News on all the latest Mobile devices
Articles
Windows Phone 7.5 Mango
Nov 2nd
Make no mistake, Microsoft isn’t playing coy in the smartphone market any longer. The folks in Redmond are making a significant jump forward in the mobile arena, announcing that the upcoming version of Windows Phone, codenamed “Mango,” will be heading to a device near you in time for the holidays. As its competitors have raised the bar of expectations to a much higher level, Microsoft followed suit by adding at least 500 features to its mobile investment, which the company hopes will plug all of the gaping holes the first two versions left open.
We received a Samsung Focus preloaded with the most recent developer build (read: not even close to the market release version) and we had a few good days to put it through its paces. It’s still far from completion, as there were several key features that we couldn’t test out; some weren’t fully implemented, and others involved third-party apps that won’t be updated until closer to launch. Yet we don’t want to call this build half-baked — in fact, it was surprisingly smooth for software that still has at least four months to go before it’s available for public consumption. Read more…
New Nokia Windows Phones
Nov 2nd
The big “reveal” is now just around the corner. have already teased us and we’ll shortly be finding out whether rumours of the Nokia Sabre and Nokia Ace are true.
The Nokia 800 / Sea Ray is the handset we’ve heard most about. It’s at the higher end of the spectrum with an 8 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, 3.7″ AMOLED screen, 1.4GHz CPU, 16GB internal storage and 1540mAh battery.
The Nokia Sabre is said to have an interchangeable rear cover, 3.7″ LCD CBD (Clear Black Display) screen, 8GB internal storage, 5 megapixel camera and a 1.4GHz CPU.
Apple iPhone 4S to Launch in 15 More Countries on Nov. 11
Nov 1st
The iPhone 4S will be available in Hong Kong and 14 additional countries on November 11, Apple announced Tuesday.
Apple’s fifth-gen smartphone will go on sale in Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and South Korea next week.
While the iPhone 4S looks the same as the iPhone 4 from the outside, Apple has completely revamped the phone’s innards to include a dual-core A5 processor, a souped-up 8-megapixel camera, Siri voice controls, and iOS 5.
The iPhone 4S is currently available in 29 countries. Apple added 22 countries to the original seven last week. Next week’s addition will bring the total number of countries that have the iPhone 4S to 42. Apple said the iPhone 4S will launch in 70 countries by the end of the year.
However, Apple has not mentioned when the phone will launch in mainland China, the fastest-growing market for the iPhone.
The StorDigital HD Clone Station – can be used anytime and anywhere without intensive training
Oct 24th
New from StorDigital the HD Clone Station hard drive duplicator delivers fast and effective duplication and cleansing of multiple hard drives.
The HD Clone Station from StorDigital is a fast and economic way for system builders and IT technicians to quickly and easily migrate and propagate data across multiple HDD targets. The device will work with a mixture of drive types (eg PATA & SATA in the same pass) allowing you to Clone or Sanitise any combination of drives at the same time.
The StorDigital HD Clone Station is totally standalone and requires no host PC or software for operation.
Find out more information about the StorDigital Hard Drive Duplicator
71 Android Apps
Oct 13th
Free
Adobe Photoshop Expressmeans you can give much needed touch ups to those washed out smartphone snaps. Add soft focus, colour correct, crop, change to sepia or black and white and add one touch effects like vignettes. The photo browser also lets you organise your snaps, and upload them to the usual raft of social networking sites.
Free
Have you ever accidentally tried to View a PDF in Gmail, and witnessed Google Docs butcher it in front of your eyes? Yeah, Google doesn’t do PDFs very well. Luckily, Adobe does: this comfortably opens PDFs you’re sent, wrapping and rezizing text and letting you get your pinch to zoom on too. Grab it now, and be grateful when the times comes and you need to use it in a jam – like you’ve forgotten to print off an e-ticket, for instance.
Free
ADW.Launcher is another homescreen rejigger that really makes you wonder what the big phone makers were doing when they crafted their Android software skins. It’s fast, clean and completely customisable, letting you put what you see fit in your own dock. If you don’t like LauncherPro try this, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t put up with Motoblur on your Motorola Milestone or Defy.
£1.99
You may be surprised to find while plonking your iTunes collection on yoru Android phone’s SD card for the first time that album art doesn’t come with it. Apple doesn’t actually use the standard way to tag tracks with their respective graphics, but this one click solution fills the gap for you, and stashes images on the SD card too – plus if you object to a naked baby on your homescreen while listening to Nirvana, you can change the artwork to any other picture you have too.
Free
The Kindle Android app is great if you use Amazon’s ereader platform on other devices too, but we like a bit of competition, and Aldiko certainly gives, with its own book store. Plus, you can open your own eBook files you already own, as it’s down with most formats.
Free
The Amazon Kindle app for Android gives you access to over 500,000 ebooks through the Amazon ebook portal. If you’ve got a Kindle, you can also use WhisperSync to link up your accounts and devices so that you’ll never lose your page. Anything you buy can be read across devices, and reading is flexible, with customiseable text size, bookmarks and annotations.
Free
Buy music on your Android phone from Amazon’s massive music library. Think of this as the Android alternative to the iPhone’s iTunes music store. OK, so there aren’t any music videos, podcasts, audiobooks or any other frippery that Apple likes to chuck in amongst the digital tunes. On the other hand, Amazon MP3 is incredibly easy to use, densely packed with musical choice, and often cheaper than Apple’s music store too!
Free
It’s ChromeToPhone, but right back at ya. android2cloud simply lets you shove what you were reading on your phone straight to your desktop browser for when you get back in the door and want to carry on reading at a respectable font size.
Free
Ever wondered what you’d look like if you were magically morphed into the same size, shape and appearance as Google’s robotic mascot Andy? Well wonder no more, because Google has given you the tool with which to fulfil this rather worrying fantasy. Androidify is an impressively slick avatar creation program which allows you modify aspects such as skin tone, size, clothing and accessories to create an Android-style likeness of your good self. You can then share this via all the usual channels.
Free
So here’s the deal: an Android 2.2 and up phone allows you to install alot of apps to your SD card, rather than your phone’s limited internal storage – something even a high end phone like the Google Nexus Onehas very little of indeed. But if you’ve filled up your internal storage or are running a phone with Android 2.1 or lower, App 2 SD acts as a band aid. It won’t let you run apps from your SD card, but it will let you move them to it for when you don’t need them, and reinstall quickly when the time comes.
Free
AppAware Market mixes things up a bit when it comes to Android Market recommendation by crowdsourcing ratings. Not only can you see the top installed Android apps from AppAware users, you can see which ones have been uninstalled the most, see the top apps of those nearby you, and even those of your friends who’ve opted in too. Give it a go: it’s free and you never know what you might find.
Free
Google’s recent update to the Android Market still leaves it woefully behind the iPhone App Store – not least because after two and a half years there is still no desktop version to browse. Thanks guys. In the meantime, AppBrain App Market does a fantastic job of recommending good apps to you absed on previous downloads, and shows you hot picks and apps which have had a price drop too. One of the best Android apps to get started finding all the others, no matter what phone you own.
Free
A handy, simple way to get access to the file structure on your Android phone – you’ll want to do this from time to time when you can’t find the video you want to send, or a certain ROM for your emulators. it can even zip up files to send – this really makes your Android phone a portable PC.
Free
This really is an elegant solution for something Google really ought to get off its bum and fix itself. Install it, and now when you plug your Android phone in to your computer (PC or Mac), it automatically mounts as external USB storage, negating the need for the laborious process of unlocking your phone and confirming this every time you want to grab some pics or sideload something.
Free
Ever tried to use your own photo as a background for your Android phone? Bet it went horribly wrong, and got all stretched, didn’t it? That’s because Android uses an unusual resolution, to give that effect of the background moving ever so slightly when you swipe through homescreens. Backgrounds is a free app that lets you pick out plenty, and they all look just great. If you’re using an Android phone with an AMOLED screen (rather than LCD), try an all black image, and see if it gives you a battery life boost. That one’s on us.
Free
We could complain about the Android Market until Google releases the next big OS update and then some, but we must admit, we like the ability to pull up a link from a QR code (Those blotch black and white squares) since it saves the hassle of hammering out a URL. Grab Barcode Scanner, point your Android phone’s camera at one and watch as it pulls up the link. As the name suggests, it’s also rather good at checking out regular barcodes for price comparison too, which is nice.
Free
We imagine there’s a cynical reason most smartphones don’t show remaining battery on the homescreen as a percentage rather than a vague symbol, but the benevolent folks behind Battery Indicator are here to help. Install, and it’ll give you a precise percentage of juice left in the notification bar, in an icon no bigger than the default icon. If you have an Android phone with a pathetic battery, like the HTC Desire HD, you need to try this out, pronto.
£1.28
We stick with the more utilitarian Widgetsoid on our own Google Nexus S, but if you’re the sort of person who lusts after HTC’s suite of Android widgets but have a different brand of phone, this is the best Android app for you. It’s stuffed full of hundreds of lavish looking homescreen applets, with lots of animations to choose from, and customisable power control bars too.
Free
If you use the PayPal Android app, you might have used Bump’s tech before. Bump is super nifty tech that means you can share stuff with other people just by bumping your phones together, in a sort of smartphone data smooch. It works between operating systems too, so you can have an unlikely romance between an Android and an iPhone, iPad, or even an iPod touch.
Free
A scanner! In your phone! We’re big advocates of paperless offices but for the times you do need to scan a document in, the CamScanner Android app works eerily well, even with the awful sensors Motorola still sticks on most of its phones these days. Simply take a shot, select the corners of the page in the image, and watch as it twiddles with the contrast and whatnot to give you a smooth, flat, white sheet of paper with your text on.
£22.98
Google Maps Navigation is truly one of the most groundbreaking developments in software of the last decade – it’s now built in on Android, which is why we haven’t included it here. But even it has its flaws: it only caches some mapping, so you need a 3G connection, which is a no go in parts of the countryside, and abroad if you don’t want a huge bill. CoPilot Live however is full PND software for your phone at a knockdown price, with locallystored maps. Ace.
Free
Dolphin Browser HD is superior to the stock (and already recent) Android browser app in every way. It’s faster, still supports Flash 10.1 on Android 2.2 and up, and offers gestures, letting you jump straight back up to the top of a page in an instant for instance – an obvious UI feature Google has failed to figure out as of yet. Google devs, this is one of the best Android apps you could learn from.
£3.13
We love the free desktop version of doubleTwist as a simple way to sync music and media to any phone that isn’t an iPhone, with an eerily similar iTunes-interface and absolutely none of the Ping. This complementary Android app adds the awesome extra feature of wireless sync. While it’s a pricier solution than WinAmp, we really like the sparse, get-the-job-done approach of the desktop software it works with.
Free
Stashing files in the cloud is the smart way to centralise your digital documents, but in practice it can sometimes be quite fiddly. Enter, Dropbox. This neat cloud storage app hooks you up with gigs and gigs of free storage (and you can earn more by referring friends). Pay a bit of money and you can get oodles of space. Dropbox lets you tap into your files anywhere, and even better, plenty of other apps sync with Dropbox to automatically save things like photos and audio
Free
Evernoteis the don of mobile note taking. The Android app lets you type notes and make an audio note at the same time, then attach a file, take a photo, then file it away neatly with some appropriate tags and pinning it into one of your digital notebooks. As soon as you hit save, that note will sync with any other version of Evernote you use, be it on a tablet, PC or Mac.
Free
Facebook needs no introduction. While it’s usually later to get features than the iOS Facebook app, Zuckerberg and pals are pushing to get Android up to speed, with Places and improved Groups added just before Christmas. Like all Facebook apps, it’s free. Fingers crossed it’ll be getting Deals soon too!
Free
Federico Carnales – a talented fellow we know well from his work on the excellent LauncherPro – has been busy with a side project that might interest those of you that like the look of Windows Phone 7′s Metro UI. FedeMusic is basically an Android-based replication of Windows Phone’s Zune music player, right down to the silky-smooth animation and transition effects. You can even search your music using the Zune Player’s cool grid-based tool. At the moment it’s only available in .APK form, so you’ll need to download it from Carnales’ site and side-load it using a file manager like Linda. We’re sure more features will be added in the future, but at the moment it should sate your desire to rush out and replace your Desire HD with a HD7, and it’s actually a lot nippier than the default Android music player to boot.
Free
Use your GPS-enabled Android phone to check-in to places and earn badges and (possibly) discounts at selected stores, bars and restaurants. Special check-in combinations earn special badges. Do a tour of four Apple stores in a day, for instance, and you’ll unlock a special Mac-lover badge. Checking in absurdly often? You’ll get the over-shareing badge. It’s a bit like being a digital cub scout, earning badges for roaming around, rather than tying fiddly knots. Fun, too.
Free
Unless you’re rocking a Motorola Milestone XT720 or Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, the chances are your Android phone’s camera is a bit awful. In which case, we suggest you spruce up your pictures by overlaying them wtih retro templates to mask this fact, while giving them a Polaroid 70s feel in the process. For now, this is the closest you’ll get to Instagram on Android, and it’s well worth a look if you’re disatisfied with the quality of your smartphone’s piccies.
Free
Reading something in your browser at home, then need to head out? If you’re signed into your Google account on Chrome (or Firefox with a plug-in) you can sling them to your Android 2.2 or up phone, and carry on reading on the bus, courtesy of the free Google Chrome To Phone.
Free
Google Earth serves little purpose in everyday use, other than to look absolutely amazing. Which it does. You could spend hours just zooming in and out of the world, marvelling at its beauty, and Google’s phenomenal ability to capture it all. And we have – and we advise you to do the same.
Free
A glimpse into the future, this first party Android app shows where image search is headed. Take a photo and Google Goggles will do its darndest to work out what exactly is in the shot, and bring you details about it. Snap a painting in a gallery for instance, and you can find out who it’s by and more – the same goes for landmarks. It’ll also translate some languages for you on the fly, though if you’re using it on your jollies, watch out for pesky roaming charges.
Free
Google’s own podcast trapper-keeper Google Listen is still in beta, but works a treat for sucking down the latest episodes of your favourite audio shows, and cleverly uses Google Reader for managing on the desktop. It’s one for casual podcast listeners rather than audiobook obsessives, but it gets the job done with litle fuss for free.
Free
Google took a strangely long time to come out with a native Android app for its popular RSS reader, but now that it’s here we don’t know how we coped without it. The Google Reader Android app is just like the web version optimized for a small screen, with handy options to view video embeds and even navigate through posts up and down with the volume keys. It’s text heavy, sure, but that’s quite alright with us when it works flawlessly.
Free
One of the best educashional Android apps: this chin stroking official Google app shows you the night sky, and all the constellations and clusters that supposedly look like an animal but clearly don’t. Or at least it shows you what you would see where it not for urban smog getting in the way. Anyway, the Google Sky Map Android app lets you look like Patrick Moore, and that’s good enough for us.
Free
Google Translate‘s handy on a desktop, but inifnitely more so on your phone, when you’re likely to be out and about asking people Polly voo English? It translates on the fly, offering up voice input and even a scary new mode where you can chat over IM in English and Spanish, while the Google Translate iPhone app does all the translation.
Free
Handcent SMS replaces the stock messaging Android app on your phone with a new look program bursting with added features. You can completely customise layout and notifications for different friends, group text people easily and change the layout as you see fit. There’s a ton of themes to download, and plenty of plug-ins on the Android Market too which give you new fonts, emoticons and more.
Free
We really hate voicemail – not so much because the messages people leave us are never good ones, but just because ringing up the network, then pressing all the buttons to listen to it, then having to hear them all again if you missed a bit of it, then trying to delete it, is. A. Nightmare. HulloMail is a simple Visual Voicemail Android app that’s a cinch to set up, and simply gives you voicemails like they were MP3 audio files you can stop and scrub as you like.
Free
Google’s always coming up with new ways to save power but there’s no denying that Android can slurp through your battery’s juice all too quickly. JuiceDefender is a nice solution, turning off various settings at thresholds you specify to make sure you don’t run out for an emergency, and is much more comprehensive on rooted phones, which can toggle many more. We’re recommending this over any task killers (Note their absence from our Best Android apps 100 list) as a power saving solution, as particularly on Android 2.2 and up, task killers are just a placebo, and if anything, can waste power.
Free
Android 2.3 comes with an amazing new touchscreen keyboard, which is almost as responsive as the iPhone’s legendary QWERTY – and adds some killer UI features on top too. For those lumbered with a Google Nexus One or older Android phone with a bobbins custom manufacturer keyboard (LG and Acer, we’re looking at you), this open source interpretation of it is free and works like a charm.
Free
We’re big fans of WhatsApp for smartphone instant messaging, but the other program gaining traction is Kik Messenger, which works like a charm, using a more SMS style layout for your chats with friends. Really, it’s just a question of trying both out to see which more of your friends use – don’t expect any BlackBerry mates on this one though, as the developer is in the midst of a legal brawl with RIM.
Free
The Last.fm Android app has been around for years now, and while it’s been eclipsed by the likes of Spotify’s mobile offerings, it still offers a lot of choice for very little. It’s also still a great way to discover new music, letting you create your own personal radio station, where music discovery is one of Spotify’s few failings.
Free
Unless you own a HTC Sense Android phone, use a custom ROM or a Nexus handset, please don’t take offense when we say your Android launcher is awful – with special laginess prizes going out to Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Luckily, you can speed things up and customise your homescreen to your heart’s content by installing LauncherPro instead, which gives you a nice plain dock to tool with, and no laggy social feeds hubs cemented on. Seriously, give it a go and see how much more enjoyable it makes Android.
Meridian Media Player Autonomy
Free
Not everyone likes to keep enormous, lossless FLAC versions of their songs on their Android phone’s SD cards, but audio purists will appreciate the extra format support this smart music player offers over the bult in Android sound slinger. Meridian also lets you edit the ID3 tags of all your songs on the fly, which is handy if your CD ripping software of choice hasn’t done it already. Or you’re, er, sourcing music from, how shall we say, “elsewhere”.
Free
What did we do before PayPal? With the Paypal Android app you can check payments, transfers, balance, and even go Dutch. Every payment is confirmed with a pin or password too, so it’s secure. The best bit of the PayPal app though is the Bump tech that’s inside – knock two Android phones together and exchange details for quick and easy payments.
PdaNet
Free
If you’ve got a phone running Android 2.2 or up, the chances are you have a mobile WiFi hotspot app built right in. For everyone else who wishes to apply their Android phone’s 3G connection to their laptop, there’s PDAnet. It’s free, it works with PC and Macs, and the only catch is it’s through USB tethering or Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi. Go get
Free
Android doesn’t have too many visual, magazine style RSS reader apps at the moment, in the same way iOS boasts – though that may change with the advent of Android 3.0 Honeycombfor tablets. In the meantime, Pulse News Reader is the best of the bunch, presenting news feeds and blogs in a gorgeous layout – plus there’s offline caching for when you’re on the train with poor or no signal, and Facebook news feed integration. If you’ve never used RSS before and have an Android phone, we urge you to try this one out.
62p
Ever found yourself reading a particularly interesting website and then realising you’re late for work, and have no option but to make a mad dash for the door, leaving the aforementioned article unfinished? Or perhaps you’ve been stuck at work and spotted something that you’d love to read at a later date, but have no way of reminding yourself? Sounds like you need Read It Later, the Android edition of the web bookmarking tool that has already proven to be a massive success on the iPhone. The premise is simple – once you’ve established a Read It Later account, you can tag pages on both your phone and your web browser. Unread pages appear on both devices, so you can finish reading either on the way to work or when you return home. The best thing is that Read It Later even remembers how far you’ve gotten in a particular page, and allows you to pick up from exactly where you left off. Genius.
Free
While mobile VNC is easy on modern smartphones, this flips things on its head by giving you access to your Android phone from your computer instead: check out the contents of its storage, get notifications on your computer screen and even send SMS messages with your keyboard. Great for office workers.
Free
Android isn’t known for its video format support, and if this is a dealbreaker for you, we suggest you go with a Samsung Galaxy S phone – Samsung’s gone above and beyond to offer native support for usually unplayable AVI and MKV files. For the rest of us, RockPlayer does a great job of opening any clip in any format in a pinch – perfect for watching TV shows on the go.
Free
Skype for Android gives you access to a full contacts list (and syncs with your Google contacts on your phone), lets you make in-app calls on the cheap (or for free if you call another Skyper) and has instant message support that can work one to one or with a group. Hook up to Wi-Fi if you’re going to Skype from abroad to avoid pesky roaming charges though!
Free
Like LauncherPro, this gets rids of the random garbage launcher your Android phone manufacturer has likely enforced upon you. Instead of paring it down however, this Android app transforms your homescreen into a beautiful, visual guide to all your notifications, with the latest from calls, text messages, email, Twitter and even RSS. Take that in your static homescreen face, iPhone.
Free
Google’s calendar widget will take a huge chunk of screen real estate, without ever showing more than one day’s events ahead. Smooth Calendar on the other hand, is a nice thin bar with a clean visual indication of the day, and detailed descriptions of your next three upcoming events. This has pride of place on our Google Nexus S‘ homescreen.
Free
Historians are going to look back at this time and curse us: SMS messages really are the most transient form of communciation humans have ever invented. Other than speech. Anyway, the point is, SMS Backup + lets you preserve your 153 character gems for posterity by backing them up to a label on your Gmail account. It keeps them as conversations, just as your Android phone does, which is handy too.
Free
There’s a surfeit of fitness-related applications available on the Android Market right now but the recently-released Sports Tracker is by far the most polished. It does everything you could possibly want from this kind of application – you can track your runs and cycle routes, analyse your performance and share your activities with other like-minded fitness freaks. It’s backed up by a robust social networking framework that allows you to share your regimen with friends, and that encourages a spot of good-natured rivalry that can push your exercise aspirations to new levels.
Free
As many tunes as you can stuff into your ears, with offline caching that’ll stop you blitzing that 3G data allowance too. Spotify‘s music streaming app is very nearly perfect, and a must-own for music-loving Android owners. The only downside is you’ll need to fork out cash for a monthly Spotify subscription – £9.99 in the UK. It’s worth every penny though. Note that the link above will take you through to Spotify’s mobile site for download, as AppBrain doesn’t currently list the European only app.
£1.25
SwiftKey is another keyboard Android app that gets better as you use it. It tries to predict the next word you’ll use based on sentence structure, rather than just the current word you’re typing, and it learns your lingo over time, making it eerily efficient. If you’re on an Android 2.1 or lower phone, we strongly advise you to check this out – and it looks a lot like HTC’s Android keyboard, which is a tres good thing.
Free
Swype is one of a new wave of unconventional touchscreen keyboards available on Android. Instead of poking one key at a time, you swipe (Get it?) across the screen for the word you want – it’s eerily accurate and if you give it time to learn your new words, get’s very fast. It’s worth trying on any Android phone, but if you’ve got one with an unresponsive resistive touchscreen it’s absolutely essential. You can download it simply by clicking through to the company’s site and registering.
Free
You probably won’t need this if you’re sporting a HTC Sense or Sony Ericsson Android phone, but for the rest of us, Google’s attempts at linking Facebook profiles to those in your phonebook often falls short, with no way to manually join them. SyncMyPix makes a much more intelligent attempt at populating your contacts with Facebook profile pics, so you can see who’s calling you at a glance.
£3.99
Tasker lets you create incredible, complex profiles based on everything from your location to whether the Wi-Fi is on, or your headphones are plugged in. Then they lie dormant in the background, triggering actions at your convenience: we’ve got our Google Nexus set to turn off the PIN lock when we get home and give us a list of media playing apps to launch when we plug in our cans. It’s utterly brilliant, and well worth the time to customise. In fact, it’s so good, we named it in our Best Android apps of 2010.
Free
Instant access to the world of internet radio. Listen to rumba stations from Cuba, or country from the deep south. Over 40,000 channels, with browsing by type and genre, plus presets to save your favourites. This version is free, with banner ads, but if you fancy an ad-free version get your hands on RadioTime.
Free
TV Show Favs is for the sort of person who follows American TV schedules rather than waiting months for the BBC to pick up a hot new show: You just enter the shows you watch, and then it’ll remind you when the next new show airs, as well as let you keep tab of the episodes you’ve already seen. Perfect for boxset addicts.
Free
TweetDeck for Android might just be a better option than the official Twitter app for Android, depending on what you want to do. TweetDeck lets you pull in more than one account, plus Foursquare, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds, as well as the usual replies, mentions and retweet functions, and it looks a whole lot nicer than the desktop client.
Free
We know what you’re thinking – do I really need another accursed Twitter client when I already have the excellent official app and the mighty TweetDeck? The answer to that question ultimately depends on how much control you want over your Twitterverse. Twicca – which has been in beta for what seems like years and has recently been updated for Gingerbread – is without a shadow of a doubt the most comprehensive Twitter app on Android, offering near-limitless customisation. However, for all its depth and complexity, our favourite feature is the ability to colour-code tweets, so you can group people into various categories.
Free
The Twitter Android app does everything you need to keep up to date with all your tweeps on the go. Tweet, reply, retweet, share and favourite tweets, and will also let you keep on top of your lists, alter your profile. Be aware though, to use the Twitter for Android app, you’ll need to be running Android 2.1 or higher. An older version than this means you’re stuck with the mobile app.
Free
Increasingly, Android phone peddlers are including some form of media streaming app built in – Samsung, Motorola, HTC and Acer all offer this feature on their new Google phones. Have something different and want to join in the fun and stream music and video from your phone to DLNA friendly devices in your house? Grab Twonky Mobile, which is currently free. It’ll let you create your own DLNA or UPnP server, so you can stream TV shows from your phone to your PS3 plugged into your telly, for instance.
Free
You know how all your friends still lugging BlackBerrys around love their BlackBerry Messenger? Get them to install this cross platform alternative instead: you can holler at friends on Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and Symbian phones, using micro amounts of data instead of wasting valuable texts for long conversations. It’s instant messaging, but tied to your mobile number so as soon as you install it you’ll see which of your friends use it and are available to pester.
Free
Widgetsoid lets you conjure up widgets of just about any shape for your homescreen, then stuff them full of toggles for all sorts of power controls, settings and media toggles. Want a bar that lets you toggle 2G and 3G, remove the PIN lock and toggle screen brightness? Want it vertical? Whatever, you choose.
Free
WinAmp for Android is a great music player made even better by the addition of wireless desktop syncing and iTunes library importing. Just leave your phone lying around in the radius of your home network, and presto, all the latest songs you ripped on your computer will be there. Magic.
Free
Ever find yourself wishing you could connect to your PC or Mac and peruse all its contents (and see its desktop) on your Android phone? Wyse Pocketcloud is your go to Android app then. This RDP/VNC freebie works like a charm, and for all your Android 2.2 and up folks, can be installed on your Android phone’s SD card to save space. The free version is only limited to one computer and without 128-bit crazy encryption – but that might be enough for most!
AT&T unleashes Real Time IM Relay for the hearing impaired
Sep 29th
As our hearing impaired readers are no doubt aware, AT&T has been offering its Instant Messaging Relay service since early this year, allowing folks to use AIM to communicate ……
Garmin-Asus nuvifone G60 finally ready for AT&T: $300 on October 4?
Sep 29th
Let’s just be brutally honest here: Garmin-Asus’ nuvifone G60 is basically the Duke Nukem of phones. We’ve been following it since before Garmin and ASUS formed……
LG gets mysterious AWS LTE device through FCC
Sep 29th
If this strange, rather unhelpful FCC label diagram looks vaguely familiar, that’d be because it’s in the same product family as another LTE-compatible device submitte……
Samsung B5310 CorbyPRO and B3210 CorbyTXT now official
Sep 25th
Today at an event, held in Milan, Samsung announced two new members of the Corby family Samsung B5310 CorbyP……
Palm Treo Pro relaxes out of the spotlight, sheds $150
Jun 23rd
At $549, you might say that the Treo Pro is a tough pill to swallow in the face of ever-sexier competition from other WinMo devices and Palm’s own Pre — but at $399 ful……
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