52. Go Launcher EX
Price: Free
Unused app shortcuts and ignored widgets
can clutter up your home screen. Go Launcher EX is a solution to simplify the
experience of navigating around your phone and keep things nice and tidy.
Clearing your screen initially of any
widgets, you’ll now find in their place app shortcuts for key communication
apps such as Google Talk, Gmail and Places. Below the string of shortcuts you
can find icons to make a call, search contacts, text, surf the web, and an icon
to open other apps. Further app shortcuts can be added by scrolling through the
dock.
Go
Launcher EX
If you want to add more home screens, you
can do that by simply gliding your finger up on the screen to preview available
screens and see exactly what lives on them. You’ll still be able to add
widgets, change your wallpaper, search your phone, share the app, and view
set-up preferences and settings.
For what is essentially a launching
application, features like the task killer and new-look app drawer make this
even more useful to own. All makes for an intuitive experience that will
benefit those who often find they need help keeping their home screens tidy and
more accessible.
53. Firefox for Android
Price: Free
Firefox
for Android
Firefox seems to update its full-blown
browser every single day. But when it came to updating the Android version, we
knew we would be in for something special. This update is one of the best we
have seen, offering up massive improvements in page load times, zooming and
panning, and so on.
It takes the slightly annoying mobile
browsing experience and massages it, making it feel less tense and a whole lot
better for surfing the web.
There’s a redesigned user interface that’s
packed with stuff (maybe a little too much) and from here you can import data
from your desktop version of Mozilla Firefox.
Opening up tabs is easier than ever before
and the experience on the whole feels completely intuitive.
Other features include the ability to save
web pages to PDF, and tiny text is easier to read thanks to a small text
inflation tool.
With built-in Flash and HTML5, Firefox for
Android is how mobile browsing should be done, and when it comes to speed, no
other browser comes close. Chrome, it is over to you!
54. Eurostar Trains
Price: Free
Eurostar
Trains
The Eurostar app enables you to book
trains, check times, and use mobile- ticketing, all in an effort to make your
trip that little bit more manageable.
Focusing first on the home screen, you’re
greeted with visual simplicity itself, consisting of a series of sliders, which
enable you to select where you travelling from and to, when you want to leave
and whether it’s a return ticket.
Using it is an dream. The sliding options
enable you to construct a journey in seconds, then it brings up train times,
prices and which ticket type you’d like. Once that’s done, you can use the
billing profile you’ve previously set up to pay for the tickets, leaving you
with the option of a paper ticket collection or a mobile ticket in the form of
a QR code, which can be scanned at the barriers.
It’s a rare example of an app that makes
what could be a mundane and complex task simple and stress-free.
55. Foursquare
Price: Free
Set
up Foursquare on your smartphone and you’ll soon become addicted
Foursquare is the Eyes Wide Shut of the
social-networking world; you don’t quite know what it is until you join and
then it’s too late to go back.
The social-networking site rewards you
every time you go to certain venues in and around your area. The more times you
visit, the more chance you have of becoming ‘mayor’ of the place, and the
better your odds are for being rewarded points and even badges.
Essentially it gets you out and about in
your town, with the community offering information about local bars, cafes and
so on.
The Android version doesn’t run down your
battery like other location- aware apps and it has the real look and feel of an
app made for Android.
If you are familiar with Foursquare, the
shortcut check-in options will be welcome. Newcomers will also find the site
easy to understand and navigate.
56. Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro
Price: $5.99
For
fitness freaks, Endomondo is the perfect app, keeping track of your efforts
Since it was first released in 2008 for
Symbian, the Endomondo Sports Tracker has been coming on in leaps and bounds,
fixing pesky glitches and becoming a firm cross-platform fave.
It can track almost any exercise, from
running and cycling to snowboarding and Kitesurfing. Using your phone’s GPS,
the app lets you track your progress over Google Maps, recording your average
speed, distance travelled and route. The app holds all this data in a handy
History tab, with a whole host of other data uploaded to Endomondo.com for more
precise analysis. Give the app your weight and it calculates how many calories
you burned during your session, and with an external monitor accessory, it can
monitor your heart rate, which is really useful data.
All the data collected by the app is
uploaded to the Endomondo website, where you can share your achievements (or
lack thereof) with the rest of the Endomondo community, as well as share routes
with other users.
57. Paper Camera
Price: $1.99
Paper
Camera
The quality of cameras on phones may be
improving at a rapid rate but sometimes you need an app to give your images a
distinctive makeover, something Paper Camera offers.
Paper Camera is not an app for those who
like to subtly change their images, because the filters the app offers are
pretty striking.
Once you load the app up - it does take a
few seconds - the most striking filter is first, and that is Sketch Up. This
turns your own photos into a sketch and they look great. We tried it on images
taken outside and inside, and the ones with shadows work better, but the app is
worth it for this filter alone.
Although the other filters aren’t as good,
they are plentiful. Neon Cola gives your images a glowing hue, there’s also a
pop art filter as well as an old-fashioned filter, and one that makes your
images look as though they have been printed on a dot matrix printer.
The app also enables you to change images
already taken or you can take images through the app. There are other tweaks
you can do, including changing the brightness and contrast.
This may be a paid-for app but it is one of
the best camera filter apps we have seen for Android smartphones.
58. Chord!
Price: $2.99
Chord!
Those who can tell their G-strings from
their plectrums know what a pain it is to figure out new chords. The Beatles
may have based their entire career around three chords but sometimes a musician
wants to veer away from A-D-G and do something a little bit crazy. This is
where Chord! comes in. The app is so good that we don’t even mind the
extraneous exclamation mark in its name.
Load it up (it’s only 1.8MB) and what you
have is a digital gateway to every chord in existence. The app’s user interface
may be clothed in drab grey but the information it offers is gold. And it is
not just for guitarists either. If you are partial to a bit of banjo, ukulele,
bass or mandolin, then this app is also great for you.
The best thing we found about this app,
though, was the reverse chord search. If you think you have found an awesome
chord on the guitar but don’t know its name, you simply need to enter in the
tablature of that chord and the database comes up with the nearest match.
For those who haven’t the time to swot up
on music theory, Chord! is an essential purchase.
