Some of my friends recently bought Android phones and I started writing an email to them recommending some apps and different widgets, when it occurred that it might be more useful if I put them up here.
I’ve had a Motorola Droid since the weekend they came out, so have gotten pretty comfortable with the device. And so away we go…
Wallpaper
A wallpaper graphic on the Droid, at least, needs to be 960X854 in pixels. One way to put a cool background in there is to search the web for images in that size, then hold your finger on the image to get the context menu asking you to save the picture. Another way is to just take a picture with the camera (which is what I did). Any picture you have in your photo gallery can be made wallpaper by viewing the picture, then press “more”, choose “set as”, and then “wallpaper”. That’s also how you replace your phone contacts default droid picture with a picture of them. (Or if your friend leaves their Android phone lying around, replace the picture that shows up when her mom calls with a picture of something obscene.) If the picture you want to set as wallpaper isn’t the right size, it prompts you to crop it to the correct dimensions.
Apps
Here are the applications that I use the most, not including Facebook, camera, and other stuff that comes pre-installed. Just launch “Market” and you can search for them:
- “Live Scores” by Sportacular —Good sports application
- Weather Channel
- BatteryTime Lite
- DroidLight by Motorola—a flashlight
- Compass by Snaptic
- Aldiko, an e-book reader
- Advanced Task Killer Free—good for freeing up memory on occasion
- Proxoid—use your phone’s 3g network on the laptop via USB, great in a pinch.
- Connectbot—excellent ssh client and the main reason I bought the phone
- AndFTP—excellent sftp client
- MLB At Bat—worth every penny of the fifteen bucks or so
- XKCD Viewer—quick, convenient laughs.
Here’s some stuff that I don’t use that often, but are very cool and worth having around:
- Metal Detector—uses the magnets in the back that detect whether the phone is in a dock to see if there’s any iron nearby. I’ve used it to find little screws.
- Google Sky Maps—just download it and be amazed.
- Google Translate—it prompts you also to add…
- TTS Service Extended—a speech synthesizer (your phone can now order beers and pick fights in thirty languages)
- Google Voice—transcribes my voicemails
- Google Earth—pretty world
- OI File Manager—A good filesystem browser
And I also have some pretty fun games, in order of my favorites:
- Phit Droid by mToy
- SNesoid Lite—free SNES emulator. Awesome.
- Cavedroid by Rob Everest
- Grid Droid—mToy
- Blocked Stone by mToy
- Shot 3 by mToy
- Bebbled by Nikolay Ananiev
- Labyrinth by Illusion Labs
I also have a silly lightsaber thing, just because some of the iPhone kids in the office have fake sword fights with theirs. I don’t think I’ve ever had to jump in and break up a war.
Widgets
I have three widgets installed on my desktop or whatever you call the workspace on the phone. Widgets are things that look sort of like Application launch icons, but they have interactive behavior. On the center desktop panel, I have the Weather Channel’s large widget instead of having the Weather Channel app launcher. The widget shows the current temperature and conditions, which is much more useful than the static app icon. I also have the new BatteryTime Light widget, that shows what percentage of battery I have remaining. If you press the widget, it launches the application, which estimates how much talk-time, video watching time, etc. you have left before you’d need to charge.
On the left panel, I have a big ol’ Power Control widget, which lets you dim or brighten the screen, turn on and off wi-fi, bluetooth, gps, etc., in order to conserve battery or make the screen easier on the eyes. It takes up a whole row on the panel.
To add a widget, you just hold your finger down on a blank spot of the home screen until a menu pops up, asking you what you want to “add to home screen”, with Widgets as an option.
That’s pretty much what I have installed on my phone, plus WordPress (which I obviously never use) and Twitter (which I read quite a bit while contributing very little).
Later update: I’d also recommend setting your default alert sound to “None.” Some of the more poorly designed applications don’t allow you to customize the sound (I’m looking at you, weather channel) and so you get a bunch of ambiguous bleeps and bloops from the pocket.