The Android app suggestion thread

[superb1]

Since a growing amount of guys have or are going to android phones and tablets, leave your suggestions on apps to try.

sent from the pseudo GM offices of the Charlotte Hornets

[ziggy]

A few apps that I like are

google goggles
flipboard
hulu plus
lifehacker
tapatalk

[Adam42R]

Juice Defender is tremendous for battery management (I have a friend w/ a GS3 who found it a bit flakey with streaming audio apps however when the screen goes to sleep)
Start-Up Auditor (I used Start-Up Auditor Free - limited functionality but does what I want) as a way to suppress apps that want to start up on boot.
avast! Mobile Security - I have tried a half dozen free security apps and found this to be the least intrusive (e.g. most performant)
doubleTwist - easily my favorite free app for syncing to iTunes on a Mac and I have tried several. It's the only one I found that gives you a pseudo iTunes interface so you can manage music & podcasts you want to sync w/ your Android phone.

If you have an MS SkyDrive account, MS One Note is a great way to share docs. I have Evernote and the Evernote widget too - both are great tools, I use them in different ways but they basically do the same thing at their core.

Also, Opera Mobile for some older devices can be a HUGE performance bump concerning HTML5 specs. On some devices, it's a minimal gain over the standard android browser (here's a test site for html5 spec compliance/performance - http://html5test.com/).

Another tool (and site) that I am not sure most folks are familiar is DuckDuckGo which is a nice search engine for deep dives into particular sources (look up the !notation on duckduckgo.com - there's a standalone app that I use a lot on my phone).

You will also want a good file system manager - I have used a couple and found ASTRO File Manager to be the one that I stuck with.

Having said all of that, I am excited to see what the next flight of WP8 devices will look like - the integration with Win8 is tempting me away from the Android ecosystem. Although, with the Sammy Galaxy S IV and HTC M7 coming out, it might be a tough decision.