My Top Ten Android Apps
It seems I haven’t covered this in quite awhile so I thought I’d give it a go again. After all, what’s more important than what we’re running on our mobile devices?
Ok here’s my current Top 10 list, drum roll please:
I can’t talk about top ten without the number-one thing I look at every time I turn on the phone. Maybe it’s not what I’m after whenever I hit the power button, but it’s my favorite clock/calendar/weather widget for phones (not so on tablets – but that’s another post).
Even though BW has weather in the widget, I still count on a really good forecast tool, and WeatherBug has been my go-to weather app for years. Heck they even updated it in the past day with a nifty new UI. Clear, concise, fast, detailed, and with animated maps.
This is a fairly new addition in the last month. While I wasn’t a big Google Reader app user on my phone, I was a gigantic Google Reader user on the desktop. Now that we see some forward innovation on the RSS reader front, I’m happy to report that Feedly brings innovation in megaton quantities An absolutely gorgeous UI, fast, easy to navigate, and most important of all – they listen to their users and respond to suggestions, ideas, and criticize criticism very quickly (and constructively). Highly recommended!
Many people love Facebook, and I do to an extent as well. However, Google+ is where I’m spending most of my time reading and posting. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it does more than just tie into the rest of Google’s services. Since I’m a big Google user, it really does work better for me, and all the people that I interact with are more active there in any case.
While the default Twitter client is quite nice, it does fail at showing me the information from my streams that I want to see. With the demise of TweetDeck, I needed a Twitter client that could show my lists as well as the main stream and mentions. Plume does this very easily. I’m sure there may be others out there that do this as well, but the three other clients I tried just didn’t make it easy. Plume does.
I’ve been using Pulse for a couple years now, and it’s been evolving quite well along the way as an all around great news aggregation app. Recently purchased by LinkedIn, I see Pulse becoming a very important and powerful tool for reading and sharing news with peers in my industry. Great little app that keeps getting better.
Ah, Pocket… one of my favorite read-it-later tools. In fact, Pocket used to go by the name Read It Later, then figured out how to make this type of tool/service even better. I can save things to Pocket from my phone, my tablet, and just about any browser that exists. They make it super simple, and very lightweight. Ties into Android like it was made for it.
What can one say about Evernote? The all-around great note taking tool that runs on simply everything. It took me awhile to get into Evernote, mainly because I was a huge Microsoft OneNote user and, of course, they have no equivalent anywhere else (though there is a OneNote Android and iOS app now). Since I use Windows, Linux, and Android, I need apps that are on all these platforms. Evernote is this as well as one of the best note taking apps that exists.
LinkedIn on Android used to be a pain to use. This past year, they seem to have gotten serious about the user experience and really worked on their app (much as Facebook has on theirs). The latest rendition of LinkedIn on Android is a joy to use. Fast, intuitive, and easy to connect with or respond too my industry peers. LinkedIn is growing in importance for me as a consultant, and a quality app like this one helps immensely.
Finally we get around to something more mundane, like listening to music. Unlike most people, I never seemed to accumulate a lot of music. This was true of CDs as well back in the 90’s as I just didn’t have the money then to buy every CD I wanted. Somehow this translated to MP3s as well. In any case, subscription models seem to work well for me and I really enjoy Rhapsody on my phone and my Nexus 7 mounted in the dash of my truck (hey, I’m a true tech nerd). Easy to use, good UI, and the ability to cache anything in my library locally.
Last but not least is an under-sung hero of the phone and mobile movie scene, check out the Movie Box App. Well, that’s my list and I hope I’ve helped answer a question you may have had regarding any of these apps. If not, don’t hesitate to jump into the comments and ask me about them. Or simply let me know of a better app or ones that I should check out.
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