Recommended Android Applications

Google Voice,Nestoid,Listen,Advanced Task Killer,PDANet,Nestoid,DroidLight,i Music,ApkInstaller,AK Notepad.

Guava is good if you have a Gizmo5 Account, but it interferes with the Google Voice Ap. It is good to have available but uninstalled if you get in a bind and have used all your 'Anytime' minutes.

We are looking forward to Fennec.

Swype Keyboard works quite well.

Game Emulation on Android

We are not hugely in favour of video games as they suck up a lot of time. When that is what you are going for, keep in mind that Android has a free NES and SNES emulator. iPhone has an emulator also, but no keyboard which makes it effectively unplayable. The Droid keyboard and D-pad work, but cannot compare to a proper Nintendo controller. The G1 keyboard looks better for gaming than the Droid's which is too compact. Gaming should not influence your smart phone decision much, but if it does, remember that the iPhone has a ton of $2-5 games, but there are hundreds of classic S/NES ROMs free with BitTorrent. Palm Pre was a nice try for a Linux Smartphone, but it is a dead-end platform with poor signal coverage and no applications or games to speak of unless it involves NFL, NASCAR, or ESPN. Enough said.

Augmented Reality and other Smartphone News

We've been holding out on buying a smart phone given the rapid acceleration taking place. Some of the applications we have seen are quite impressive. Here is one: Wikitude. Wikitude takes GPS and phone camera input, and overlays points of interest on the image.

By the way, if you check out the Recommended Stories section, you will see more reasons NOT to get an iPhone. Once again, Apple's insistence on running their users' lives drags down the company. Apple has banned an application which remotely administers legal torrent software, and now has also banned the Electronic Freedom Frontier's RSS application because they linked to a parody video Apple found potentially politically incorrect.

Information Technology in a Free Society should be used to enable Free Speech and Expression. We can not abide a company with such anti-human business practices, unless compelled by an oppressive regime as in Israel, Iran, or Zhong Guo. A California based company protected by the US Bill of Rights has no such excuse. We posit that in a well regulated market, such suppressions themselves would be illegal. In the meantime, boycott Apple.