Just Duke - Mostly Tech Ponderings

I'm really enjoying my Nexus One! And I have test driven several third party apps since this Android device arrived at my doorstep! I thought it might be time to highlight my five favorite apps!  Thinking about this for a few days, its really is hard to nail down only five! And more than likely, a month from now, a couple are likely to fall out of favor with me, to be replaced by a couple of others! Basically, to make it to my top 5 list, it has to be an app that I use daily! And it had to be an app that didn't ship on the device!  In no particular order:

Weather Bug - The free version includes all the necessaries but includes some advertising! Launching the App gives you current conditions, the immediate forecast, a ten day forecast and satellite views are also included. An additional feature is severe weather alerts. You can turn these off, but it's really nice for your phone to alert you to any kind of pending severe weather! Another nice feature is the local web cams that you can open and look at to see what's doing in near-by locations. The download also includes two Widgets. A small and a large. The large is still kind of small and provides at quick "at a glance" that gives you the current Temperature, conditions and expected lows and highs. I've tried a few other weather apps, but this one always gets my approval. A solid app for weather! Web site!

PingDroid - So I love Twitter! But I like facebook too! And I see a lot of potential in Google's Buzz! Oh, my band has a MySpace account! So it's really nice to be able to open up PingDroid and post one time and have it send to all these locations. If you are active in seveal social networking sites, this is a real time saver. One powerful feature of Ping.fm is to post to your custom news feeds. So you can set up say, a feed to your personal site and it will send there also! There are a couple of things I would like to see changed in this app. For example, I have posted several half posts because I will mean to hit the delete key and instead have hit the return key, which posts the article. Frustrating! But when I want to post across platforms, this is always the app I go for! PingDroid gives you the ability to attach photos to send to all of those social sites too! The interface is certainly nothing fancy, but the app itself gets the job done! If you aren't currently using Ping.fm, head there from your PC first, set up and account, configure to your various sites, and then log onto your PingDroid App!  Learn more.

Twidroid Pro - This is one of my top five apps . . . . however, there are some really good Twitter apps out there! Two of my favorite free apps are Seesmic and Twitter's own app. I don't like how Twitter's app retweets however. Twitter and Seesmic don't cover all the features offered in Twidroid. This one is the most complete twitter apps at this time. Basically, anything you can do from your computer through Twitter, you can do through this app on your phone. The pro version supports mulitple accounts for those of you with personal and business accounts. Twidroid allows the uploading of pics and vids to sites, url shorteners, the ability to reply to all, to follow and unfollow peeps, the ability to search and to search based upon a geo location. I'm guessing that Twitter's free app might improve over time to give Twidroid a run for it's money. And Seesmic is probably the best free solution out there today with it's features and beautiful interface. But if you need the very best twitter app right now, that would be Twidroid. Price: $3.99 USD Twidroids Website.

Kindle - I didn't think it was ever going to happen! But Amazon's Kindle app is now available for Android devices. I enjoy reading from both my computer and my Nexus One. This app does a great job of syncing all my computers and my Android device. The app of course, is free and there are several books available for free also. The bestsellers are usually cheaper than their Hard Copy Cousins. The app allows bookmarking, Archiving, it's easy to search for new books, and of course it's a one click purchasing process once you have set yourself up through Google Market. Anytime I find myself waiting, I launch this app and take up right where I left off on my PC. If you need an ebook reader app for your Android device, this is it! With Amazon's library and their ability to support apps for different devices, there really aren't any real competitors. Launching the app from your android device autosyncs your last place, regardless of the device you were in prior. Books are not dead! And if Amazon has anything to say about it, they never will be! Website

Handcent SMS - This is one of the most flexable, most customizable SMS apps available for any platform! And it's FREE! I could feature a whole article on what all this app can do, and probably will sometime in the future! It threads, and gives you total control for colors, fonts, and backgrounds. Add profile pictures to your Contacts! Hit the speaker button to have your text read to you! Define different ringtones, and if supported on your device, different color notifications. And yes, you can attach your vids and pics to send also! If you do messaging, you have to have this app managing them. The user interface is beautiful and if you don't think so, you can tweak it until it's to your tastes! I have barely scratched the surface of the abilities of this app! Here is the website if you would like to learn more.

So as of today, these are my top five Android apps! Let me reiterate that to make my "Top Five" list, I have to use them everyday! There are many other apps on my Nexus that I love! Look for future articles highlighting those.

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