Android Apps Alert 11: Music, news, and word games, too

Looking for the best Android apps? Good luck finding them on your own. But if you do stumble across apps people will love, let the world know. Androinica.com encourages users to tweet great apps with the #androidapps tag on Twitter, and we plan to incorporate that into our weekly notifications of new, updated, or recommended apps. Get to downloading and keep telling us about those exciting #androidapps.

Happy Holidays from Androinica. In light of Christmas, apps were in short supply this week and my time to cover them was even shorter. Here are a few videos showing apps that I think you’ll enjoy. Unlike previous episodes of Android Apps Alert, these videos are split in order to make them easier to upload and share, cutting down on the time it takes for me to edit them.

NPR News

Public radio is now in your hands with NPR news, an official app from one of America’s most known media outlets. Use this application to listen to radio stations and shows from NPR, or tap into the written stories available from the news arm. Fans can browse through NPR’s popular programs or find stories by topics ranging from general news to politics, arts, and business.

WordUp

English was always my best subject in school, so of course I’m going to recommend WordUp. Word nerds will enjoy this game that places letters on a board that players must connect to form words. Players can take turns competing against friends or race against a clock and test their vocabulary in a single-player game. There’s a free lite version, but I highly recommend purchasing the $1.99 upgrade because it’s well worth it.

Shoot It!

The holidays remind us to reconnect with family and friends, but apps like Shoot It! can connect you year-round. Shoot It! takes photos from a camera or SD card and adds a short message to your contacts. Once submitted, the company will send a physical postcard to the recipients address. (Prices start at $0.99 each postcard but can increase depending on region)

iheartradio

Clear Channel promised that it would deliver an Android version of iheartradio before Christmas. They waited until Christmas Eve, but its technically here and well received. With this application, users can listen to Clear Channel stations from various markets. Listen to your local radio, a favorite station in another city, or listen to a station centered around one artist.

Museek

We all know that the default music payer for Android is kind of disappointing, so maybe you’ll get a kick out of Museek. This media app organizes your music library visually, allowing you to browse through album covers and find similar songs. Smart shuffle can recognize if you’re skipping a lot of dance songs in favor of rock, so Museek will recognize this and play similar songs.

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shoot it! creates printed postcards created on Android devices

In an age of calling cards, IM, email, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes, it’s hard to believe that people still send postcards to their loved ones. Though it would seem like modern technology has mostly replaced the classic modes of communication, shoot it! is trying to merge the two together.

shoot it! is a postcard service that lets users create a greeting with their Android phone and then have a 4 x 6 paper postcard sent to someone they choose. People can take photos of iconic images of where they visit or snapshots of themselves in new places, and then arrange to have that image printed and mailed to friends or family. Users can select addresses in their contacts or type in an address manually.

The cost of one of these postcards is 99 cents in the US; $1.24 for other North American countries, Great Britian, and Japan; and $1.49 for Western Europe and Asia. After users add their personal message and pay this fee, shoot it! prints a high-quality card stock postcard that is mailed by the following business day. *At the moment, postcards can only be sent from the US and Western Europe.

Travelers, military personnel, and annoying college roommates who decide to backpack through Europe after graduation rather than get a job like the rest of us, even though they still owe us $300 for that last month of rent, will probably find shoot it! to be very useful. 

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Seesmic app gets an update; adds support for Lists, Search and more

Seesmic has been in the market for a few weeks now, and it has seemingly been on a pretty regular update path. Just after the release, we saw the first update which was really just a fix, but this latest update offers more — it comes with new feature support.

And just to get this out of the way, the Seesmic app can be found in the Market by searching for, you guessed it — “Seesmic” It also remains available as a free download.

Now getting back to this latest update, it is version 1.1 and with that comes better searching, more ways to share, an option to change the font size and support for Twitter Lists.

• Searches: We’ve added a full set of features for Twitter search. View your saved searches, search on Twitter for Tweets, search for users, see current Trending Topics, create and save new searches, delete existing saved searches.
• Share with Seesmic: Easily share links, photos or videos using Seesmic. Simply share your item via “Seesmic” and a new message will be created with the content you’re sharing.
• Font size setting: You can now change the font size of the timelines text from the settings and choose the size that is the most convenient to you.
• Twitter Lists: Be able to view and manage your Twitter Lists in Seesmic for Android. View your Twitter lists (that you are following and lists that are following you) as well as lists for all the users from their profile. You can also follow and unfollow a list right from the app.

[via Seesmic Blog]

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NPR app for Android now available for download

NPR fans rejoice, the NPR app for Android is now available. First things first, the app, which is available as a free download can be found in the Market. Just launch the Market, search for “NPR” and begin the download.

As far as what the app can do, here are a few of the feature;

• Backgrounding. The NPR News app for Android allows backgrounding, so that users can click to listen to audio and then toggle between applications as the audio is playing. It also uses open source code, allowing developers to iterate and improve the app in the future.
• Listen and Read. Allows users to listen to programs and read news at the same time.
• Extensive Topics section. News section showcases NPR’s top 10-20 topics of the day ranging from Science to Books to World News.
• NPR station listening choices. Easy to find and bookmark more than 600 favorite NPR stations and hundreds of station on-demand streams. Live station streaming to launch in Spring 2010.
• Playlist. Bookmark favorite programs to play later.

And just in case you needed anything more in terms of why, feel free to check out the screen captures below.

[via NPR.org]

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Slingbox for Android speculation

I don’t own a Slingbox, but I probably would if they had an Android-based app for viewing content like the one they have for the iPhone or the Blackberry. Watching my own TV content on my Android phone screen sounds great to me, and it apparently sounds good to the new hordes of Android users coming online as well. Run a search for “android” on the Sling Community site, and you’ll see the following results (among others like them):

SlingPlayer on Android? Vote here! “How’s it going? I have the HTC Droid Eris. How about getting the SlingPlayer client on our Android phones? Please go to the link below and vote on getting the SlingPlayer mobile software for our…”

HTC hero . Android “Have sling develloped a player for android ? had it on an N95 for three years worked great.would be nice if sling could devellop something . The android operating system has been out for some…”

SlingPlayer Mobile for Android Still a Possibility “Since the G1 launched last year, the Android faithful have been clamoring for a SlingPlayer app to run on their Google-iscious handets. Now that a slew of new Android players are hitting the market, like…”

The rants come angry and often in discussions like “SlingPlayer Mobile on Android?” In fact, four of the threads on the front page of Sling Community’s “New, Rumors, and Gossip” forum are questions about Android. How can something that seems so obvious to everyone else escape the notice of Sling Media?

Speculation time. I don’t think that Sling Media is unaware of Android’s current market share. It turns out that Sling Media plans to be at CES in January, and one of the most reasonable things they could do there is announce support for what is now the world’s fastest growing cell phone OS (and 2nd overall in the global Smartphone market). Again, this is just a guess on my part, and I have no evidence supporting this notion whatsoever. I made a few calls to the Sling folks, but they wouldn’t answer me. The only other thing that I can think of that would prevent a company from choosing to earn more money is a pre-existing agreement with someone else. Perhaps a certain fruity company?

In any case, this may be a situation that resolves itself when another competitor shows up first. Orb has a competing solution, but they lack a simple set-top box to make it work (you have to permanently attach a PC to do the streaming). Maybe they have something in the works. I sure hope so, because like lots of others, I want to be able to watch my TV content on my Android phone.

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General Mobile to release its own app store with new phone

It seems like every couple of months, I’m hearing about another Android store seeking to be an alternative to the Android Market. I learned about SlideMe several months ago, followed by the AndAppStore, Handango, Mikandi, and then the upcoming shops from Motorola and Sony. Do we really need another app Market for Android?

Yes, according to General Mobile, makers of the first dual SIM Android phone (DSTL1). General Mobile just sent me a message that they are working on a sequel to the DSTL1 that will include their own app market – Storeoid. Naturally, I had to ask why they felt the need to create yet another market alternative and received the following response:

1. Google Market is not available in many countries because of the Google restrictions ( eg. many European countries)

2. We produce some specific products. For example our DSTL1 device has a dual SIM support, and it needs some special applications.

3. Some applications will be localized from country to country

4. There is no content filtering in Google Market but we have [it in Storeoid]

5. The Google Android Market search bar does not work very well, but our search bar will work better than the actual one

Here’s a gallery of what Storeoid will look like. Keep in mind that General Mobile does not say all of these apps will appear in the market.

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