Android phones are popping up all over the place now, with older models being overtaken by shiny new lust objects like the Motorola Milestone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and the HTC Tattoo. There may not be quite as many apps around for Android as, say, the iPhone but Android Marketplace is catching up fast – here’s our pick of the best Android apps around right now…
Photos and Video
Photo Effects
Not quite Photoshop in your pocket, but a great little toolbox of effects and filters to tweak your pics right on your phone.
Picsay
If Photo Effects is a bit too complex for your needs, PicSay provides a much simpler palette of effects such as resize, colour adjusting and rtation. You can also add fun captions and speech bubbles for MMS postcards.
Snap Photo Pro
Snap Photo Pro is an improved camera app that could help you to get better results from your phone’s camera. Among various filters the app offers image stabilisation using the phone’s accelerometer to detect and correct wobbly hands.
Flixster
If you tire of watching movies on your phone you might prefer to visit the cinema. Flixster will show you what’s on locally and provide show times and potted reviews, as well as show trailers.
Droid Comic Viewer
Robot Comics publish comic books in digital formats and their homebrewed app is a great way to read them on your phone.
Location-based and Travel
Carr Matey
A parking app with a ‘mild pirate theme’. We have no idea who thought representing your car’s location with a pirate ship was a good idea, but the app itself is really useful if you need help remembering where you parked your, er, galleon.
Google Maps
Android is proving to be the test bed for some great new features from the Google Maps team. The version shipping with Android 2.0 now features turn-by-turn mapping to rival your in-car satnav, with more to come.
Locale
Don’t waste time turning your phone to silent when you go to the library, or ditching that embarrassing ringtone when you get to work – Locale will change your phone’s settings by detecting your location.
Foursquare
Foursquare is a strange mashup of location-based information service, social network and augmented reality game. If you live in one of the supported cities you can earn points by ‘exploring’ and finding cool stuff to tell your friends about. Earn enough points and you become ‘mayor’ and qualify for some real-world benefits like 2-for-1 deals and free drinks.
Qype Radar
Find reviews and ratings for places to eat, drink and shop via the Qype community. The app uses GPS to find shops and restaurants in your area, then lets you search through user submitted reviews or add your own.
Wikitude
Use your Android phone’s camera as a lens on the world with this augmented reality app. Point your phone at landmarks and Wikitude will display facts and figures, let you plot routes and plan your wanderings.
Shop Savvy
Find the best prices for stuff either online or in your area just by scanning in their barcodes and letting Shop Savvy have a poke around for you. The app will even alert you when a price drops so you can grab a bargain.
Sherpa
A more serendipitous way to find places to go. Sherpa tries to learn your preferences then uses GPS plus its database of locations to show you things you might be interested in, and how to get to them.
gWalk
gWalk encourages the urban flaneur to wander around and take in the sites as it plots you a walking route to your destination. YOu can customise how direct a route you take and check out points of interest on the way.
Social networking and the web
Twidroid
The very acme of an Android Twitter client. Twidroid has a great interface, support for URL shorteners and image hosting and colourful themes. The Pro version has a few extra features such as access to your follower lists.
Facebook
The Android Facebook app isn’t quite as full featured as some of its rivals, but it IS blazingly fast – and thanks to the Android back-end can run in the background, giving you instant alerts for events and messages.
Delicious Bookmarks
Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) lets you share you saved inks withother users and search trhoughtheir tagged and indexed links in return. This app will let you save bookmarks to your Delicious account as well as your phone, so you can find sites on your handset, then check them out later.
Flyscreen
Anyone using a handset running Motorola’s MotoBlur shell will have some of these features already, but for everyone else Flyscreen is a way of using your phone’s lock screen to display widgets full of tasty info. You can get news updates and feeds of messages from social sites like Facebook and Twiter that will update and be usable even when your phone is locked.
Music and Entertainment
Shazam
A phone could barely be considered Smart if it can’t handle Shazam – an app for identifying music from audio alone. Play the app a bit of a track and it will identify its unique ‘fingerprint’, tell you who it is by and what it is called and even help you buy it.
Pandora
Free personalised music station Pandora has extend its reach to Android handsets so you can listen to streaming music on the go. You just give Pandora the name of an artist or a song and it will play similar music that ought to fit in with your mood.
Spotify
The current favourite music streaming is now available on Android phones, as long as you have a premium account (£9.99 a month at the moment). Stream music from Spotify’s huge library and cache tracks for offline play.
TubThumper
Phil Collins recently announced that he was quitting drumming due to a back injury. With an Android phone running TubThumper he could probably keep at it for a few more years, just using his fingers to tap out rhythms on the rather splendid virtual drumkit.
Aldiko ebook reader
Aldiko is a great loooking ebook app, resenting itself as a wooden-shelved library displaying the cover images of your ebook collection. Books can be downloaded directly from the Aldiko site or imported using the free epub format.
DoggCatcher
Nothing to do with Mr Snoop, DoggCatcher is a simple but effective podcast downloader for Android phones. Just give it a list of RSS feeds and it will download your favourite podcasts as soon as they come out, ensuring you always have something to listen to.
TuneWiki
Another alternative media player, this one can handle all your stored music but will also let you access community-generated information about the current track. Lyrics, wikipedia entries and more plus the chance to share your playlists with other users.
Ringdroid
Ringdroid is a simple, easy to use tool for chopping up music and other audio files and turning them into ringtones. The app is pretty basic right now, but under active development to add features like reverb and fade in/out.
beebPlayer
For some reason, the BBC hadn’t bothered officially supporting Android phones with its iPlayer service, which is a shame as it is a great way to catch up with TV and radio you may have missed. beebPlayer comes to the rescue with a native Android app for using iPlayer that manages to ape the iPlayer branding quite effectively.
Utilities
Remember The Milk
The leading online to-do list now has an Android app that is as full featured as the website. Create and share lists, associate to-do tasks with locations and organise your life, one bullet-point at a time.
SpeedTest.net
The speedtest.net website is a simple way of testing your ISP claims about the speed of your broadband. Now Speedtest has released an Android app to help you do the same for your phone’s internet connection. Just fire it up and it will send and receive test data, displaying the results of a colourful speedometer graphic.
Gmote
Run the Gmote server on your PC and the Gmote app will turn your phone into a remote control for running movies and music, controlling presentations and more. The media player remote will even display cover images along with the controls.
Phonebook
An improvement on the basic contacts app, Phonebook links each of your contacts to contextual information and operations. Select a contact and instantly see emails and SMS that you have exchanged, create messages and even get reminders of people’s birthdays.
Better Keyboard
If your Android doesn’t come with a hardware keyboard, or if you are finding the built in keyboard a bit of a challenge, the self-explanatory Better Keyboard offers multiple layouts, predictive text and a huge range of skins to customise the look and feel.
Qikipedia
You can browse Wikipedia easily enough from the web browser, but Qikipedia offers a much slicker experience. Search the entirety of Wikipedia with just a few taps and even get facts about stuff near you using the ‘Nearby’ search and your phone’s GPS.
Power Manager Full
Tweak you phone’s power consumption to squeeze out every last volt of ‘leccy. You can turn off a wide range of functions (e.g. backlight, GOS, Bluetooth) to save more juice and can create custom profiles to fit specific circumstances.
Astro File Manager
A full featured file browser for Android devices, this will let you view inside ZIP archives, browse the contents of your SD cards and check out installed apps.
Bubble
A simple, but elegant spirit level that uses your phone’s sensitive accelerometer to measure inclines and flash, beep or vibrate when you hit the sweet spot.
Toddler Lock
Absolute genius, this one. Toddler Lock turns your phone’s lock screen into a colourful baby toy that generates shapes and sound effects when touched.
App Manager
One of the limitations of Android is having to cram your apps into the (often limited) internal memory. App Manager will help you move little used apps onto SD card, install and uninstall new apps and take backup copies of apps for safekeeping.
Moov
Google phones should be all about search, right? Well, Moov certainly agrees and offers an easy way to get at almost anything on your phone – just start typing right on the home screen (you’ll need a phone with a hardware keypad for this) and it will search as you type.
Business
Documents to Go (£29.99 for full version)
Carry full Word, Excel, Powerpoint or PDF documents around on your phone with this professional app. The free version is just a viewer, but the Pro upgrade will allow editing on your phone.
Action Complete
Getting Things Done is a methodology for organising your time that has gained a lot of traction in the more organised corners of Web 2.0. Action Complete is a task manager geared towards helping you stick to the GTD regime, tracking to-dos and goals in a loose but structured way.
Financisto
Balance the books with this personal financial manager app. Track your in and outgoings, monitor multiple accounts and produce detailed reports to pore over at your leisure.
3Banana Notes
Create multimedia notes on your handset and automatically sync them to your 3Banana web account. Notes can be easily shared via social networking sites and you can add tags to help categorise your jottings and make sense of them later.
HTTPMon
If you need to look after a web server this is an invaluable app. Monitor the server ‘live’ by checking key indicators and alerting you if anything looks wrong. Notifications can come via the app or through SMS, which is handy.
ConnectBot
Another one for the ‘web professional’ or just the geelk at large – ConnectBot is a SSH client for Android phones. SSH is a secure text terminal used to control UNIX system (if you have a Mac it is built in to your OS too). Not universally appealing, but if you need it (and a lot of webmasters do) this is a great implementation.
MobileDefense
Protect your phone from thieves – or at least annoy the thieves if they do nick it. Mobile defense will track your handset and sound an audible alert when activated remotely. Track your handset on a map and tell the police where to look, or just figure out where you left the damn thing.
Communications
MeeBo
MeeBo is the web-based chat app that can act as a lingua franca between rival IM networks like Google Talk and MSN. Sign in to you MeeBo account from your phone and chat to pretty much anyone using the same interface.
ChompSMS
ChompSMS adds a threaded, ‘speech bubble’ display to your SMS messages, but also lets you send texts via its own network (you can buy credits for this). They offer a flat rate and if you are in the habit of texting overseas this could be a bargain.
ToggleWifi
Stupidly simple, but really convenient if you are sick of traverse the settings menus. ToggleWifi will turn your wifi connection on and off with a single tap.
Special Mention
Google Voice
Google Voice hasn’t fully launched yet, and isn’t available outside the US in any case, but we reckon it ought to find a natural home on future Android phones. A cross between VoIP, Voicemail and a virtual PA, Voice can transcribe voice messages as text, screen unwanted callers and make low-cost international calls.