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.