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.