Android Software Recommendation for the Nook
As of last count, Android’s Market has approximately 250,000+ apps to iOS Appstore of 350,000+. The numbers are steadily increasing and while the total number is not representative of the quality of the apps or the platform, it is a healthy sign indicating that the Android platform has attracted its fair share of developers. Having used Android for some time, I will recommending my favourite apps that I can’t seem to do without.
1) Pulse Reader – Pulse is a popular RSS Feed Reader for the Android Platform. The reason is simple. It is breathtakingly beautiful. It presents the newsfeed in a colourful interactive mosaic that maximises the use of the touch screen, i.e. both horizontal and vertical scrolling. While it may sound complex at first, the navigation is intuitive. It is easy to browse through the articles and a clean and elegant in-depth view is readily available at a click.
2) imo.IM – my current Instant Messenger of choice is the imo.IM beta. It provides a clean interface, tabbed chats, supports different IM protocols (Facebook Chat, Google Talk, MSN, Skype and more). Also, it allows multiple logins for MSN which doesn’t seem to work with the other clients, like Meebo, Palringo etc. The simplicity is one of its biggest attractions. It doesn’t try to add in too many extra features, bloating the memory footprint. It just does exactly what it needs to, and it does it well.
3) MoboPlayer – By far, the best video player on Android! It supports a large range of video format, from the standard AVI, MP4, MKV and even the more obscure RMVB format. It has subtitles support and has a clean library interface with auto-thumbnail generation. It does not add any watermark to the video, providing a sleek interface and none of the other competitors in the video playback category comes close. It’s a must have software for my nook color.
4) ³ (cubed) – The default Android music player is just average, and is strikingly lacklustre if you were to compare it to Apple’s alternative. If you are a frequent music listener, there are much better options out there, and for me, that option is ³. Your album list is displayed as a cube that, when you swipe up and down, spins around, scrolling through your albums. You can also swipe left and right to scroll through the alphabet instead of through your albums (which makes the process a bit faster). It has album-art fetching, and a last.fm plugin.
5) Adilko – I was looking for the Nook application when I stumbled upon Adilko and that stopped my search for an eBook reader. It supports a variety of formats and notably ePub, the industry standard format for digital publications and incorporates facilities for browsing online catalogs on thousands of books (including thousands of free public domain work) and downloading them directly into your personal library. The application features a day / night reading mode and the standard tweaks to borders / font sizes and also features a bookshelf-like user interface that allows for easy browsing and navigation of the books.