Ubuntucat

I’ve been using Android two full years now, trying out various apps and uninstalling the ones I don’t want. This is what I have left over.

I’m someone who likes to play Angry Birds, and I also like to flash new Android roms from time to time. Losing that game data (completed levels, high scores) would be sad. This app makes it very easy to back up Angry Birds, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Seasons.

While I don’t get Android fanatics bragging about how great it is to have Flash on Android, it is nice to have as an option from time to time, particularly for annoying restaurant websites built on Flash or for watching Amazon Prime streaming movies. That said, I also don’t get iPhone fanatics complaining about Flash draining the battery. Every major web browser on Android plays Flash on demand by default (as opposed to automatically). Flash doesn’t run unless you want it to.

On computers, I find Adobe Reader to be a bit sluggish in launching. Oddly enough, it’s quite snappy on my Android phone. Great for PDF viewing.

Great VNC viewer. Does what it’s supposed to.

Yes, I don’t really game that much, but I’m addicted to Angry Birds (and Rio and Seasons).

AutoRotate is a nice thing most of the time. Every now and then you don’t want the phone constantly switching from portrait to landscape and vice versa. This allows you to bind the holding down of the Search key to toggling AutoRotate.

Speedily loads Microsoft Office documents for viewing.

Yes, I’ve tried Mirren, Opera, Firefox, Skyfire, Browser, xScope, and all the rest. I still keep coming back to Dolphin. I love the gestures, the tabs, the speed dial, the configurability. It just is a fantastic all-around web browser.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t sync automatically, but it’s still a good way to share files.

This is a great file browser, because it lets you browse files but also lets you switch to being a root explorer if your phone is rooted. If you don’t know what rooting is, don’t worry about it—ES is still a good file explorer.

If you use Facebook, the app will give you a better experience than even the mobile version of the website.

I actually think the Firefox Android app is terrible, but I keep it installed just in case it gets better.

Not great for editing. Still good for viewing your online Google Docs.

Unlike Facebook, this Google+ app appears to be designed from the ground up to be an app and not just an it’s-better-than-the-mobile-site app.

I actually like this Google Reader app better than the Google Reader website on a regular laptop. The next and previous buttons are conveniently always visible, and the feeds load quickly.

A very handy tool to do quick translations from various languages. I use it for Italian to English or English to Italian. There’s a convenient toggle button to swap the source and destination language.

I’m not going to lie—this app is terrible. Nevertheless, Google Voice itself is awesome. And the Google Voice app is still the best way to use Google Voice, so this is what we’re stuck with.

A simple and unpolished app that has a picture of a guitar and six buttons to press to play the sound of the E, A, D, G, B, and E strings.

At work recently I’ve been taking pictures with my phone and then emailing them to myself to document problems, and emailing the large files just takes way too long. For web quality, this app will make a fast shrunken copy to send via email, Dropbox, or whatever method you prefer.

If you like to read the Bible or just reference it, this is handy, as it allows you to quickly switch between translations and browse by chapter or book.

This is an easy way to see what’s opening, what’s playing nearby, and what gets good reviews.

Eh. I’m not impressed by the Google Music Beta service. As with Firefox Beta, I’m just checking this out to see if it gets better.

The app isn’t great. You can’t really check out reviews or see your queue by thumbnail. Still, if you’re stuck in an airport with a delayed flight, this makes for a good time-waster.

Before there was Angry Birds (and before I got my own smartphone), this is what I used to steal my wife’s iPhone to play. Mindless fun.

You need a rooted phone to run this, but it allows you to take screenshot by delay (instead of having to shake your phone to take a screenshot) or just by holding down the power button and then selecting Screenshot.

Skype video chat finally arrived for Android. Yay. It saved my butt when I had to have a remote conference and wasn’t near a computer.

Navigating a computer remotely with a tiny phone screen isn’t ideal, but for quick checks or small changes, TeamViewer is great to have.

My math skills have deteriorated over time. I can’t do 15%, 18%, and 20% in my head, so I have this. It also gives you the easy ability to split the check among various people if you are eating in a large group.

Yes, I use T-Mobile. This helps me check on my data usage, which so far hasn’t gone far above 2 GB per month.

Actually easier to navigate than the real Twitter website. They also fixed the refresh so that it won’t push down what you’re currently reading (it’ll just make more available when you scroll up).

You know that extremely loud annoying camera shutter sound when you take a picture? This helps you turn down that system volume. I used to use Sound Manager, but it kept resetting back to the loud system volume. This app keeps the volume where you set it and allows you to lock it there.

Ugly Scrabble game you can play with friends on other phones. Even though it’s ugly, it’s much better than Words with Friends. You can’t start a game with someone without her consent. You won’t accidentally start multiple games, and notifications tell you not only that it’s your turn but also what your opponent played and how much she got for it.

I keep this around for one friend who has an older iPhone and can’t install WordFeud. This is terrible for all the reasons stated above. The only good thing is that you don’t have to manually zoom in. If you are zoomed out and place a tile down, it’ll zoom in to where you’re placing the tile.

I’m debating whether this is better than the Yelp normal site or not. I stopped using the normal site because every time you go there, it’ll pester you to install the Android app instead.

Finally! It took Zipcar long enough to release an Android app. The iPhone has had this for years. Can’t wait to make last-minute reservations and unlock the car with my phone!

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that my blog posts have become less frequent lately and more about my smartphone than anything of importance. Basically, I’m of the opinion that people shouldn’t write unless they have something to say. You’ll see I have some 500+ blog posts, many of substance, with perspectives not often expressed by others. Generally, though, if I feel a certain way about an issue, and I see that plenty of others have already blogged the same perspective (or if even I have in the past), I just don’t see the point in saying “Yeah, me, too” or “Let me repeat what I said before.”

So this is for the ten MyTouch 4G users out there who are reading. Maybe there are only three of you, actually.

For two years, I’ve been using Cyanogen roms. They’re solid. They’re good. I’ve even donated a very small amount to the project. I used Cyanogen on my old MyTouch 3G, and I used it for my currenty MyTouch 4G.

Just on a whim, I thought I’d try another rom, and I ended up trying [ROM] (v1.3.1) CM Nexus Gingerbread 2.3.5 – Faux123 [Aug-30-2011]. It’s a good rom with some bad defaults.

The good:

• It’s fast and responsive.
• It’s very close to vanilla Gingerbread (doesn’t even include ADW Launcher or a custom boot splash screen).
• Even though the developer says Updates for this ROM will NOT be very FAST or FREQUENT due to my LACK OF TIME…, it actually appears to get updated more often than the official Cyanogen rom. It’s gone through 27 versions since the beginning of April.

The bad:

• There are multiple download links, but whichever one I picked, the download speed was extremely slow, and the announcing post did not include an MD5 hash to verify the download integrity. In case anyone’s curious, my download appeared to be fine afterwards, and the MD5 hash was cedcfd08aba0b7717f3c9b0237089290.
• The keyboard default is to make a loud clicking sound (much like a typewriter) with every key press. And before you log in, there’s really no way to turn this off or even adjust the volume. Fortunately, once you do log in, you can turn it off.
• The keyboard is also an English/Asian keyboard by default, with both Chinese and Japanese input methods. I’m all for accessibility, but this is a bit confusing, since the thread announcing the rom is totally in English on an English-speaking forum, and there’s mention at all in the rom description that it’s a trilingual keyboard. I had to Google how to get rid of it and bring back the standard Gingerbread keyboard (long-press a text input box and then select Input Method).

Another nice thing—and I’m not sure it has anything to do with the rom itself, since I checked the /system/build.prop file, and the phone identifies itself as HTC Glacier, which is the original model name of the MyTouch 4G phone—is that I can natively install Netflix from the Android Market (no need to trick the Market into thinking I have another phone or no need to manually download a copy of the .apk from some random place). So either Netflix finally expanded official support to the MyTouch 4G, or the rom builder included some other workaround that isn’t modifying the build.prop file.

Overall, a nice rom (with a couple of bad defaults), and the 3in1 Angry Birds Backup app was instrumental in making the move over relatively painless.