![]()
This week is a short and sweet look into some great Audiobook player apps for you Androids: MortPlayer Audio Books by sto-helit.de and the Audible app by none other than Audible.com. While there are other apps that might play audiobooks well enough (i.e. Meridian Player), I am focusing this week's article on these two.
![]()
This week in the media category of Android Apps, I took a look at the various streaming audio player solutions available on the market. This is for those of you who like to listen to radio stations but don't have an FM tuner built in to your phone. I use this at the gym and when I'm on my bike, but there are plenty of other applications for this as well. StreamFurious is so far the best App that I've found that helps play M3U/PLS streams from the Internet (AAC+ streams are supported in the Pro version).
This week's readers get a two-for-one deal. Access to a great Android device with a side of sound advice for your day-to-day life! That's right, managing a personal and family budget is one of the most important things that we can do to keep life running smooth and our credit ratings high. Traditionally, most budgeting and financial planning applications are designed for desktop computers and often rely on manual data-entry to be able to put all the numbers into one place. Mint.com is an App for Android that leverages modern technology to make financial management as seemless as possible, and all from your phone.
Have you ever been away from your home or work computer and needed to access something on those hard drives? What if you forgot to tell your computer to render that home video you had just edited? Or did you simply forget to turn the computer off? Well, LogMeIn Ignition solves every one of those problems. This is the app that you didn't even know you wanted. This is every power user's dream!
![]()
The default Chrome-like browser that Google provides with the Android Operating System is a decent, standards-based web browser. But just because it's a decent App doesn't mean you have to live with it. Today you get a double dose of Android App of the Week as I look a two very viable alternative browsers: Skyfire and Opera Mini.
This week brings a small and simple utility for adding some fun to photos taken with the camera on your Android device. FxCamera is independently developed, but has a fairly large user base with over 18,000 ratings and 250,000 downloads to date. The developer behind the program is quite active, even if the English language skills are a bit off.
This week I decided to do a little spotlight on Social Media, particularly, Twitter. Now, there are quite a few Apps out for your Android device that fill this function, such as Seesmic or the ever-popular Twidroid, but the real question is which one to choose? Well, after testing each of the "main-contender" programs for some time, I believe I've found a real winner: Touiteur by LevelUp Studio.
One of the more lackluster aspects of the Android device is its media player and default functionalities. While Android 2.1 brings some enhancements especially with the picture gallery, there is still a lot to be desired in terms of its audio and video players. Thanks to afzkl, an independent developer, for creating an excellent video player app, mVideoPlayer.
One of the things Apple did right in developing their iPhone OS software is the functionality that has text messages (SMS and MMS) pop up in a dialog window, giving you the ability to quickly delete or reply to any messages that you receive. Google's default offering through its messaging service uses the notification bar to inform you and allow you to access messages. Some people like the unobtrusive way the default application informs you of messages, others prefer the pop up style of messages the iPhone offers. The people at Handcent Software ask: Why not have both? Why not have even more options?
Okay, so the Android OS developers over at Google made some pretty smart choices when programming for audio, If you're a heavy sleeper, you want your alarm volume to be super loud, but at the same time, you don't want to blow out your eardrums listening to your music at full blast. Hence, there's a volume control for Media applications as well as Alarms. There's also volume controls for notifications, ringer, and a general system volume. The problem comes into play when you need to change each of the volume settings for different circumstances. How frustrating is it when you need all of your volume settings to be set to zero, when there's no way to easily do this with the default programs. Introducing Volume Settings a.k.a. cVolume...