For half a year my job has been getting me in “touch” 🙂 with Apple devices: an iPad 3G+WLAN and a new iPod touch. Most of the time we use these devices for testing our mobile websites and to find out how the rest of the mobile world does it. As I’m not that in favour of spending so much money for an Apple phone I ordered a startup Android 2.1 phone some time ago. The actual Huawei-manufactured Vodafone 845 comes with a pretty small resistive 320×240 pixel display – but: hey, it came only 100€!
After trying many many apps the following list is an overview of my favorite ones. I might add a list pretty useful iOS apps in another article together with Benjamin in the next days.
Games
123 Maze Lite
Maze game which get’s quite tricky in the later levels.
http://market.android.com/details?id=maze.game
Scumm VM (alpha)
The scumm VM is a virtual machine for the best adventure games ever – created some years ago by Lucas Arts. Till now I could only find a very early ported version for android but following the instructions in the website at: http://sites.google.com/site/scummvmandroid/ I got the manually installed apk running. You’ll need some files from the scumm VM project (datafiles) – just stick to their FAQ and it should work.
You can get some of the old games from abandonware games website on the web or just copy the data from your 3.5″ floopy disks :-). I successfully played Monkey Island 1 + 2, Zak McKraken, Sam & Max and Day Of the Tentacle (though the sound is sometimes cracking).
X Construction Lite
Like the bridge builder and Pontifex games in X Construction you have to compose stable bridges for a train using metal segments.
http://market.android.com/details?id=de.hms.xconstruction
Traffic Jam Free
Rushhour is a puzzle game where you have to move cars out of the way so a yellow can drive to the exit. Thousands of levels and you can set the difficulty in various steps.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.jiuzhangtech.rushhour
Labyrinth Lite
The kids just love it, though the lite version does not come with many levels.
http://market.android.com/details?id=se.illusionlabs.labyrinth.lite
Andoku
Yet another Sudoku game with many variations and thousands of levels.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.googlecode.andoku
Android Invasion
Space invaders clone.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.invadersgame
Chess for Android
You can set the CPU strength which gives even my bad chess skills a chance to win.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.chess
Droid Balance Lite
Fun with the position sensor of the phone. By turning the phone left and right you have to get rid of red shapes while preventing the blue ones from falling down.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.DroidBalanceLite
Gensoid Lite
Gensoid is an emulator for good old SEGA games, such as Sonic the Hedgehog or Street Figther.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidemu.genslite
Math Attack & Math Workout
Two “brain-train” math games.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.chilisapps.android.mathAttack
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.akbur.mathsworkout
National Flags Quiz
Either you have to chose the correct country name according to a shown flag or the other way around. I knew suprisingly few of them …
http://market.android.com/details?id=net.fractalgate.android.nationalflags
Save Newton Lite
Using arrows shot by a bow you have to save Newton from apples falling from the tree.
http://market.android.com/details?id=ml.game.android.SaveNewton.lite
Sea Fight
Classic sea fight game. Just place your ships wise and try to nuke the CPU one’s.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.ztech.seafight
Tools & spare time
c:geo
All-you-need for geocaching. Just connected my geocaching.com account and turned on GPS and it worked like a charm. Comes with Google maps overlay, GPS compass, detailed cache information with riddles, coordinates and user hints. You can store geocache information for later use – e.g. if there’s no network in the woods.
http://market.android.com/details?id=carnero.cgeo
IMDb
Accesses movie information from the internet movie database. Very handy for quicky looking up a movie or what actor did which movie and such.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.imdb.mobile
Google Sky Map
Ever looked to the night sky and wondered: what’s the name of that bright star? Google sky map can tell you, just point your phone into the direction of the target.Can also guide you to find a specific galaxy or star.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid
DailyStrip
Displays comic strips which you can chose from a large list. I’m much in favour of XKCD, Dilbert and Peanuts.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.fusetree.android.dailyStrip
fring
Instant message client for Gtalk, msn, icq or yahoo. Can also do video calls. I’ve been using it for ICQ chatting sometimes.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.fring
barcoo
Given a scanned barcode of a grocery item you can look up it’s caloric values or where to get it with best price.
http://market.android.com/details?id=de.barcoo.android
Mileage
Small app for tracking fuel consumption and gas station prices.
http://market.android.com/details?id=com.evancharlton.mileage
By the way: I used the QR Code generator by Jason Delport of Paxmodept to create the QR codes. You can get market links and package names of android apps using androlib.com and – as of today, I believe – you can visit the market links using any browser as google opened the market for the web.
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