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I was asked by a fellow Twitter user, RhondaUSA, a soon to be new Android user, for a list of “essential apps”.

For her – and everyone else – I’ll share a list of the apps I have installed in my phone; this list is in two parts – the ones I immediately install after upgrading the OS – and the rest.

The “immediate install” list includes:

1) WeatherBug Pro – worth the 2 bucks – it’s nice having the current conditions and three-day forecast on my home screen.

2) Gtasks – a great app to use for Google Tasks – I have two widgets on my home screen: one for my task list and another for the grocery list.

3) Laik Agenda Widget – my wife and I use Google Calendar to share our schedules and the kids’ schedules. The widget is front and center on my home screen.

4) Battery Watcher widget – I like being able to quickly see the percentage left; this does a great job.

5) Retro Clock – I like having a large, easily visible digital clock on the main part of the home screen.

The rest of my downloads include:

6) Speed Test (from Ookla) – nice being able to check your data speeds wherever. This is an easy and effective speed test app.

7) MySpeed – a great combination of a GPS speedometer superimposed over a Google Maps image of where you are right now.

8) TiKL – Touch to Talk – gives Android phones a Nextel-style walkie talkie functionality – the wife and I use this pretty regularly.

9) DigitalClockMini – worth a buck – a very efficient use of a 1 x 1 space on a homescreen – time, day, date, and seconds indicator.

10) TweetDeck – still in beta – but a very promising combination Facebook/ Twitter/ Google Buzz client.

11) T-Mobile My Account – a decent app to show your account balance, SMS quota status, minutes used.

12) Ringdroid – a great app to choose and set audio clips as ring, notification, and alarm sounds on your Android phone.

13) Sleek Camera – a decent camera app with a great zoom feature.

14) Opera Mini – a slick, quick, efficient app for when you don’t need all the bells and whistles of the stock Android browser, especially when you’re not on 3G or Wi-Fi.

15) gReader – a decent Google Reader Android app.

16) Solitaire (by Ken Magic) – a nice game to fritter away time when needed.

17) AutoRotate OnOff – for times when the auto-rotation of the screen can be inconvenient or annoying.

18) ES File Explorer – a great file explorer app that works with the phone’s SD card, a home or business Wi-Fi network, or Bluetooth file system.

19) ixMat Scanner – a quick and efficient barcode app.

20) Google Voice – a tightly integrated front end for Google Voice – can handle calling as well as SMS and voicemail. I mainly use it for the voicemail and SMS (without using my allotted messages from the T-Mobile account).

21) mVideoPlayer – a stable, easy to use video player.

These are the main apps I use on a daily basis on my T-Mobile G1. I have a 8GB Micro SD card on it and run Android 2.2 “Froyo” with CyanogenMod 6.0 RC3.

Enjoy! :)

I’ve been a fan of Opera Mini for a while. It was the primary browser on my first smartphone, the Windows Mobile powered T-Mobile Dash; Mini blew the doors off the default browser, Pocket Internet Explorer.

While some pan Opera Mini for having a somewhat different user interface, its speed more than makes up for it – and the learning curve isn’t that bad.

I’ve used the Android version of Opera Mini 5 for a couple of weeks – and it’s the fastest web browser on my T-Mobile G1. While the standard issue Webkit-based Android web browser is no slouch, at times it chokes on certain web sites. And Opera Mini is noticeably faster than the other web browsers I’ve tried on my G1: Dolphin Browser and the alpha version of Skyfire.

Here are my raves about Opera Mini 5:
1) It starts up more quickly than the stock Android web browser.
2) Its server-side data compression makes web pages render the quickest of any browser on my G1, even on a slow data connection.
3) Its “Speed Dial” start page gives users a quick way to get to their most accessed web sites.
4) Opera Mini uses the “Opera Link” online bookmark storage: handy if one also uses the Opera desktop browser. It was VERY HANDY when I migrated from Windows Mobile to Android.

Here are my rants about Opera Mini 5:
1) It needs an “out of the box” way to be made a phone’s default browser. There’s a separate app to do this; but this is a glaring omission.
2) The app needs to be more multitasking friendly. Right now, Opera Mini relaunches every time a user switches to it from using another app: major annoyance.
3) Opera Mini needs the ability to share web pages just like the stock browser does. It needs to be able to seamlessly pass links to other apps such as SMS, Twitter and Facebook clients, and email programs.
4) In addition having Opera Link, it needs to be able to import or use the same bookmarks accessed by the stock browser (as Skyfire and Dolphin already do).

Opera Mini is a very promising alternative web browser for Android. It’s a few tweaks away from becoming my default browser. Its deficiencies primarily center around how it works with other apps.

The primary way I keep up with RSS feeds is using Google Reader. Today, I took a major step to clean up the information clutter and back down on the cyber-overload. I was getting sick of seeing 1000+ unread items every time I went to check Google Reader.

I have my feeds broken down into 11 groups:

*Android Stuff – updates on the Android mobile phone operating system: news, downloads, and other related items.
*Media Stuff – news relating to the media business and journalism.
*Nonlocal News – news feeds from places where I used to live: the Jackson (MS), Rochester (NY), and Seattle areas.
*Personal Blogs – feeds for blogs of people I know in real life and/or online.
*Points of view – my catch-all for feeds related to religion, politics, opinion, and humor.
*Spanning the Globe – US and International news feeds.
*Sports Sites – sports opinion and news feeds, including sports media.
*Tabloid Trash and Entertainment – gossip and entertainment news feeds.
*Tech News – technology opinion and news feeds.
*Yokels – Ohio local news feeds.
*Mobile Quick Reads – content in this group overlaps the other 10 – and is intended to give me a quick read on my smartphone. I have a homescreen shortcut to this web page on my G1. I have two, at most three feeds from each of the other groups also in this group.

During my Google Reader purge, I made a goal to trim each of my 10 groups down to no more than 12 feeds each (some had 15 or 20) and I succeeded. In the end, I went down from 140 feeds to 95 – a cut of one-third of the feeds I had followed. Since the feeds from “spanning the globe” are high volume, I trimmed that one down from 15 to 4.

Going through Reader this evening, it seems much easier to get the updates I want to keep up with. We’ll see how it works in the long term.

Now only if decluttering my house would be this easy. :)

For most of the four months I’ve had my T-Mobile G1, I’ve found app support for Facebook to be for the most part lame. I tried FBook – but it was flakier than an apple pie. Since then, I’ve mainly used the Android browser on Facebook’s mobile site, http://m.facebook.com – until yesterday.

A new and very promising native Android app for accessing Facebook was unleashed on the Android Market Friday (7/3/09). It’s called “Bloo” and it arrived with a lot of advance hype and buzz that it would be “the” killer app for Facebook for the Android platform. When it was released, I decided to take the plunge and spend $1.49 for it.

After having it for about 12 hours, I can say the app lived up to the hype – and was well worth the money. I gave it a “four star” rating on the Android Market. Two things I wish it had were the ability to see more than one page of the Facebook “Feed” and a button to retrieve more than one page of it. The other thing it needs is a screen to read the inbox.

The setup went reasonably well – being able to retrieve a six-character security key from Facebook and enter it into Bloo made authenticating a snap. Setting the access permissions to read and write to the FB account took a few minutes but worked well once it was done.

I was pleasantly surprised to not even have the app for eight hours and have an update for the app in the Market already (and a second update is coming this weekend). The developer has done well with his first effort – and this app has the potential and promise to improve and be the definitive native Facebook app for Android.

Here are some more looks at the app:

All in all, MAJOR props to Dimitris Couchell for a GREAT initial effort on Bloo. You did very well – and I look forward to seeing this app grow and develop further.

I sure hope this comment off the TmoNews blog is true. I am so JONESIN’ to get 3G for my G1.

http://lin.cr/qlg

Here in CLEVELAND OHIO I have noticed over the last 2 months that a 3rd antenna has been added to each sector of the t-mobile cell sites here and my friend at t-mobile told me these are 3G data dedicated antennas and the TARGET launch date is mid August for 3G in Cleveland, Akron, Dayton and cinnci! Can’t wait. I know these engineers have been busting there asses trying to get all these markets launches as soon as possible…so good job guys! Thank you.

*crosses fingers and keeps hoping*