Android is rapidly catching up with Apple in the smartphone war, mainly thanks to it’s great App Store, which is the only one anywhere near large enough to have a chance at taking down Apple. So let’s have a look at some of the best free Apps on the Android Marketplace, you’ll find some of them are also found on the App Store as well.
(I’ve added the QR Codes so you can quickly download them from the Android Market by scanning them)
1. Shazam
By far one of the apps I use the most. This great little app can be found on the App Store as well, but on the Android Market it’s completely free! What it does is allow you to tag songs that you hear so you can download them later. Say for instance you were listening to the radio and you heard a song that you liked, but you didn’t know the name of it. Fire up Shazam and it will listen to the song and identify it. It will then give you the option to search for it on Youtube or download via Amazon.
2.Barcode Scanner
There’s a couple of different Barcode Scanners on the Android market, but in particular is the one from the ZXing Team. Once again it’s free, and what it does is use your Smartphones camera to scan a barcode and grab barcode information. It works with both the Android Market QR barcodes and barcodes that you find on every day products. It doesn’t always work, but generally it does. Once it finds the barcode information, It then presents you with three buttons for Product Search, Web Search and Google Shopper that you can use to find the lowest price of the item on the web.
3.Google Goggles
Now this is a cool little app from Google. What it does is allow you to look at something with the camera on your smartphone. It could be a landmark, a book, a bag of crisps, anything, and it will try and recognize what it is and do a search for it on Google. It can work things out based on your location, so say you were looking at the Eiffel Tower, and it found that you were in Paris, it would put two and two together and show you search results for the Eiffel Tower. A great app for using in every day life and showing off to your friends.
4.Google Sky Map
This app just blows me away, it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Again it’s from Google and just like all the other Apps it’s free. You fire this baby up and it will use the phones compass, date and time, accelerometer and GPS (where possible) to show you a map of the sky where your looking. So say you point your phone to a certain star that you see, it will tell you what one that is, and what star constellation it’s part of. Point it anywhere in the sky and it will give you a detailed map of exactly what you’re seeing. You can even browse it manually and search for planets and stars. It will then direct you where to look in the sky so you can see them for yourself. Definitely one of the coolest Android Apps going.
5.Where’s My Droid
How many times have you put your phone on silent, and then can’t remember where it is? You can try calling it, but it’s on silent so you won’t hear it, and if it’s fallen down the back of your sofa, good luck finding it. But that’s where this great app comes in. Where’s My Droid, allows you to send a message to your phone containing a certain pass-phrase. Once it receives the message it will start ringing your phone at full volume, over-riding the silent mode until you find it. It can even give you a GPS location if you have GPS enabled. A great app, and could be a life saver some day when you lose your phone.
So there are 5 of the best free Android Apps, what else have you got to add to this list?
Let me know in the comments
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