39. Llama
Price: Free
Llama uses mobile masts to determine your
location instead of GPS, so battery life isn’t affected, and it’s immensely
configurable. Set your locations - such as work, home, the pub - then assign
actions to those locations. Turn off your ringer at work and switch to silent?
Done. Want your phone to ring (or not) when family and friends call? Done.
Auto-sync over home Wi-Fi automatically? Done.
Llama
Essentially, it makes a million daily tasks
disappear, and means that your phone is often doing exactly what you want, when
you want it, without having to remember to do anything manually.
It’s one of those apps that you wonder what
you did without it. And for free it’s a complete winner.
40. Job Search app
Price: Free
Whether you are getting itchy feet in your
current role, or simply want to keep a close eye on the market, Job Search aims
to keep you abreast of all the latest work opportunities.
Powered by lndeed.com, this relatively
straightforward job search engine enables you to hunt for vacancies by type,
location or a combination of both.
Generating results from well- known
recruitment companies such as Reed.co.uk, and the likes of JournalismJobs.com
and Guardian Jobs, you can then follow an external link to begin applying for
the position. Alternatively, you can choose to save the job and return to
review it later.
The search can also be widened to countries
as far away as Dubai and Singapore, and there is also the option to sign up to
receive email job alerts.
There are plenty of things to love about
this app. Search results are quick, which makes up for the sometimes slow
loading of external pages when you select to ‘View & Reply’. However,
features such as updating previous searches with the latest jobs each time you
return to the app, and the ability to look at jobs abroad, make this the
perfect app to help you find your new career.
41. Tuneln Radio Pro
Price: Free
Tuneln
Radio Pro
Tuneln Radio enables you to instantly
access over 30,000 radio stations from across the globe, including thousands of
AM/FM local stations. If you were thinking of investing in a new internet or
DAB radio, you might want to think again, because this app turns your
smartphone into the ultimate digital radio.
There is an almost unimaginable amount of
music, information and entertainment available to you via this app. It is hard
to imagine any music fan, news junkie or sports nut who would not be able to
find a bunch of new stations that would suit their tastes and predilections
with Tuneln Radio. The only real problem is filtering down the massive amount
of choice on offer to something that is manageable and understandable.
Tuneln Radio lets you save your favorites
and also lets you surf the web from within the app, both of which help to make
it the best radio app on Google Play right now. You can easily search for
stations via genre, keyword, location or language, all of which helps to
whittle it down to what you like.
42. Google Maps 5
Price: Free
Google
Maps 5
Google Maps for Android has finally been
given the update it deserves, offering up offline viewing and 3D visualization.
We’ve been waiting a long time for Google
to sort out its Maps for Android. Not that there was anything wrong with the
app - but the promise of 3D views and offline modes made the current iteration
look rather bland. Lucky, then, that Google’s added sparkle doesn’t disappoint.
It’s the 3D maps that’s the killer here.
Viewing some of the major cities in the world on your smartphone and in 3D is
more than impressive. Well, it would be if London was one of the cities chosen
to be emulated in 3D. Instead in the UK we get a virtual representation of
Birmingham, and there’s Dublin for the Irish contingent.
While we can only guess how cool a vectored
Hyde Park is, it was oddly compelling viewing Brum in this way.
Using finger gestures (not those kinds) you
can tilt, rotate and zoom through the 3D map.
The offline mode is a bit of a lifesaver;
the caching of content isn’t for everywhere but it’s useful when you are in a
town that has been given the offline treatment.
Given the fancy new graphics, you would
expect some lag using the app but there really isn’t. Some fancy
behind-the-scenes tech means that the maps are faster than before.
To use the spangly new features, you need
to have Android 2.0 or above.
43. Green Eggs and Ham
Price: $3.65
Green
Eggs and Ham
Green Eggs and Ham is another spectacular
digital adaptation of a Dr. Seuss classic book. The interactive book is a
smashing tool for parents helping their children to learn to read.
There’s professional narration, with the
words highlighted as they’re read, allowing kids to read along as Sam-I- am
uses rhymes to convince his pal that eating green eggs and ham is a good idea.
The words are accompanied by moving
original illustrations and background audio, but perhaps the most useful
elements are the interactive images, which allow children to touch an object or
a person in the story and the word is spoken by the narrator and flashes up on
screen.
For younger kids, the app plays like a
movie in the read-to-me mode, which will keep them entertained until they’re
ready to have a crack at it themselves.
44. Pulse
Price: Free
RSS
feeds are now sexy and cool with the advent of the Pulse news reading app.
Reading RSS feeds on your phone has become
a whole lot easier, with the introduction of the official Google Reader app.
But what Reader doesn’t bring is, well, sex appeal.
Pulse is Google Reader slathered in Sex
Panther and injected with the libido of Hugh Hefner. It’s an app that begs you
to cheat on Google, offering a quick way to import Google Reader RSS feeds.
It teases you into submission by showing
off your favorite websites in such a coherent way. Once you import your feeds,
they appear in rows. In each row is a thumbnail story that you can click and
get a nicely reformatted page of the article.
Pulse is one of the best looking and
easiest news reading apps to use on Google Play - you’ll wonder how you lived
without it for so long.
45. Instagram
Price: Free
The
amazing Instagram turns a run-of-the-mill snap into a work of art
While there’s a ton of camera apps that add
an old-school twist to photographs on Google Play, none does the job better
than Instagram.
Interestingly, Instagram is meant to also
be a social network, where Instagramers can show off photos to one another but
this aspect doesn’t really work and you can opt out if you want to - although
this is set to change with the Facebook acquisition. What does work are the
filters that can be added to a photo after it’s taken. And you can also add
them to pics that you took well before you put the app on to your Android
phone.
Once you have added a filter - there are 18
available - you have the choice of uploading the image to a number of social
networks.
The app makes taking pictures easy and no
matter how bad an image is, there always seems to be one filter that will perk
it up, which is great considering the app is free.
