Some Android for Everyone

My Last (Not Smart) Phone

A colleague of mine recently wrote about his favorite Android Apps.   His post does mention some very worthwhile apps, which I won’t post here (since you can view them here).  But first, a little backstory.

I’m a geek, that much I can admit, but I was never one to see my phone other than a way to place and receive phone calls.  Why the hell would I ever want Internet on my phone?  The Blackberries came, the Palms came, and everything in between came…but I still was steadfast, nay, stubborn in my insistence to stick with the simplest phones I could find.

Then the iPhone came along.  Suddenly your phone could do more than look at the “mobile internet”, it could look at the actual internet.  It was smaller, but damn if it wasn’t there.  Yet, I still relented due to my general anti-Apple mentality.  Like I said, stubborn.

I finally gave up  on November 5th, 2009 (Remember remember the fifth of November?).  The Droid had come out, and I had recently acquired a Google Voice number (which I still haven’t used, honestly).  So after 6 years of owning a cell phone, Joel Doetsch finally broke into the smart-phone market, and he hasn’t looked back since that day. Now after all that, if you’re still reading the article…here are my favorite Android Apps (in no particular order)

Locale – Locale is an amazing app.   You set up what are called situations that, when triggered, alter your phone’s behavior.  For instance, If I am in the radius that I designate as “work”, and it is between 9am and 6pm, and it is a workday, my phone is set to vibrate.  Same with the movie theatre.  If I want to change my phone’s background based on the time of day, I can do that.  I can even set precedence.  For instance, if my family calls while I’m at work, my phone will ring (albeit at a lower volume), but anyone else?  Sorry.  That just scratches the surface.  There are tons of plug-ins (mostly free) that you can install to give you even more control.  Put simply, probably one of my favorite apps in existence.

Phonalyzer – I enjoy statistics, no matter how random or mundane.  It is for this reason that this app keeps me entertained.  It may only hold my attention for 10 minutes every couple days but that’s good enough.  This app creates graphs based on your phone usage.  You can see a pie chart of incoming/outgoing or missed/received.  You can see line graphs that show you which days of the week or hours of the day you have the most calls or call time.  You can even see a graph that distributes your call length (given this one is rather boring, as it turns out, 90% of my calls last less than 2 minutes).  It does the same with text messages as well.  You can even set it to reset during your billing cycle, in which case you can switch between the current billing cycle and all-time.  It’s a handy way to see your calling habits while keeping track of your minutes.

Mileage – Following on the last app, here’s an app that tracks your gas consumption habits.  You fill in the price of fuel, gallons of fuel, your odometer reading and the date and the app does the rest.  It shows you a history of your last few fillups and it gives you a list of statistics (Average, Min, Max, Most Recent) for the Distance traveled, Fuel Economy,  Fuel Price, and Fillup costs.  Following this is totals for fuel amounts and expenses (Total, Last Month, Last Year).  As an added bonus, it shows you the outer boundaries of where you fill up (the furthest north, south, east, and west that you’ve filled up).  We’re not done, though.  The last tab shows you charts for all of the measurements I mentioned previous.  What?  More?  More, you say?  Ok, you can use this for multiple vehicles, save your service intervals with reminders AND import and export data via SQL or CSV.  Oh yeah, I went there.

Sudoku Free – There’s not too much to say here.  It’s said that working your brain 15 minutes a day can do wonders in the long run for your mental health.  I love Sudoku because there’s no need for guessing.  If you’re smart enough, you can figure it out.  I use this app constantly when I’m waiting for food or during a commercial break.

Google Sky Map – I haven’t had a huge opportunity to use this one because it’s bloody cold out (I really have a deep seated hatred towards the winter months).  This is an app that, when pointed at the night sky, gives names to all those stars that you’re seeing using GPS.  I can’t wait to try it out in more…comfortable weather.

Mother TED - For those of you who don’t know, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, and it is simply the most brilliant minds delivering talks on everything from Evolution to Nanotechnology to Particle Physics and beyond.  I can’t begin to tell you how much you can learn just from listening to these men and women who are the crowning achievements of human intellect.  That is, unless you’re afraid?  Chicken?  *Bgawk*

Ringdroid – Ringdroid is a fancy tool that allows you to cut up an mp3 into a ringtone.  As a person who dislikes buying ringtones and as a person who has non-mainstream taste in music, this is a godsend

Metal Detector – Oh hell, I just like telling people I have a metal detector in my phone then laughing at their astounded faces.  It seems there is a line of what people will and won’t believe that your phone can do.

My honorable mention is Keyring, which is supposed to be an app that lets you scan the barcodes of your store membership cards, gym membership cards, etc…so that you don’t have to keep them in your wallet or purse.  Ideally, you’d pull up the app, pull up the correct card and run it through the scanner.  I’ve heard success stories, but the only couple times I’ve tried, the scanner won’t read the digital screen.

That’s all from the brain of Joel.

Until next time…