the phone will automaticaly send a GPS ping right before it dies to the Lookout website where you can locate it on a Google map. And if your phone is stolen, you can wipe it through the website. Plus, it has an antivirus app, if you care about that.
Prey is a free anti-theft app with many more features to persuade thieves to return your phone, like taking their photo, putting a display message on the phone, etc.
Juice Defender is a legit app that helps extend your battery life (only for android). Basically, it suspends data connection every time you turn of your phone because that’s the thing that drains your battery. The logic is that you don’t really need data connection when your phone is sleeping except for notifications. Therefore, it activates data connection for a little bit every 15 minutes by default in order for you to get all your notifications. You can change this time interval if you would like. In the notification bar, it actually tells you whether data connection is off or on, and the reason for it. It also displays the amount you’re saving. For example, if it says 1.50, then that means that your battery life is being multiplied by 1.50. If you’re a heavy user, you can expect it to be around there, however if you’re a light user, you could be saving up to 2.00 or 2.50.
AirDroid - turns your phone into a web server, so that pointing a browser at it gives you a web-based interface to transfer files (and do numerous other things) from any computer
Falcon - pretty nifty twitter client
Solid Explorer - one of numerous powerful file explorers. With root access can do even more fun (and dangerous) things
SwiftKey 3 - excellent replacement keyboard if you’re not a Swype person
Tasker - if you like automating things, this is your app. Horrible interface but amazingly powerful, can set virtually any condition as a trigger to perform virtually any action. So, just for example, if connected to your home wifi, turn off lock screen security. If connected to work wifi and placed face down, forward calls to your office phone, if face up do not. If a button on the home screen is pressed, turn screen brightness to minimum, lock orientation in portrait, and open specified e-reader app for reading in bed. Whatever you can think of
Torque - along with a bluetooth OBDII dongle (costs $30-$100) turns your phone into an automotive code reader or real-time instrumentation
Wifi Analyzer - shows graphs of current wifi signals by strength, channel, security