I’ll be making updates on the Android market as it continues to develop through its infancy. My hope is to download and experiment with as many applications as possible in order to give you a recap of the most useful tools. Rather than being negative towards certain applications and risking death threats from developers, I’ll only focus on the applications that I continue to use and am willing to endorse.

Applications

AccuWeather – Best weather application out so far. It’s lack of interactivity and features are made up for by it’s stability and graphic interface. Good way to get a quick weather update in the morning before heading of to work. I picked this over iMapWeather because I can be specific about my location and am not forced to view what it thinks is my current geographic location.

Android File Manager – Essentially a must have if you dont want to have to plug in your phone or remove your SD card when you need to make changes. Allows simple functionality of a file manager, maybe one too many button presses to get things done, but all-in-all a great tool.

College Football Live / Pro Football Live – Really impressed me on game day, updates frequently while open, accurate scores, and a nice interface for keeping track of your favorite teams, conference, or the whole shebang. Could be improved by enabling drag-and-drop to change the order of the teams around.

Compare Everywhere / ShopSavvy – This is quite a tossup between the two. Compare Everywhere has given me book results at the local library, ShopSavvy has beautiful interface. CE picks up location specific results quite quickly, SS is a bit spotty. I think the thing to consider is that they are both developing and worth trying out. I use both, and may none day make a final decision

BistroMath – Of all the tip calculating programs out there, this may be the best one. It’s not flashy, it’s not glitzy, but it has all the functionality with the cleanlieness of a web application. Some  of the other apps were just plain ugly.

ConnectBot – SHELL access from your phone. Wow, works great, looks great, feels like the real thing. If you dont know what this is, don’t worry because you probably don’t need it. Otherwise, this is another must-have!

Countdown/Stopwatch – Simple countdown timer, you dont even need to open the keyboard to use this. Simple start and stop application to start counting time. I’d like to see a real clock application with count down and count up.

Flashlight - Best app to use your phone as a light, probably to find keys or something dropped in a dark place.

Gmote – Lets you use your phone to browse media on your pc over the network. Works really well in most cases. Just kind of lacking on the interface. Does require an install on your pc though

GPS Tracker – If you’re worried about your phone being stolen, get this app. Requires a free online signup, but lets you remotely turn on GPS tracking in the background on your phone. Tracking works really well and can be monitored from the web. This is probably the most important application I have on my phone.

Locale – Forget to turn off your buzzer? Is your wallpaper not work appropriate? Get Locale! It can be set up to switch certain functionality aspects of your phone based on your location. I use it to set my phone on vibrate at work, with a clean background. At home the ringer is blaring loud and has a cute picture of my dog (yeah, I’m soft for my pup), until the evening when my phone goes on silent so I can sleep without interruption.

OI Shopping list – It took a lot of downloads to find a shopping list / list application that satisfied me. This one had tags, easy list cleanup for ‘completed’ items, and a easy interface to manage.

Password Safe – Nice application to store all of your passwords. The program itself is password protected, but it’s nice to have a place to keep all of the information safe with you at all times. Great if you’ve got way too many accounts to remember like I do.

Ringdroid – Make ring tones from your music files. It works like a professional sound editing application, without any need to read the instructions. Super easy, extremely beautiful, would easily pay for this free application.

Twitroid – For lack of any other option, the best Twitter program around. Still very buggy, but does the essential reading and posting of Tweets. Don’t even bother with the camera.

Tunes Remote – Awesome for iTunes users. Controls your iTunes over the network with no need to install anything. Displays album artwork and works like magic. To use, you simply add your device like it were another shared library on the network.

Games (just get these)

Coloroid – Pac Man – Mem – Pop Pop Corn – Divide and Conquer – Light Racer – Slide Puzzle

T-Mobile G1

I received my G1 in the mail yesterday at work and have had some fun times thus far.  Here’s a quick two minute synopsis.

Android is a great mobile OS that deserves a lot of credit. It has taken some getting used to, coming from a long history of Nokia (Symbian) phones, but I’ve adapted and taken quite a liking to my new best friend. The main drawbacks have been the lack of real headphones. Not the lack of a headphone jack, I can understand the need to make money, but the headphones that came with the phone were god awful. The other bother has been more of a time consumption and a realization of disorganization… my Google contacts. Since the G1 uses your Google contacts, there is a long and tiresome process of cleaning up your contacts. First I had to rid myself of duplicate names, merge information, delete unwanted names and when that was all over I had to get rid of all of my “suggested contacts”. Suggested contacts are by far the worst feature of the phone/Google contacts. Suggested contacts appear in most applications when looking up a persons name. NO, I do not want to contact a craigslist posting, I want to contact Craig. It takes about an hour or so, depending on the size of your list (mine was around 400), but it’s worth it in the end. Now you’ve got a clean contact list on your phone and on the web for backup.

The 3G speeds have been phenomenal, a mobile speed test put me at about 375kbit/sec, versus my old 100kbit/sec on Edge. Not only was it fast, I beat out 2 3G iPhone’s on YouTube and page load times (by far) and even better still, managed to beat an iPhone connected to wifi. By no means am I bashing the iPhone, I’m just saying how happy I am with the results.

Which brings me to another thing, android needs some visual designers to get on the ball. I love simplicity just as much as the next CSS obsessed designer, but the iPhone shows us how simplicity and clean graphics can really make things look amazing. A few tweaks here and there could really convince even the most die-hard apple fans reconsider. The applications in the android store, alongside the street view features just make this phone a hard to beat buy. T-mobile customers really shouldn’t be reading this right now, go out and get one.

4.8/5, probably a pretty bias review.

[youtube: my unboxing video]