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<- Back to part 1 of the myAndroid series.

In this part of the myAndroid series, I will present the best really useful Android apps I could find and test until now.

Let’s begin with the apps on my second home screen, which I call the “organizer screen”:

• Business Calendar Beta: It’s a wonderful Calendar app that can synchronize with the Google and Facebook calendars and also some other ones. The app also comes with a nice widget. Rating: 10/12
• GTasks: Get rid of to-do lists that are not saved in the cloud! Saving to-do actions at Google Tasks is a really good way to get organized. GTasks is also supported by the Executive Assistant app (see below). But without the big widget the app wouldn’t be half as useful as it actually is. Rating: 9/12
• Evernote: Evernote is to general notes what GTasks is to checklists. As a cloud based service it helps you a lot to prevent yourself from getting lost in notes or from losing notes anymore. Photos and images can be attached to notes. Actually, the app has even more features, but I just use those most important ones – and of course the nice widget. Rating: 9/12
• Executive Assistant: Want to feel like a real manager? Get this app! It’s very nice and presents missed calls, unread text messages, mails (for various e-mail accounts), (Google Tasks) checklists, and calendar items all in one screen. And you have easy access to screens for RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and Facebook news feeds. The Executive Assistant is highly configurable and can also be used as lock screen replacement – but using that feature makes the app quite unstable on my system. Rating: 10/12
• Documents to go: Want to have a small office application on your mobile? Here it is. It even allows you to edit Google Docs documents comfortably. It’s really pretty good for a mobile app! Probably the biggest downside is that most of the features only come with the full version, which is one of the more expensive apps (14.99$ last time I checked), but it’s still relatively cheap for a more or less complete office package. Rating: 9/12

Now, let’s check out the many apps that are likely to be on my central home screen (sorted in folders, so that they actually fit into a single screen):
Tools

• Document Scanner: Tired of scanning/copying documents and books with a bulky scanner or copying machine? Just make photos of them and use the Document Scanner to turn them into a nice pdf file that you can upload to Google Docs or Dropbox or other cloud services immediately afterwards! Perfect for the transition from 20th to 21st century! Oh, but only a trial version is available for free. However, the app and also the perspective correction add-on are cheap enough and very much worth their price. Rating: 9/12.
• Thinking Space: Mind-mapping on Android! Yeah, it works, and it’s fun! Is there anything else to say? Yes, it can be synched with MindMeister and supports gesture commands. Rating: 10/12
• WordPress: It’s a mobile version of the admin panel I use to manage this blog. Unfortunately it’s not nearly as good as the webbrowser based interface, but at least it’s much faster than that. Rating: 8/12

Communication

• imo.im: Imho this is the only messenger for Android that really convinces me (there’s also Trillian, but that costs some money and I haven’t tested it). Imo.im supports Skype, Facebook, Google Chat and AIM/ICQ for example. A feature to send voice messages is integrated and cool, but not optimally practical in every case. As with all free multi-messengers there’s the problem that imo.im eats a lot of battery power, so it’s a good idea to switch off the auto-login option. Rating: 9/12
• Yaaic: Connecting to multiple IRC servers and channels is no problem with this free IRC client. Yaaic works fine, but doesn’t have an overwhelming list of features. Rating: 9/12

Photos

• Camera 360: For making photos this app is definitely much better than the regular photo app. It doesn’t make videos though. Rating: 9/12
• Just Pictures: Also the standard galery app is nothing compared to this finely crafted image presentation app. Rating: 9/12
• PicSay: Editing photos and images on your Android phone is really lots of fun with PicSay or PicSay Pro. Apart from colorful speech and thought balloons it supports all standard photo editing capabilitites. Rating: 9/12
• ShootMe: If you want to make screenshots of your smartphone screen, this is the app of choice. Just start it and shake the phone to take a screenshot! Very cool! Rating: 9/12

E-Readers

• Amazon Kindle: Yeah, I really don’t like all that DRM crap, but the comfort of this app convinced me to buy a few Amazon e-books nevertheless. At least those e-books are saved in the cloud, so that reinstalling the system or changing to another platform poses no problem for accessibility. Rating: 9/12
• Moon+ Reader: So, this is how an e-reader should look like! There’s no feature I would miss apart from not being able to access and buy Amazon e-books. Rating: 10/12

Mathematics

• RealCalc: It really looks like my old pocket calculator from school. I like that style. That’s why I list it here although it doesn’t have really impressive features, but at least it’s very easy and comfortable to use. Rating: 8/12
• handyCalc: What’s this? Something like a small CAS for your mobile. Very neat! It also has pretty useful tools like plotting 2d graphs and a currency calculator. Rating: 9/12
• Wolfram Alpha: Although it’s not free and costs a tiny bit of money, it’s worth the price. Connecting to the global mathematical brain is fun. If it also could solve all my mathematics exercises it would be frighteningly good. But plotting 3d graphs and predicting hypothetical market developments (and all the other features that are officially listed) are useful enough. Rating: 10/12

Language

• ColorDict: Wow, a tool that’s a unified dictionary/lexicon/thesaurus (with Wikipedia support)! Many useful packages can be downloaded for this tool, for example packages for translating words into other languages. Rating: 10/12
• Leo Dictionary: If you don’t want to use the official website dict.leo.org you can also master the world’s most popular languages with this useful translation and vocabulary learning app. Good for getting a lot of results quickly, but not as sophisticated as the web application. Rating: 8/12

Navigation

• Google Earth: You probably know about this app. But it’s really good, so I mention it here. Rating: 10/12
• Happy Cow: Good for finding vegetarian/vegan restaurants or stores in your proximity. Rating: 9/12
• Layar: This standard augmented reality app is really cool and useful. Optimal for finding all kinds of services by looking at the cloud layer of reality. Rating: 10/12
• Qype: At least here in Germany this app finds more services in my immediate proximity than I thought would even exist! Rating: 10/12
• Yelp: Is an alternative that is supposed to be good for some other countries. Rating: Test it on your own!

Sensors

• Barcode Scanner: Scans barcodes and tells you where you can find the associated product for the lowest price in the closest location (or something like that). Rating: 9/12
• Tricorder: Trekkie fun! Use all the sensors in your smartphone to get full gravity and acceleration readings and accoustic and EM-spectrum information overload! More fun: Download information about solar activity! Rating: 10/12
• Ulysee Gizmos: It’s a less flashy and nerdy alternative to the Tricorder, but presents lots of useful information on a single screen. Rating: 9/12

Sleep

• Gentle Alarm: After using this app you will wonder how you could possibly live without it! Waking up turns from a nightmare into a really joyful experience when using this awesome alarm clock. Rating: 11/12
• Math Alarm Clock: If you need to get waked up by the most brutal way imaginable, then download this app, which is available for a small price. To turn off the alarm, you need to solve one or more simple or complicated mathematical equations. Afterwards you might feel totally terrible, but you will be really awake for sure! Rating: 10/12
• Relax and Sleep: Using this app with its quite self-explanatory title you can listen to various repetitive sounds that might be soothing (or not) and adjust their volumes. Rating: 8/12
• Sleep Silencer: Important: This app is essential if you use one of those other sleep related apps! It switches off nasty alarms, vibrations and notifications of your smartphone for a period of time that you can specify, so that you can sleep undisturbed by your phone. Rating: 9/12

Finally, in the third and last part of this series, I will present some apps that are rather fun and entertaining than directly useful.

Go to part 3 of the myAndroid series ->