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.