Google Drive for Android Review

Google Docs App for Android is now Google Drive, rebranding the existing app into a cloud storage service. In addition to accessing your Google documents and syncing them up with the cloud, the new app allows you to upload and share files of any type using your Google Drive.

The user interface is similar to the Web experience for Google Docs and has all the functionality of the Google Docs Android app.  The app opens to a dashboard with the options Drive, Recent, Shared with Me and Offline.  Tapping on Drive opens up a list of all the files on your Google Drive. Using the icon at the top of the screen, you can create a file or upload any type of file to your Google Drive. You can create and edit only documents and spreadsheets using the app. The file editing tools are basic, just like on Google Apps. Presentations and images can only be viewed but not edited within the app.  All the files you upload or edit from your app are automatically synced with the cloud, so that you can access them from a device or computer anywhere. Against each file on your drive is an icon with the options to Rename, Share, Email or Offline. The Share and Email options allow you to share any file on your drive with collaborators or send the file by email. Offline makes the files available offline, so that you can access them on your phone even when you don’t have an internet connection.  

Google Drive offers 5 GB of space free to store your data on the cloud. Additional storage up to 16TB is available on a tiered pricing plan. The first few tiers are 25GB for $2.49 per month, 100GB for $4.99 per month and 1TB for $49.99 per month.

As of now, the app has only limited functionality to organize your files into collections – it does not allow you to create new collections or move files between collections. You cannot provide a download link to your file either, as you can with other cloud storage service providers. Privacy concerns have been a major controversy since Google Drive launched, as the Terms of Use, though explicitly stating that you own your content on Google Drive, also assert Google’s license to use the content in various ways. This is different from several other cloud providers like Dropbox and Microsoft, who state that the only “use” that will be made of user content is to host it on their servers.

James May Science Stories: Augmented Reality app for your Android phone

The latest experiment into bringing Augmented Reality to our Android phones is by the London Science Museum, in partnership with app developer DigiCove. The app, called “James May ScienceStories” released in April 2012. It brings James May, the inimitable presenter of Top Gear and Man Lab into life as a 3D animation at the London Science Museum.

As you walk through the museum, nine of the exhibits have a “triggering marker”, a poster pasted on an information plinth. Open your app and select the exhibit you are viewing from the list. Focus your camera on the marker. James May appears as a 3D object on the camera’s display. Walking up and down the information plinth, he describes the exhibit and how it has an important place in the history of the world. There are subtitles and the commentary can be paused or resumed using the controls within the app. If you lose the lock on the marker during a presentation, it will stop and you will have to restart again from the beginning. The app has a map to help you find the exhibit in the museum and a quiz to gauge how well you have grasped the information. The app has an option for Facebook sharing too. 

Currently, ten exhibits in the Making of the Modern World Gallery including the Cray 1A computer, Rolls Royce Merlin engine, Model T Ford and the X-Ray machine have the augmented reality commentary. Updates to the app to cover more exhibits are in the pipeline and five more have already been recorded.

The app has an “at home” mode too, so that you don’t have to be at the Museum to use it. To use the app in this mode, print out the triggering marker and place it somewhere. Then choose the exhibit from the list and focus the camera on the marker to trigger the James May hologram.

The app has been developed using Qualcomm's Vuforia augmented reality software development kit. Augmented Reality technology in itself has made great advances and can recognize objects from the camera without the need for a triggering marker. However, this would require a high resolution camera. The use of a triggering marker in the app makes it compatible with lower-end Android devices too. The 3D hologram of James May was created by taking photos of James May from different angles and positioning them over an animated wireframe.

Though this augmented reality app has a long way to go in terms of usability, it is still a very interesting step towards practical applications of this technology.

Top 3 Android Apps for Students

Your trusty Android phone turns into the ultimate study tool with these Android Apps for students. Here are three of the most popular Android Apps to help your organize your student life, take notes and study better.

Class Buddy Pro is the number one student planner in terms of popularity. It helps you track of your course schedule and grades and has lots of extra features to make your life easy and organized. The interface is clear and intuitive. The main features are keeping track of course schedules and events like exams, assignments and class activities with timely reminders. It also keeps track of your scores and even allows you to set weights for your scores so that you have a ready reference of your course totals and your GPA. Class Buddy has a customizable home screen, task manager, support for syncing with Google Calendar and even an Expense Manager. The free version, Class Buddy Lite, has only the basic features like class schedules, attendance management and GPA calculation, but no assignment, exam or task management.

Flashcards are one of the best ways to learn and with android flashcard apps, you don’t have to make or lug around your own flashcards. AnyMemo Free has millions of flashcard decks in its database from anymemo.org, flashcardexchange, quizlet and studystack, covering almost every subject under the sun. What’s even better is that the application is free and open source. The interface is simple and no-frills and allows you to create, edit and view cards easily. The user can grade his performance on each card and AnyMemo will use an adaptive scheduling algorithm to schedule a review in future. You can also import databases into the application in a variety of formats. There are many Android flashcard apps with cooler, flashier interfaces, but AnyMemo stacks up with its rich database and ease of use.

The Evernote Android app is part of the Evernote suite of products that helps you take notes and manage them across devices. Save text notes, to-do lists, web pages, images, songs, scanned receipts and cards on the go with your android device and access them from any other computer or device anywhere. Evernote even employs OCR techniques to allow you to search images saved as notes! Other features are organizing notes as notebooks or tags and sharing notes with friends through Facebook, Twitter or email. The free version is quite comprehensive in itself while the premium version has a few additional features like allowing others to edit your cards or putting a lock on your app.

Useful apps for your Android phone

Now that you’ve invested a lot of money on your Android phone, you would definitely want to take good care of it so that it lasts longer, without any issues. Here are some useful apps that will make a big difference to your Android phone’s lifetime, performance and safety.

Many of the useful features on our phone are quite battery draining, like Wi-Fi or GPS.  JuiceDefender is a free app that runs in the background, managing your Mobile Data, Wi-Fi and CPU speed so that your battery life is extended and you still get to use all the smart features of your phone. It offers features like enabling connectivity for specific apps, location sensitive toggling of Wi-Fi, brightness control etc so that you can customize the power consumption according to your needs. This app also has a complete activity log, a customizable user interface and home screen battery widgets.

If you feel your Android phone is becoming sluggish, you can manage your phone performance with the free, ad-supported Auto Memory Manager app. The app categorizes your apps into six groups based on their function and sets memory thresholds for each group. When the Android RAM falls below the threshold level, the corresponding apps are killed.  You can leave the Auto Memory Manager on default configuration, or customize the threshold levels. The app also displays running processes and memory consumed with details like priority level, associated software and threshold level so that you can monitor the memory consumption of various processes.

History Eraser is the “one-touch cleaner” for your Android phone. Browser history, call log, cache files from all apps, message logs, clipboard data and more are cleaned with one click to clear up memory and for better privacy. It has customization options to set up auto clear and notifications. It also integrates a display of your phone ROM memory status.

Lookout Security &Antivirus is the popular award-winning security & anti-virus app for you phone. Security features include blocking malware, spyware and trojans and scanning all the apps and files you download.  You can schedule daily or weekly anti-virus scans with automatic protection against the latest threats. If your phone gets lost or stolen, you can log in to mylookout.com to use GPS and track your phone on a map. You can also set off a loud scream on your phone, even if it is silent mode. Lookout also has provision for backup & restore of your contacts through your mylookout.com account. The premium version has additional browsing security and advanced backup features.

Where’s My Water? Android Review

Where’s My Water? is the latest game to go viral on cell phones, emulating the success of predecessors like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope. Released by none other than Disney, the cute cartoon styling and interesting storyline combines with physics based puzzle to keep you engrossed for hours.

The app, released for iOS in September 2011 for Android on October 2011 for Android.  On the iOS App Store it crossed 1 million downloads on the very first day, surpassing its predecessor Angry Birds. Android users have taken to the app as well.

The story goes like this. Swampy, the alligator, loves to be clean and he wants to take a bath. But Cranky, the big, bad alligator and his friends have disrupted his plumbing. Each level has a water source which is either a pool of water or a supply of water flowing in through a pipe. The aim of the game is to dig through the dirt and get just enough water to Swampy to complete the level. This seemingly simple task is made interesting by game elements like the algae which grow at the touch of water and block up cleared paths, acids and poison that contaminate the water, mazes and mines that you need to navigate etc. You also need to manipulate a series of nozzles, switches and barriers to get the water to Swampy’s tub. Along the way there are rubber ducks and other bath items to collect which earn you points and unlock new levels. The game is easy to play but the interactions between the elements keep it from being too simple and boring. For instance, acid and poison explode on contact and open up the dirt, acid and algae solidify into a new barrier and the purple poison water melts algae. There’s also a game within a game, called Cranky’s Story. These are a set of levels where the player must route the purple poison water to Cranky to melt the algae covering his food and solve 12 tough puzzles.

You can get eight themed chapters with all 160 levels in the paid version. Where’s My Water? gets frequent updates introducing new free levels and new game elements. Where’s My Water? Free is the free version with limited levels.

To sum up, beautifully designed levels, interesting storyline, challenging game play and frequent updates – this is a real winner from Disney in the mobile games space.  If you enjoy puzzle based games, you will definitely love Where’s My Water?

Instagram for Android

Instagram, the hugely popular photo processing and sharing app for iOS devices, released its Android version on April 3, 2012. Instagram, which launched on October 6, 2010 in Apple’s App store, had 30 million accounts by April 2012 and a passionate community among iPhone users. With the Android version, the Instagram team is hoping to recreate this success for the much larger and growing market of Android devices. As of now, Android users seem to be all over this new app, with more than 5 million downloads in just one week after release.

For the rare uninitiated, the Instagram app allows you to take photographs with your mobile device, apply pre-set filters and share the photograph on various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr etc. The charm of the app lies in the artistic feel its filters can give to the most mundane photograph and its social network. On first look, Instagram for Android fulfills its promise to recreate the same user experience on Android.

The user interface is clean and simple to use. The photo can be taken using the mobile’s camera application or from within Instagram. After taking the picture, crop it to the mandatory square. There are 17 filters available for Android, a couple of filters less than the free iPhone version. Choose and apply your filter, add a border or rotate your image. The last step is to add a caption, choose whether to geotag your photo and select the social networks on which you want to share the photo. The photo is also uploaded to your Instagram timeline. The “Popular” icon at the bottom of the app opens up a grid of the most liked photos on Instagram at the moment and the “Profile” icon will bring up your Instagram feed.

The feature users will miss most on Instagram for Android are the tilt shift and circle blur options. Flickr and Posterous are missing from the social options. Overall, however, Instagram for Android does a good job of bringing the “exact same filters and community” to Android. The filters give that quirky vintage feel to the photos and the app’s biggest draw is the 30 million strong community that comments on and likes the photographs.

A major challenge to Instagram in the Android market would be scaling up to the wide range of Android devices with varying device and camera specifications. Instagram for Android is optimized for Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but will run on Android 2.2 and higher. Within a couple of days of its release, there were reports of slowness, crashing and incompatibility on various devices, notably HTC One X and HTC Sensation 4G. Instagram has been responding quickly with upgrades and bug fixes.

Android Apps for Movie Buffs

If you love movies - watching them, talking about them and collecting them – here are some apps to bring movies to your Android phone.

Imdb Movies & TV is the Android app for imdb.com, Internet’s oldest and most definitive reference for all things movie and TV related. Just like on the website, you can look up movies, trailers, ratings and reviews, cast profiles and trivia on this handy app. You can also track show times at local theaters or buy the DVD from Amazon using this app.

If you have a Netflix streaming account, you can use their official Android app, Netflix, to watch movies and TV shows from your Android phone. It syncs up with your account so you can pick from where you left off on your television or computer. You can manage your Netflix queue from the app and find new shows and movies to watch.

Crackle is a free app with unlimited, free to watch movies and TV shows. The movies and TV shows tend to be older titles, but if you are looking for some free content to watch on your Android, there are several good titles to pass the time.

Fandango Movies for Phones is the app you need to keep on top of the latest movie releases. It is the official app for Fandango.com with theater listings, show times, movie listings, cast details, movie photos and trailers.  You can browse for movies playing at nearby theatres and buy tickets on the app. Rate and review movies directly from the app and post to your Facebook wall, check the last 10 tweets about a movie or read its Metacritic reviews.

If you have a huge collection of DVDs, you can organize your movie catalog with the free, ad-supported Movie Collection & Inventory app. It even has a barcode scanner interface to make entering your movie collection easy. You can enter category, rating and personal notes, number of times watched and other information for each movie and track statistics like total number of movies, movies in each category etc. You can back up all this information to the server too.

You’ve probably already heard of GetGlue, the social network for all things entertainment related. The GetGlue Android app makes it easy to check-in and rate the movie or TV show you are watching. Just like on the website, you can find and follow your friends, get updates on what they are watching, earn stickers and get recommendations for what to watch next.

Personal Finance Apps for Android

There are apps galore to help you manage your money, track your budget, pay off your debt and much more. Here is a review of some of the top personal finance apps for Android.

Mint.com is one of the trusted names in personal financial management today so you can’t go wrong with their free Android app, Mint.com Personal Finance. It pulls in all your bank accounts and credit cards, so that you can view all your financial information from a single interface. It tracks spending, categorizing every transaction so that you can see where your money goes. You can create a budget based on historical spending. Other features are investment tracking, personalized recommendations, bill reminders, over-spending alerts and unusual pattern alerts. The app employs the same security measures used by banks to keep your information protected.

Budgetroid is a simple app that does exactly what it promises - easy real-time budget monitoring. It will allow you to type in your incomes and expenses and quickly compute what you have left in your budget. The clean, uncluttered interface and the simple operations are the USP of this upcoming app.

Easy Envelope Budget Aid is yet another budget management application, but with a unique feature- you can sync up multiple phones to create a shared budget. It is also backed up on the Web. It is free and ad-free too. It operates on a concept of virtual envelopes and as you enter transactions, keeps track of the envelope balance. It has some features which make entering transactions into the app easier –like auto-complete, auto-categorization and location-based auto-complete.

Mortgage Calculator, by Adonis Apps, is one of the popular loan calculator applications for your Android phone.  It can calculate your monthly payment and display amortization tables when you are shopping for your new car or home. The Pro version has additional features like graphical charts, Estimator etc.

For those of us who have unfortunately fallen into bad financial habits and debt, there is help in the form of debt payoff planners. One of the popular debt payoff planners for Android platform is Debt Payoff Planner, from Adonis Apps. It uses the proven and systematic “Debt snowball” method to create your debt payoff plan. It then shows you month-wise debt snapshots and allows you to enter payments, prepayments and countdown to debt-free. The paid version looks worth the money, though the free version, Debt Payoff Lite, is too limited to be actually useful.

Fun and learning: Top 3 Android Apps for your preschooler

All the edutainment your preschooler needs can now be carried everywhere – on your Android phone. Here are three of the most popular apps for Android that combines learning with fun for kids under five.

Going by the number of downloads and user reviews, Kids Connect the Dots is one of the most popular apps for preschoolers. This game, developed by Intellijoy, is bright, colorful, interactive and easy to use. The dots are numbered and can be connected by dragging along or by tapping the dots. When all the dots are connected, the outline comes to life as a charming creature or colorful object! The dots can be customized to show alphabets and odd or even numbers. In audio mode, a voice speaks out loud the alphabet or number the child touches. The game improves motor skills while teaching alphabets and numbers. The paid version has more than 100 puzzles and the free version, with 25 puzzles, is called Kids Connect the Dots Lite. There is also a Christmas version, Kids Connect the Dots Xmas, with 45 Christmas themed puzzles.

Kid Mode by Zoodles is the free Android app with the unique and popular Zoodles Child Lock feature that puts devices into Kid Mode.  When the app is running with Child Lock enabled, the child is locked into the app and cannot accidentally make calls or get into other apps or phone functions. The app has hundreds of games and activities for age 8 and below. To customize the app, parents must set up a free account and create profiles for their children. The child taps on his picture to log in. Based on the age information, Zoodles will curate age-appropriate videos, games and activities for the child.  Other cool features are the art studio where kids can draw and color, the illustrated storybooks that you can read and record and the weekly activity emails about what your child has been doing within the app.

Kids Preschool Puzzle is another great game from Intellijoy. The child is shown an image of an animal, food, vehicle, number, alphabet etc. On the left side are brightly colored puzzle pieces that can be slid into the outline. Once all the pieces are snapped into place, the name appears on screen and is also spoken out loud. The game improves reading, shape recognition, tactile and motor skills while the interactive and colorful format with 100+ images keeps children entertained. A free version of this game is available as Kids Preschool Puzzle Lite with 20 puzzles.

Temple Run for Android Review

The popular adventure game, Temple Run, finally became available for Android devices in March 2012. As expected, Android users flocked to it, creating a record 1 million downloads in just 3 days. The game, which had first released for iOS in August 2011, was a runaway hit on that platform, becoming the top downloaded iOS app in December 2011 and top grossing iOS app.

The game revolves around a group of explorers who steal an idol from a temple. The game starts immediately after the idol is stolen and the explorers are being pursued by a group of demonic monkeys through the temple. There are seven different characters in the game, which differ in their appearance and the sounds they make. One of the characters will be controllable by the player. The default character is a red-headed man, Guy Dangerous. The objective of the game is to survive by running away from the pursuing monkeys, while avoiding the different obstacles on the path. To avoid obstacles like cracks, cliffs, mossy rocks and burning arches, the player must slide his fingers to jump, duck and turn the character. Along the way the user can collect coins and bonus items. The coins collected by the user can be spent in the game store to unlock the other characters, get new wallpapers and upgrades. Upgrades include increasing the value of the coins you collect and additional powers for your character such as the power to go through obstacles without needing to avoid them. You can also buy all this from the store using real cash.

The extremely detailed and dimensional environment of the game makes it look very realistic, as befitting a game from the famed Imangi Studios. Controls are simple and navigation is easy, the sound effects and graphics are crisp and awesome. No game is complete these days without social integration; in Temple Run, it comes in the form of tweeting your score from the game. There is even a feature that’s missing from the iOS – the ability to set the sensitivity of your gestures. The game is ad-free and released for Android in a freemium model. It is free to play and makes money through the purchase of coins by players from the game store.

Cons, as of now, include that the game is buggy and crashes multiple times. It also takes a heavy toll on the battery of the device. Hopefully, future updates will  soon sort out these bugs.

In short, an addictive adventure genre game with amazing graphics that every fan of adventure-genre games must try.

Amazon Price Check App for Android

The online retailer Amazon has always been at the forefront of bringing technology into retail in amazing ways, and they’ve done it again with Price Check, their latest comparison shopping app on Android. The app is familiar to iPhone users, having released its iOS version a year before it finally ported to Android in November 2011.

The app, in Amazon’s own words, helps you find out “if the deals you see in retail stores are really deals?” It does this by allowing you to compare the price of items you see at retail stores with Amazon prices, as well as read product descriptions, ratings and reviews. During the holiday shopping season of 2011, Amazon even offered a discount if customers used the app to check the price of items while inside a retail store.  With such promotions, it is no wonder that the app stirred up controversy with brick-and-mortar retailers alleging unfair competition.

Such apps are here to stay though. For a major purchase these days, almost everybody uses online retailers, comparison shopping sites and review sites to research alternatives, reviews and prices. With its Price Check app, Amazon takes this to the logical next step, so that even for smaller purchases and products, customers can easily research their purchases right from the store.

Price Check App allows you to search for items using barcode scan, image search, voice search, or text search. If you are at a store, simply scan in the barcode using your Android phone and Amazon will return the exact product matched. You can also take a picture of the product using your phone. Amazon uses image matching algorithms to match your product to the products in their database. You can speak the name of the product into the app and do voice search. In addition to these pretty futuristic options, there is the old-fashioned text search too, where you type in the search query and get matching products. The app will display the product descriptions, customer reviews and ratings from Amazon.com and the Amazon prices. You can log in using your Amazon.com account and securely purchase using the App.

Other features of the Price Check App are adding to the Wishlist, sharing using Facebook, Twitter, e-mail or text message. Price Sharing is another feature introduced in the latest version of the app, which further steals the thunder from brick and mortar stores. Using this feature of the app, while shopping at a retail store, you can share their prices with Amazon.

Angry Birds Space for Android Review

Angry Birds Space, the latest release of the wildly popular Angry Birds series was released on 22^nd March 2012. The new version takes the game into interstellar space for new levels of pig-smashing fun.

The storyline is that the Angry Birds are chasing a giant claw which has kidnapped their eggs. They pursue the claw into a wormhole and end up floating in a strange new galaxy, surrounded by space pigs. The game is the same – to smash the green pigs by launching the angry birds at them. However, the game is played on planets with different gravity conditions – even zero gravity. This results in a very different game from the older versions. The gravity field of each planet is marked by a blue line and you should take into account the effect the gravity will have on your bird missile’s movements. This makes for some very challenging and different puzzles. The game has 60 interstellar levels – two worlds of 30 levels each. There are 10 more levels available through free updates or purchases.

New bird characters have been introduced in the space version and some of the birds have new special powers. The red bird has a new “Uber Mask” and he can see the sling scope – the path by which he can cause maximum damage. There is the classic blue bird, black bomb bird, the huge green bird, yellow lazer bird and a new extraterrestrial bird called the Ice Bird. The ice bird has powers to freeze an area and the pigs it smashes into, making them easy to break on the next impact. There is also a Space eagle power-up, similar to the Mighty Eagle from the earlier versions. The pigs have also gained special contraptions like a robot, a UFO etc which can be destroyed only in particularly inventive ways. Other additions to the game are levels with a hidden egg, called Eggsteroids. Finding this egg unlocks an interesting hidden level. The designs of these levels seem to be inspired by classic video games like Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros., Pong etc. On finishing the level, the player is returned to the point where the egg was found.

The game remains as charming and addictive as before, yet in a fresh new avatar with new elements and gameplay mechanics. The game is free and ad-supported for Android users.  In short, the fourth installment of this global phenomenon with 700 million downloads, does not disappoint and continues the success story.

Essential Shopping Apps for Android

Smarter shopping can help you save by finding better bargains and products that give the best value for money. Here is a lineup of some of the best shopping apps for your Android phone to help you shop smarter.

Shopper by Google, is an excellent app to find information about a product you are interested in. You can scan the barcode or take a photograph of the product.  Locking in on barcodes using the barcode scanner or recognizing products from the images is quick and returns relevant results fast. The results include online and brick and mortar prices and reviews aggregated from many sites. Other features are search history, favorite products and sharing products via email. It also supports voice and text search. The app works best on CDs, DVDs, books and video games, cannot scan QR codes and may not offer very relevant local listings. ShopSavvy is another price comparison app worth checking out. Though it offers product recognition only via a barcode scanner, it has a richer database of deals and relevant local listings including mapped directions and other information on the stores. It also supports long-term price tracking of the products you are interested in with price alerts.

If you are one of those people who end up holding up the checkout line while fiddling through a thick stack of rewards and membership cards, Key Ring Rewards Card is the app for you. Scan in all your cards and recreate them on your phone using this app. When you are shopping, you can quickly locate the card on your phone and ask the cashier to scan it from the phone screen.

Out of Milk is a Shopping List, Pantry List and To-do list app. It supports multiple user-defined lists, so that you can organize your shopping. You can enter items manually, scan a barcode, or just speak your list into the app. It has a simple, intuitive interface and a lot of presets to help in entering items. It maintains the price totals of your list, and maintains shopping list and price history. You can move items between lists, and share lists by email or text message.

The Coupons App is one of the most downloaded coupon apps for Android. It saves time spent on searching for coupons as it brings the relevant deals and coupons to you, in real-time throughout the day. Browse through the list using filters and save the coupons you need. When you are out shopping, just show the phone to the cashier to redeem your coupon! Other features include comparison shopping using a barcode scanner and the ability to share coupons using Twitter, Facebook, text and email.

News Reader Apps for Android

Mornings are incomplete without a cup of coffee and your daily morning news fix. While your Android phone may not replace your morning cuppa soon, you can get the latest news on your smart phone with one of these amazing newsreader apps.

Feedly is one of the most popular news feed reader apps on Android. The default configuration has a set of RSS feeds covering a wide range of topics, which can be replaced with your Google Reader feeds.  Feedly follows a clean, minimalistic layout and gives a choice of dark or light theme. The feeds are organized into pages, four feeds in one page, with the article heading displayed prominently. You can easily search and add new feeds. Feedly also supports photo and video streams. A very useful feature in Feedly is the Instapaper and Read It Later integration. Both these services allow you to bookmark an article so that you can pick it up later, even from another device or computer. You can recommend an article on Feedly, or share it via Twitter or Facebook. Feedly is a free app, without ads.

Pulse News app stands out among news feed reader apps with its unique and attractive interface - a mosaic of card sized thumbnails. The items from a single source are arranged in a row and you can scroll up and down the page to see all the sources. The navigation is intuitive, with smooth and appealing animations. You can choose from the featured feeds, search and add feeds, import feeds from your Google Reader or integrate with Facebook to create a feed from status updates or links shared by your friends. The feeds are arranged in five pages and users are restricted to 60 feeds. You can share articles on social networks or via email.

Google Currents, which was initially dubbed as the Flipboard for Android, has turned out to be more of a RSS feed reader than a social network aggregation app. They have tied up with more than 150 partners ranging from TechCrunch to PBS to provide full-length articles in a beautiful magazine style format.  You can select from the content partners on the app, add your Google Reader feeds or search and add any public RSS feed. Google Currents is also strongly focusing on pulling in more dedicated content partners. They have created Google Currents Producer, where even bloggers and small news publishers can customize their feeds for Google Currents with customized branding, feeds and CSS. The Trending feature makes use of Google search to show the top trending stories across the world in different categories.

Musical Instrument Apps for the Android

We all listen to music on our Android smart phone, but how about making music? With these musical instrument apps on Android, you can now create music on your Android phone.

DrumKit by nullapp, transforms your Android into a functional drum kit with drums and percussions. There is a bass, snares, toms, crash and ride cymbals, kick-drum and more. It uses real drum sounds and some cool animations to give you a nice finger drumming experience. With the latest feature, called Composer, you can create a base rhythm and then play finesse beats as the rhythm plays. The app works well with a high-end phone which supports multi-touch. It is amusing and free, so give it a whirl.

Robotic Guitarist is a feature-packed guitar simulator app for your Android.  The interface is simple- choose the chords from the left and play on the six guitar strings, to produce the realistic effect of an acoustic guitar. There are options for right or left handed play, a realistic chord change option and an option to change the instrument to electric guitar or piano. There are chord presets, a tuner for your real guitar, and a metronome.  This app will be useful for musicians and also for those who are learning to play a guitar.

xPiano is one of the most popular piano apps for Android. The free version has 4 octaves and 12 instruments. Clever ideas like adjustable keyboard width, the auto scroll feature and the piano strip at the top of the screen allows seamless movement across the keyboard. You can record and playback tunes, save them in sound files and sync up with your computer. The pitch setting can be changed with a continuous slider and tested on the go. The paid version, xPiano+ has 5 octaves and 128 instruments and more sample songs to play.

PocketBand Uloops is a refreshingly new concept, a cloud-based social music studio. The app has 125 different instruments and 35 drum kits. Using these in audio loops, you can create tracks. You can also add live audio recordings and apply analog modulators and arpeggiators to your track. You can edit the track using the pan, pitch, volume and reverb controls. The application works totally on the cloud, uploading everything to an online account. It offers features to share your music with the app community under a variety of licenses. The paid version has more instruments and support for unlimited audio loops.

Google Play Books Android Review

Google Play Books is Google’s official Android app for purchasing and reading e-books on your Android app.

It is supported on Android version 2.2 and higher and can be downloaded from Google Play. It is a basic no-frills e-book reading app with millions of titles for download including free books and excerpts. The pricing for the priced books seems to be on par with other e-book retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc.

You can search for a book by title or author name using the search field on the main screen of the app. Voice search is also supported.  The books are purchased through Google checkout. Once you purchase or download a book, it is added to your library. The books are displayed in your library in a 3-D carousel view or list view, which can be changed according to your preference.

The design is simple and easy to navigate. Tap on the cover of the book in your library to start or resume reading. You can move to the next page by swiping or tapping. Other ways to navigate through pages are by using Table of Contents or the slider, displayed on tapping the center of the book. You can also search within the book by using In-Book Search.

The default mode is the Flowing Text mode. The Original Pages mode is a feature that displays the original pages, as scanned from the book. In Flowing Text mode, you can change the font size, typeface, line height, text alignment and brightness settings of the display. Another useful feature is to make the book available for offline reading, for those times when you do not have an internet connection. The book is stored on your phone internal storage or memory card. There is also a Share feature, to share about the book you are reading on Google+, Twitter or using Gmail. The Google Play Books app offers accessibility support and text to speech reading of books.

The books in your library can be read from any device or web browser anywhere by logging into your Google account. It auto-syncs and personalizes your reading experience so that you can pick up where you left off on another device. Google Books purchases and free downloads are transferrable to Nook, Reader from Sony, Kobo Reader, Story HD from iRiver and other dedicated e-reader devices too. Google Play Books is a good choice on two counts – excellent integration support across multiple devices and platforms and a simple but well-designed app to read and purchase books on your phone.

Google Currents for Android Review

Google Currents for Android is a content-aggregation app for Android users. It will integrate feeds from Google News, video and photo streams, Google+ streams and RSS feeds into a magazine-style layout.

It was unveiled by Google in December 2011. Inevitably, it has been called Google’s answer to Flipboard, the aggregation app that displayed custom content in a magazine format for iOS users.  Flipboard had been a major cause of app envy to Android users with its stylish layout and personalized magazine format.

Google has tied up with more than 150 publishers like Forbes, PBS, 500px, The Guardian, TechCrunch, Saveur and more to display their full-length articles within the app. You can select publications to add to your Library. When your first open the app, it asks you to login to your Google account and automatically pulls in your Google Reader feeds, which you can also add to your library, if required. You can search and add any public Google+ stream or RSS feed – this means all your favorite blogs can be integrated into the app.

The Library will pre-download the latest content from your selected feeds for a smooth reading experience, without any delays.  The layout is clean and simple. You can navigate through the articles by swiping and access a menu to see the latest headlines and excerpts from the same publication. Another tab on the Google Currents app is named Trending. This uses Google search technology to track the five most trending stories in various categories like World, Sports, Technology, Entertainment etc.  You can share the article you are reading via Google+, email, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instapaper.

Though the media dubbed Google Currents Flipboard-killer even before its release, it does not incorporate one of the most popular features on Flipboard and similar apps – the ability to integrate feeds from social networks. Google Currents was probably never meant to be a social-network aggregation app. The magazine style format is also not as appealing as that of Flipboard, forgoing fancy animations for a minimalistic and easy to use format.

Instead Google has been focusing on the publishing community to provide high-quality content through Google Currents. Google has introduced the Google Currents Producer, a platform through which any blogger or news publisher can customize their feeds for Currents. Customization options include adding branding features, social network feeds, videos and custom CSS. The platform also integrates with Google Analytics to allow publishers to collect analytics data.

Essential Android Apps for the Writer

The Android toting writer can now work from anywhere. With a few essential Android apps on your phone, you are all set to research, take notes and write your first draft to final copy, wherever you are.

One of the most popular note taking applications for Android is the Evernote Android app. It is part of the Evernote suite of products which help you take notes and manage them across devices. Save text notes, to-do lists, web pages, images, songs and more on the go with your android device and access them from anywhere. Evernote even allows you to search images saved as notes by using OCR techniques! Other features are organizing notes under notebooks or tags and sharing notes through email or social networks. The free version is quite comprehensive in itself while the premium version adds a few extra goodies like the ability to put a lock on your app.

If you like mind maps to help you brainstorm and take notes, there is now an excellent free app for mind mapping on Android, Mindjet for Android. Mindjet, which makes mind mapping software for iOS and computers, acquired the popular Android mind mapping app, Thinking Space Pro and offered it free with a few visual changes and performance improvements. Mindjet for Android allows easy topic creation, a variety of topic icons, drag and drop of topics in the map, adding notes to topics, zoom, tagging to organize your maps, saving your map in mmap format and exporting the maps as image or text files.

Pocket (formerly Read It Later) is the solution to a common problem we all face these days – innumerable browser tabs and applications left open, waiting for you to read them. When you view a web page, video or article from any app on your device, just add it into Pocket. Log into Pocket later, from any device or computer anywhere and read your saved items.

With your Android, you can say goodbye to bulky and inadequate pocket dictionaries and carry your favorite dictionary on your phone. Two of the most popular dictionaries for Android are Dictionary.com and Dictionary - Merriam-Webster. Both are ad-supported free versions with word definitions, synonyms and antonyms, pronunciation, Word of the Day and other dictionary basics.

If you are willing to pay for a premium word processing application, the popular options are Quickoffice Pro and DocumentsToGo.  For a free app, the best bet appears to be Google Docs ( now Google Drive) which is an ad-supported beta version as of now. It supports your basic word processing needs, is similar to Google Docs on the Web and syncs your docs to the cloud. Writer is another word processor app aimed at writers – its USP is a clean interface and fuss-free support for basic word processing activities, so that you can focus on your writing.

Essential Android Apps for Travelers

Smart apps make your journeys easier and more enjoyable. Here are some of the essential apps for travelers with an Android phone.

Google Maps: Whether you are halfway across the world or just venturing into a new part of your city, Google Maps for Android will help you find places, get directions and explore locations. It is one of the most downloaded apps for Android. You can see your location on your map using GPS or your mobile signals. Some other cool features are Street Level View, 3D View and GPS navigation.

WeatherBug: WeatherBug gives you comprehensive local weather information including current conditions and extended weather forecast to plan your journeys better. To get real-time information, Weatherbug taps into a network of professional weather stations across America and from thousands of locations around the world. It also has maps integration, radar animation and live images from 2000 weather cameras across America.

TripAdvisor: This is the official Android app for TripAdvisor, the popular online travel portal. You can find hotels, restaurants and attractions near you and read from over 50 million reviews to get the best advice on where to go and what to do on your trip.

Yelp: Yelp is another online portal which provides local listings, reviews and deals on restaurants, shopping, nightlife, entertainment and other services. With the official Yelp for Android, you can do all this from your android device. You can use the quick links on the app to find places near you, make reservations using OpenTable, check-in and share on Facebook and Twitter and write and upload reviews.

TripJournal: Been there, Done that, Shared it? Half the fun of going on a trip is recording the experience through diary entries, photos and videos and then telling your friends and family all about it. TripJournal does just that, helping you put together a media-rich travelogue from a simple interface. GPS tracking and Google Earth integration make the trip come alive visually. You can share your travelogue or parts of it directly from TripJournal through email, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa or Youtube.

FlightTrack: FlightTrack is an essential app for the frequent flier. It gives real-time flight information on airline flights worldwide. It covers 16,000 ariports and 1400 airlines, providing departure information, delays, gate numbers, even cancellation information and help in finding an alternative flight.  You can add flight notes with information like seat numbers for your reference. You can even track your plane on a large zoomable map with satellite and weather imagery.

Fun Camera Apps for Android

Taking photographs and sharing them is a snap with your Android device. With these quirky photo apps you can make that experience even more fun.

Use Pixlr-o-matic to a give even the most mundane of photographs a professional touch.  Pixlr-o-matic offers three steps to enhance your images – effects, overlays and borders. There are over 100 effects to change the tone and lighting of your image, 280 overlays to add special effects like raindrops, scratches, glitter etc and almost 200 different borders. Combined together, this free app offers over 25,000 different finishes, all through a well-designed and easy to use interface.

PicsSay is a popular app, which, as the name implies, makes your pics “speak up”, with balloons, titles, graphics, markers and more. You can color-correct your images and add effects like distortion or pixelation. The paid version of that app offers even more image editing capabilities like sharpen, red-eye removal, crop and straighten along with more effects and props to decorate your images.

Faced with a beautiful panoramic landscape, the average mobile cam user used to carefully take multiple photographs and painstakingly join them together on a computer. With Photaf Panorama, capture a 360 degree panorama in a single smooth movement. The app uses the phone’s orientation sensor to automatically handle taking the photographs and combining them into a seamless panoramic view. You can then upload the photograph into Facebook, straight from the app.

Doodle Cam is a fun camera app for Android to turn the world around you into a doodle. It has six different doodle effects including pencil, fineliner and chalk and four quality levels for each effect. You can preview the effects in real-time, before you snap the picture.

Camera Illusion is a free, ad-supported app that allows you to apply filters, effects, masks and borders in real-time. You can look through the camera on your Android phone, apply the filters and masks and see the world with your applied effects even before you snap a picture. The app offers a variety of filters for artistic, vintage or fun transformations. On top of this, you can apply the special effects like fish-eye, mosaic, mirror, fat, light tunnel etc. Finish off your picture with a photo frame. This app scores over similar apps of its ilk for its real-time preview and the interesting and unusual filters. You can save both the original image and the “effected” image to your phone and share them via email, multimedia message or Facebook.

Android Apps for Social Networking

When you are out and about and inspiration strikes, you just have to share it with your friends on your favorite social network! With Android Apps, you can now stay connected to your network wherever you go.

The top apps for the social media enthusiast are of course, the official free apps for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare etc. Facebook, the world’s most popular networking site, has Facebook for Android, which offers all the features of the web version, including sharing photos and messages and keeping up with your friends’ status updates. With the latest update, performance and responsiveness has improved drastically. With the official Twitter app for Android you can tweet, retweet, favorite, direct message, browse, follow and real time search tweets. If location based social check-in is your thing, the two biggies in that space, Foursquare and Gowalla have official apps. Check-in from anywhere with your mobile device and get notified of friends and discounts or deals available near you.

LinkedIn is here to stay as a professional networking tool. To access your LinkedIn profile, inbox, contacts or groups on your Android device, you can choose between the official LinkedIn client and the DroidIn client. Whatever your latest social network of choice, be it Pinterest, the lesser known GetGlue for media buffs or Untappd for beer drinkers, there are official and unofficial full-featured apps out there to help you connect on the go. Another must-mention app in this context is AppBrain, the app that helps you network and find - other Android apps! It works by connecting with your Twitter or Facebook account, checking if any of your friends there use AppBrain and recommending from the list of apps they use.

Individual apps for each social network are fine for most, but it simply won’t do the job for the determined social media addict, who is forever cross posting his tweet to his facebook timeline and keeping tabs on what all his friends and contacts on different social networks are up to. For such enthusiastic social media buffs, there are Android apps like TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite which bring several social networks under one cool interface. Seesmic supports multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts; TweetDeck integrates Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz, while HootSuite supports multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts. All of them share great features like refreshing your social feeds automatically and allowing you to post to different networks from a single interface. Hootsuite has an advantage in terms of offering a clean uncluttered interface and statistics about your social media pages.

Stay Fit and Healthy with Android Apps

According to experts, the secret of staying fit and healthy is simple – healthy eating and sufficient exercise. But for most of us, it is a daily struggle – tasty, easy junk food vs. a healthy salad, sleeping in vs. a morning jog. Here are three Android apps to help the healthy side win.

Calorie Counter – MyFitnessPal is the free Android app for myfitnesspal.com, the extremely popular diet and fitness tracking website. It offers almost all the features of the website from the convenience of your phone. It has a very large food database and the option to quickly enter your won foods and recipes, using manual entry or a barcode scanner. It will then analyze the nutrients in your food, keeping a record of your daily nutrient and calorie intake. It recommends a calorie goal based on your profile or you can set your own calorie goals. The exercise database has over 350 exercises, allows entering your own exercises and keeps track of calories burned. The most motivating part of the app is the Daily Summary of your Calorie intake and the graphical charts showing your progress. There is also social motivation; you can connect with friends to motivate each other as your work towards your goals. There is a news feed which shows updates from your friends, making it a fitness social network.

MyTracks from Google uses GPS tracking to track and record your running, biking, hiking and other outdoor activities. Once you start an activity session, it tracks via GPS and displays the data on the integrated Google map. It also tracks other data like time taken, time you’ve spent moving, distance travelled, average speed, gradient and elevation of the terrain etc. It can be set up to provide this information as announcements at suitable intervals during your activity. You can share your map routes on Google Maps, and your track data via Google+, Facebook or Twitter. You can export the track data in a variety of formats to do all sorts of statistical aggregation and analysis. It has support to record data from external sensors like heart rate monitors, power meters, speed sensors etc.

CardioTrainer for Android, from Noom aims to be your fitness and weight-loss partner. The free part of the app is the fitness tracker which has GPS tracking to track activities like walking, hiking or biking as well as a pedometer to track indoor activities. You can also manually enter fitness activities like swimming. Other features are the ability to set up a workout schedule with reminders, Friends Activity Feed and an integrated music player.  Weight loss is a paid add-on with this app.

Draw Something for Android Review

Every couple of months, a fun little app comes along and takes the world by storm. Downloads skyrocket, all your friends are playing it and talking about how addictive it is. The latest game to hit pay dirt is Draw Something, from OMGPOP.

It is a social drawing and guessing game. You need another person, an iOS or Android user, to play it against. When you log in to the game, you can either ask the game to choose a random opponent for you or you can log in with Facebook and find one of your friends to play with you.  You can choose from three words marked Easy, Medium and Hard. Draw something on the screen to represent the chosen word so that your opponent guesses the word, just like Dumb Charades or Pictionary. To make it easier to guess the word, a group of letters will be displayed on the screen. The word can be formed using some, but not all of those letters. Take turns with your opponent to draw and guess.

Guessing the words earns you coins and bombs. The more difficult the word, the more coins you earn. Coins can help you unlock more words and colors for your drawing. You first start with just four colors – black, blue, red and yellow.  Faced with a difficult word, you can use the bomb to blast away some of the extraneous letters, which makes it easier to guess the word formed using the letters that remain.

It is not a competitive game, but a cooperative game where you and your opponent help each other to guess words and earn coins and bombs. On the way, you have fun drawing and enjoy some laugh out loud moments. It is a fun, engaging albeit simple game.  I think the best part which sets it apart from other puzzles or adventure games, is that it uses and expands on your own creativity. As the game progresses and you get more colors, you’ll find yourself drawing more elaborate stories to represent the words.

The free version called Draw Something Free is ad-supported. The paid version, Draw Something, does not have ads, has 2000 more words and gives you 400 free coins. The game is stable and does not lag or crash. Drawing on your screen takes some getting used to, but as you play, you will find your skills improving. This is a good, clean fun and it is all the rage right now, so do try it once – you might find yourself joining the fans!

Boost your Brain power with Android Apps

Use your Android phone to improve your vocabulary, boost you IQ and improve your mental skills. These games are fun and addictive too. Here are some of the popular “edutainment” games and apps for Android.

Words with Friends Free, from Zynga, is similar to the traditional word-forming board game, Scrabble. It is a two person game enriched by the fact that you can login with Twitter or Facebook and invite your friends to play with you. There is an online chat to interact during an exciting game. If the game is slow, there is a notification feature that lets you know when your opponent makes his move. You can also opt for Pass and Play game, where two people can play the game on the same phone.

If you think vocabulary building is serious business and would prefer a pile of flashcards to teach you some tough words, turn to the trusted dictionary.com’s app, Dictionary.com Flashcards. It has over 70,000 flashcard decks, and can be customized by grade, subject or by standardized test. You can choose audio pronunciation or definition matching.

Sudoku Free is an android app for the number puzzle that has taken the world by storm in recent years. With four levels of difficulty it has enough puzzles to keep you entertained for a long time. It can give hints if you need them and track your score. You can also play in real time competitions online.

The aim of Math Workout is to exercise the brain with a set of daily mental mathematics problems. You can track your progress with Charts and there is also a World Challenge where you compete with other top players around the world. The paid version, Math Workout Pro, comes without the ads and a few extra features like wallpapers and user profiles.

Chess improves concentration, visualization and strategic thinking. Chess Free by AI Factory is one of the highest rated chess apps for Android. It has 10 levels from Novice to Expert. You can play against the system, or against a friend in the 2 player mode. It has a unique feature “Show CPU Thinking”, which shows the moves the system is considering.

Who becomes Rich, by Mobfish.net, brings the classic pub quiz to your Android mobile. This multiple choice trivia quiz is one of the most popular trivia apps on Android. It has hundreds of questions covering a wide range of subjects from Mathematics to Sports. The monetary value associated with the question and the question difficulty increases as you progress, making the game very addictive.

Cut the Rope for Android Review

What is it about charming little critters with personality disorders that gets us every time?  Cut the Rope is a physics-based game with a little monster, Om Nom who has an insatiable greed for candy.

Like the other popular physics based critter game Angry Birds, Cut the Rope also made its debut on iOS. It was released in October 2010 and quickly went viral, with 1 million paid downloads in just 10 days and #1 spot on iOS App Store. Android users however, had to wait for a long time to play the game on their mobile. The Android version finally released in June 2011. By January 2012, the game had been downloaded over 60 million times, in all formats!

The game revolves around feeding candy to a little green monster called Om Nom. The candy is hung up on ropes, so you have to cut the ropes in such a way that the candy reaches the mouth of the waiting Om Nom. On the way, there are bubbles to burst and stars to collect, which adds up to your point tally. The stars also unlock new levels. There are also enemies and obstacles to avoid at higher levels like spikes and spiders, which do bad things to your candy. The levels are organized into boxes like Cardboard Box, Fabric Box, Gift Box etc, with each box containing 25 levels. In the sequel, Cut the Rope: Experiments, the levels are organized into 5 experiments or settings named Getting Started, Shooting the Candy, Sticky Steps, Rocket Science and Bath Time.

The game is absolutely addictive, as 60 million downloads can attest. Om Nom is adorable, whether bobbing away in the corner waiting for his candy, or hungrily munching on it at the end of a level. The physics puzzle part is figuring out how to cut the ropes to get the most points. All in all, it is a very challenging and engrossing game. Cut the Rope uses Scoreloop to share achievements and score leaderboard.

The different versions of the game available in the Android App Store are Cut the Rope, Cut the Rope Free, Cut the Rope HD, Cut the Rope Experiments and Cut the Rope Experiments HD. Cut the Rope Free is the free ad-supported version. Cut the Rope Experiments is a sequel to the game with new settings, gameplay elements and characters.  There is also social integration in Experiments in the form of a hidden element which you can discover and post on Facebook.