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.