Sure, you’ve been seeing tons of performance tips, tutorials guiding you to free more system resources, best tools on the Marketplace, and so on… But how about if for once we talk about those cool apps that you don’t “have” to have, but that make you a really cool Android phone user. Read on.
Dice 3D
Start simple, I always say. I found myself the other day at a pub, with a couple of friends. Nothing out of the ordinary until my friends decided to play a game of Backgammon, offered for free at that particular fine establishment. The sad part is that they had every piece, but that specific board lacked a pair of dice. And then it hit me: there has to be something on the Android Market.
Dice 3D was the best answer to my search. It offers customizable dice and it even uses the accelerometer so you just look cool and shake your phone and presto! 6 – 6! Of course I could of just downloaded the Backgammon game altogether, but that is for another story.
Solo/Solo Lite
Or how to turn your phone into a guitar. Impress chicks or cry yourself to sleep on a rainy afternoon by singing the first notes from Metallica’s “Nothing else matters”. Solo just displays the picture of a guitar and touching its strings… well… you figured this one out by now. The app offers customizable chords, and a heap of features and settings: vibration feedback, volume balancing, left handed mode and for the pro only (paid) version multitouch support, accelerometer play by shaking the phone, an extra chord bar and more.
Rainy days will never be the same again.
Google Sky Map
Ah, yes! The perfect app to impress your girlfriend. Is she the romantic type that wants to sit with you and look at the stars while you can’t stop thinking of football? Use Google Sky Map with the GPS satellite activated from your options to look at the night sky and find constellations. By default, the whole sky map is there, but you can enter the stars library and pick a particular one. The app will help you track it on the sky, with a cleverly drawn pointer. See? You don’t have to be a science major to know these things…
Google Goggles
Ever wondered how Google sees the world? Goggles is the useless, but at the same time coolest app of them all. Take a snapshot of any object, brand, label or person, and this small app will connect to the internet and fetch as much information on it as possible. And I’m not talking just about reading barcodes and such. Goggles returns results including pictures, brands and logos, and any other information it finds on the internet related with the object you just took a picture of. If it’s a person’s face it tries to do a face match search, with imprecise and often hilarious results, but hey, you gotta give some points for the effort, right?
Color Flashlight
Imagine this: you at the most epic concert in your entire life. You feel great. And suddenly, the best song starts playing. Everyone turns to their pockets to find a lighter, they point it in the air, and wave with the flame. And you don’t have one! How embarrassing!
Fear not! Android Market is here once again to save your butt! Color Flashlight is the perfect app for various psychedelic disco effects, police siren sounds, and strobe lights. But let’s not forget the main function: you can use it as a flashlight to find those keys and enter your home at 5AM. Oh and for the special concert case I mentioned above, Flashlight includes a big, burning, moving candle.
Animated Weather
Animated Weather isn’t the most precise, or the most updated weather widget out there, but it has one major quality: it just looks awesome. Show someone that it will rain in 6 hours by showing him the raindrops and bad weather on your mobile phone. The various size widgets can fit a crowded or freer desktop screen, and the cool app shows you relative weather updates for the next four days. Animated Weather is also reasonably configurable, with the ability to measure temperature in C or F, and to change the background with a preset or custom file of your liking.
0 comments:
Post a Comment