So Wait, What Is Android, Exactly?

In Google's words, it's "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices." That doesn't mean much, so here's a breakdown: It's a Linux-based, open-source mobile OS, complete with a custom window manager, modified Linux 2.6 kernel, WebKit-based browser and built-in camera, calendar, messaging, dialer, calculator, media player and album apps. If that sounds a little sparse, that's because it is: Android on its own doesn't amount to a whole lot; in fact, a phone with plain vanilla Android wouldn't feel like a smartphone at all. Thankfully, these phones don't exist.

Android is Linux insofar as its core components are open-source and free, and Google must publish their source code with every release. But the real heart of the Android phone experience—the Google apps like Maps, GChat, Gmail, Android Market, Google Voice, Places and YouTube are closed-source, meaning Google owns them outright. Every Google phone comes with these apps in one form or another so to the user this distinction isn't that important. That said, it occasionally rears its head, like when Android modder Cyanogen had to strip the apps out of his custom Android builds to avoid getting sued by Google:

The issue that's raised is the redistribution of Google's proprietary applications like Maps, GTalk, Market, and YouTube. They are Google's intellectual property and I intend to respect that. I will no longer be distributing these applications as part of CyanogenMod.

This can lead to more mainstream (and confusing) issues, like with the, erm, touchy (sorry!) multitouch issue: Android OS supports multitouch, in that it can recognize multiple simultaneous input points on its screen. But Google's Android apps don't. So when a company like HTC comes along and decides to properly add multitiouch to the OS, they can only add it to the open-source parts, like the browser (or their own closed-source apps), not Google's proprietary apps. That's why the Hero has pinch-zoom in its browser and photo albums but not in Google Maps, where it's just as at home.

The issue gets even less trivial as the apps grow more central to the Android experience. You know how Google Maps Navigation was, like, the banner feature for Android 2.0? Well, it was, but technically speaking, it's not a part of Android. It's just part of an app made by Google for Android, and that'll ship with most Android handsets. Except for in countries where Google doesn't have their mapping data quite together enough, where it won't. That's what's happening with the Euro Droid, which, by the way, does have multitouch in its browser, like the Hero. That's why the distinction matters.

So, why take so much care to set up and protect this open source component, when surely Google could just slap together a closed-source mobile operating system and give it away for free, right? It would deprive handset manufacturers of their ability to freely modify certain core components of the OS, sure, but the real reasoning, oddly enough, has less to do with phones and more to do with, well, everything else.

How We Got Here

Flash back to November 7th, 2007, when the Open Handset Alliance, a massive coalition of mobile industry companies, held hands to announce to the world their new child. His name was Android, and we were told very little about him. What we were told, though, was delivered almost entirely in frustratingly vague platitudes:

Handset manufacturers and wireless operators will be free to customize Android in order to bring to market innovative new products faster and at a much lower cost. Developers will have complete access to handset capabilities and tools that will enable them to build more compelling and user-friendly services, bringing the Internet developer model to the mobile space.

We were a little disappointed that the GPhone wasn't strictly a phone, but like most people, this sounded exciting to us. Vague, but exciting.

And so we waited, patiently. And waited. Then, nearly a year later, we got our hands on the first hardware to actually use Android. It was called the T-Mobile G1, and It Was Good. Then, six months later, we got another phone—the Magic, or MyTouch, which was more or less exactly like the first one, minus a keyboard. It wasn't until two full years since Android's first appearance—when not just HTC but Motorola, Samsung and Sony started showing off fresh wares—that Android began to feel like more than an experiment. And more important than getting fresh hardware, Android's OS had changed too. A lot.

The T-Mobile G1 shipped with Android 1.0, which wasn't exactly missing much, but still felt a bit barebones. We had to wait until February of 2009 for paid apps to show up in the Android Market, after which April saw the first major update, Android 1.5 "Cupcake." (Updates each have alphabetical, pastry-themed codenames.) This was followed by 1.6 "Donut," which most new handsets are shipping with now, then 2.0 (yes, "Eclair"), which throws in social networking integration, an interface lift, support for new device resolutions, a fresh developer SDK and support for the optional Google Maps Navigation. This version is currently only found on the Motorola Droid, but should start showing up elsewhere with a few months. And so here we are. And that's just half of it.

Android Isn't Just a Phone OS

That announcement I showed you earlier? That was from the Open Handset alliance, a consortium of phone folks—handsets manufacturers, mobile chip makers and the like. But let's look back at another announcement, from the Android project leads, back in early 2008:

Android is not a single piece of hardware; it's a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications...Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with.

Almost all the talk about Android over the last two years has been about Android the phone OS, not Android the lightweight Linux distribution. While Google was busy pumping out high-profile phone-centric updates, Android was starting to creep into other industries, like a disease. A good disease, that everyone likes! Yes, one of those. This is where things get weird.

Remember all those not-quite-there Android netbooks? Part of the plan. The Android-powered Barnes & Noble Nook? Shouldn't have been a surprise. Android navigators? Why not? PMPs? Creative's got one. Photo frames and set-top boxes? Already in the works.

Most of these devices won't look like Android hardware to us, because our strongest Android associations with the OS are all visual and phone-specific, like the homescreen, app drawer and dialer. Nonetheless, this is as much a part of the Android vision as phones are—it just won't be as obvious.

Your Android-powered DVR won't have an app drawer, but it will share the kernel, and an unusually good widget system. Your Android-powered PMP may run a custom interface, but it'll have access to thousands of apps, like an open-source iPod Touch. Your Android-powered photo frame might look just like any other photo frame, but when it drops your wireless connection, it'll have a decent, full-featured settings screen to help you pick it back up. And over-the-air updates. And it might actually cost a few dollars less that it would have otherwise, because remember, Android is free. This is our Android future, and it sounds awesome.

What Happens Next

But the first step in the Android takeover is necessarily the phones. Android 2.0 means the handsets aren't just interesting anymore; they're truly buyable. As Matt said this week:

In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities.... Android 2.0's potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone's, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it.

What problems the phones still have—among them, poor media playback and the lack of a bundled desktop client to manage media—are not with Android but with Google, which is really just a major supporter of Android. Either Google will solve them hands-on, or the dream of the open source and app developer communities rising up to fill in all the gaps will become a reality. What's certain is that Google—or someone—needs to address them if future legions of Google-branded phones are to succeed to their full potential.

Speaking of potential, it's massive. In addition to everything else Android has going on, timing is on its side. Windows Mobile is limping along with two broken legs, and its hardware partners took (or maybe gave) notice: Motorola, lately a pariah in its own right, doesn't want anything more to do with Microsoft; HTC is stating continued support while quietly phasing out the WinMo ranks; Sony Ericsson, which hasn't seen a true hit come from one of their Microsoft-branded phones in years, is dabbling in Androidery. And as far as most consumers are concerned, anything Windows Mobile can do, Android can do better.

It doesn't stop with Microsoft, either. Symbian, whose boss called Android "just another Linux platform," is losing ground, and losing some of Sony Ericsson's business doesn't help. The Palm Pre, polished and beautiful as it is, can't keep up with Android's exploding app inventory, multiplying hardware partners and rock-star ability to draw talent. RIM's BlackBerry isn't generally seen as a direct Android competitor, but Android 2.0, along with Palm's WebOS and Apple's iPhone OS, are the main reasons the BlackBerry OS feels so clunky and old. That matters. From here, the outlook is clear: Android and the iPhone are the next consumer smartphone superpowers.

And even if it takes Google 10 years to iron out Android's faults and push this kind of adoption, you can expect Android, or its unofficial pseudonym "Google Phone," to become a household name. Besides, Android will start creeping into our lives in places we might not expect it. It'll power our settop boxes, ebook readers, PMPs and who knows what else. It's not just going to be the next great smartphone OS, it'll be the quiet, invisible software layer that sits between all our portable gadgets and our fingers.

Source photo courtesy of NASA

Still something you wanna know? Still mixing up your Androids and your hemorrhoids? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

The good news is that you can run Android from a USB drive or Live CD, so you don't have to nuke your current OS.

Kevin over at jkOnTheRun has a Samsung Q1UP, and was able to install an Android 1.6 port originally intended for the Eee PC 701. He says "Android is blazing on a 1.33GHz Intel Core Solo" and suspects the battery lasts longer, too. He was also able to use Wi-Fi, and the Samsung's QWERTY keyboard without problems.

The major glitches Kevin ran into were on the hardware side of things—no touchscreen, sound, Bluetooth, or button mapping support. That's bound to happen when the port isn't specifically geared for the device, but he says he's chatting with developers to make it happen.

An interesting experiment, but I'd be interested to know if other mobile/netbook OSes, like Jolicloud or Intel's Moblin, fare any better. [jkOnTheRun via SlashGear]

The Motorola Cliq is the Android OS on Motorola hardware. Like Palm before it, Motorola decided that Windows Mobile 6.5/7 would be too little, too late to combat the iPhone menace. But instead of going in house and creating something from scratch, Motorola decided to take an already stable OS and build social networking features directly into the interface. So yes, it's basically an Android phone; but it's an Android phone++.

Motorola's Cliq delivers on its social networking promise quite admirably, even if there are a few design quirks that prevent the experience from being perfect. And although it's a little sluggish on the hardware side—as sluggish as any of the other Android phones out there now, that is—the fact that it has a good physical keyboard and solid Motorola hardware behind it makes the Cliq a very interesting contender in the Android world.

The Hardware is solid, except when it's not

Moto is no stranger to building its own phones, so you'd expect some smart hardware know-how to go into Cliq's design. That's only kinda true. Everything on the phone is where you'd expect it to be and buttons are more-or-less in acceptable locations, but there's a looseness in the slide-out keyboard that's more irritating the more I play with it. I can't tell if it's because the slider doesn't quite lock into place like it should—there's a little give in both the open and closed positions—but the "Oreo-ing" is really distracting. It's not as if the screen portion will pop off, it's just an annoying looseness in the phone that makes you feel like they didn't quite solve the puzzle of fitting everything in place.

A hardware keyboard is always a welcome thing to have, and the Cliq's behaves well. There's enough spacing in each of the keys that it's easy to type, but not too much that it's occupying a lot of space. There could have been some better arrangement of symbol keys (the underscore is buried under a symbols menu), but that's just being nitpicky. Overall, it's a solid keyboard that's quick to enter data with.

Other build quirks

The wobbliness of the slider means that you need to grip only the bottom (keyboard) part of the phone when you're taking a photo, or else the screen will slide open and you'll probably drop your phone. Also, Motorola decided to make the power switch flush with the right side of the phone so even Daredevil would have a hard time finding it by touch. Since the power button also lets you toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, airplane mode and GPS, that's a bad design.

You have to open up the battery cover to shove an up-to 32GB microSD card in there, but since you'll rarely replace that (use a microUSB to transfer files), it's not a huge deal. I do like the fact that there's no cover on the microSD slot, as well as the presence of the now-obligatory vibrate toggle on the left side of the phone. Its 3.5mm headphone jack being located directly on the top of the phone kinda screws up the lines a bit, but I'd rather a slightly uglier phone than not having a 3.5mm jack.

Power and battery

Because the Cliq runs the same processor as the current Android phones now—like the Hero and the MyTouch 3G—there's not a whole lot of performance difference between the devices. They're all kinda slow. Not unusably slow, but transitions and animations don't pop immediately. And this sluggishness might be part of the reason why interacting with the touchscreen isn't as fluid a process as it could be, and why sometimes when you're swiping between emails or tweets, the page will pop back into place and you have to swipe a second time.

As for the battery life, you can pretty much imagine how much use you'll get out of an always-connected device that gets pushed emails, tweets and Facebook updates all day. Even if you don't make a lot of calls, you'll have to charge the device every night. And if you do do a lot of texting and emailing and calling and tweeting, you'd better get an external charger.

The main drain seems to be both the push and the fact that you're using the phone a lot to keep up with everything that's happening on your social networks. Motorola built a double-edged sword on that one; people want to use it a lot for checking status updates, but in turn the 1420 mAh battery runs out in less than a day.

Hardware features we like

There are a couple nice touches that we're appreciative of, such as the blinking light on the front for notifications, which has been on BlackBerries for a while. Great if you don't get a lot of emails or if you don't follow a lot of people. You can also wake up the phone using the facebuttons, not just the power toggle, so two quick menu button presses will get you to the home screen immediately.

Having a D pad is going to be useful in the future when Android developers start making games that take advantage of it, but you can use it now in NES/SNES emulators. And the camera is a beefy 5-megapixel autofocus, which produces decent photos compared to other Android phones. Plus, call quality is pretty good, something Motorola has managed to do well even when their software has faltered.

Software

Seeing as Android has been available for more than a while, and everyone should be familiar with what it does, I'm going to focus on the Cliq-specific sections. Suffice it to say that it can do everything other Android phones can, including downloading OTA Amazon MP3s and accessing all the apps in the Marketplace. The most important of Motorola's additions are the home screen widgets, so we'll start there.

The home screen widgets

The four widgets of note are the status widget, the messaging widget, the happenings widget and the news/RSS widget. The news widget is self-explanatory, and really cool that a phone would have a built-in RSS reader right on the home screen, but the others are a little bit trickier. The status widget lets you update your "status" to any of your social networking sites, like Facebook or Twitter. The messages widget consolidates ALL your 1:1 messaging, like emails, SMS, DMs on Twitter or private messages on Facebook. The happenings is a feed of other people's status updates on your social networks.

Messaging Widget
I don't know why, but it's very satisfying to be able to swipe through your emails directly from the home screen, quickly deleting or replying with just one tap. The problem comes from the way it's implemented and the lack of screen space, because you can't see the recipients list to see if you're the only person address to in an email, nor can you do a reply all if there are multiple people. And it doesn't tell you if you have an attachment.

Basically it's just a small window to your email, and you'll have to actually open up the traditional email app to do any communication beyond the basics. And there's also a full-blown Messaging APP, which consolidates all your accounts like the widget does.

Happenings Widget
This is where your all your social networks are rolled into one big feed. Again, it's a time saver to have all these updates in one place and being able to swipe through them, though sometimes you get way too many updates to realistically do so. What we would like is if there was an option to customize which networks displayed in the widget, so we could, say, have only Twitter and leave out Facebook. Right now it's an all or nothing affair, and you have to go into the Happenings app to see everything in list form and to be able to view only one network at a time.

The widget does allow you to directly interact and respond to people's updates, so you can comment on people's walls or do an @reply to someone's tweet. All you have to do is start typing in a particular section and some menu option will pop up, prompting you with context-specific actions you can do.

News Widget
The RSS widget behaves pretty much the same way as the previous two, allowing you to swipe through news items like you would in a standard RSS reader. Motorola was kind enough to bundle a few types of RSS feeds together, and Gizmodo is part of the Technology one. Good choice dudes.

Nice touches

By avoiding the creation of an entire operation system from scratch, the Motorola engineers had time on their hands to really think about the user experience, and it definitely shows in all these small touches and shortcuts they put in.

• There are some slick transition animations when you open up widgets and apps, which are quick enough to not be distracting, but slow enough to distract you for a second while your program is loading
• Faces are fetched and attached to your contacts automatically, and you can choose whether you want to grab the images from Google or Facebook. This way you can always have some kind of picture for a person when they call you for easy recognition
• The MotoBlur account you have to create on setup backs up some of your settings so that you can re-load it in the event of phone theft
• Speaking of phone stealing, there's a free service online that's similar to MobileMe that you can use to locate your phone from the web
• There's a five panel home screen. Eh? Ehh??
• The call button got moved to a soft button, eliminating the need for two hard buttons on the outside of the phone. You also get a contacts button instead of a end call button, since you don't need to hang up if you're not in a call.
• There's visual voicemail
• People's faces everywhere, and you can see their latest status updates when a call is initiated
• You can manually link contacts together, like on Palm's webOS, in case the phone doesn't automatically recognize that Frucci is the same Adam Frucci you have in your Gmail
• A self help widget is there when you get the phone, walking you through a few features you might not see
• There are shortcuts everywhere, which would usually be a bad thing since you have to poke around to find them, but they're implemented in such a way that it actually makes sense
• You can type on the home screen to find a contact. This makes sense in the Moto Cliq world since the Cliq is a person-centric device, whereas on other phones it would make more sense to bring up a Google search instead
• And typing in the applications tray searches through your apps

Gripes

The software's not flawless, however, and you will run into some minor annoyances even with all the niceties.
• Yahoo Mail only works over 3G, not Wi-Fi. This most likely has to do with some deal or legal restriction, but it doesn't make the decision less annoying. If we had to choose between Yahoo only on 3G and no Yahoo, we'd pick the 3G
• There isn't really desktop syncing for your contacts or calendar. You can send movies and music and photos over the microUSB connection, but Motorola really wants you to put your contacts on either Gmail or a social network and pull them down that way

You don't get a lot of fine-grained control over accounts. (Yes, I made you wait this long for a pun on the top photo.) For example, you can't tell your phone to only pull down contacts from Gmail and not Facebook, or choose to display only your Twitter and MySpace contacts at once. It's basically all or just one. More account customizability would be the number one software target we'd ask Motorola's team to aim for, and something we're eager to see in Blur version 1.5.

The Whole Experience

Like we said in the hardware section, the major thing holding back the Cliq from being a fantastic phone is the processor. The animations are smooth, the UI touches are smart and the social networking stuff is useful; we just wish we could have a bit more account customization, do all of that on faster hardware. Once Motorola gets the Blur platform onto a more powerful phone and works through some of the software quirks we noticed, they're going to have a really good Android phone on their hands.

Is this the phone that Motorola needs to bring it back into the smartphone race? It could be. They were smart enough to know that just doing another Android phone wasn't enough in itself, so they pulled together and created all this social networking glue to bind the experience together. It's cohesive enough to call the Cliq a different experience from other, similar devices like the Sprint HTC Hero, and is a pretty damn good first step in a possible Motorola comeback. [Motorola]

Social networking features are quite good

Lots of little touches that improve on the base Android platform

Hardware keyboard

Decent hardware except for the Oreo-like keyboard action

It's an Android phone at heart, which means you'll either like it or dislike it, based on how you feel about the platform

A slow-ish CPU makes the experience weaker than it could be

Other specs are unchanged from the current model, including 1GB memory, 160GB hard disk, and an on screen resolution of 1024 x 600 driven by Intel GMA graphics. No Nvidia Ion graphics, and no 3G…yet.

Meanwhile, Acer Japan has just confirmed an updated version of the D250. It runs Windows 7 Starter Edition, bumps the resolution up to 1280 by 720, and costs Y46,800 (about $553). It will be available there when Windows 7 arrives on October 22, but there's no word on when it will come to the U.S. [Netbooked and PC World]

The Archos 5 improves on some of the complaints we had about the previous Archos 5. Archos has upped the storage with loads of options—it now comes with flash (8GB or 32GB) or an HDD (160GB to 500GB). The flash version's way thinner, at .4-inches. The metal backing felt nice in my hand.

But the real changes are to the operating system: It's using Android, with Archos' customer interface built on top, like the Super Widget, a series of multimedia shortcuts on the main Android screen. Beyond that you'll find the usual Android drawer full of applications, since Archos is throwing in a few preloaded.

Multimedia is the Archos 5 Internet Tablet's bread and butter. Its Texas Instruments ARM Cortex A8 plays back 720p video smoothly and you can buy a dock to output it to a larger display. It is a sweet device for storing video, photos and music. Archos has always been able to do that really well. It also has a 3D map software program for GPS navigation.

Too bad it falls down on actually being an internet tablet: It runs on Wi-Fi using Android's built-in browser, but it won't automatically load full web pages—it defaults to mobile versions. Yes, you can go to Flash websites like NYTimes.com and others but you have to make adjustments to the browser, just like you have to on a Android phone. The tablet does not support full Flash yet (only Flash Lite), which means no streaming video. (Even though HTC managed to build Flash support into the Hero.) Archos is instead waiting until there is Flash 10 support from Adobe.

It might sound spoiled, but on a device that is meant for the internet I want to be able to get streaming video and full Flash websites. I don't want the broken internet on a standalone device. What Archos does do is throw in a bunch of Android apps (including some paid apps). Apps are great, but sometimes you want to just visit a site and not have to page around or adjust the settings. To its credit, Archos says they will be updating soon when Flash 10 is available for download. (Which they tell us will be in December, not than the predicted October). If you are buying the tablet for internet I'd wait until then or at least plan to upgrade, however as a PMP Archos is still more than solid. [Archos]

LG says its first Android phone is about catering to diverse preferences, but beyond confirming a European release later this year, hasn't yet said if the GW620 will reach the U.S. [LG via KoreaNewsWire]

I asked Andy about the Cliq, and whether its heavy-emphasis on social networking would make its way into the core Android OS. He said yes, that Google likes the idea of say, Facebook or Twitter being a part of the core functionality rather than having to open a separate app to get to where you want to be.

Andy also said that there wasn't a huge differentiation between in-house and third-party when it's an open source, open platform effort like Android, so he wasn't sure who would be the team that would make something like Facebook integration happen—be it Google or Facebook.

Also interesting is his views on the Cliq as a whole. He said that he considers this something he would be happy launching as a 1.0 product—the point being that the bugs were worked out, and the extras like the social networking were there. The original Android launch, he says, was more like a 0.8 release.

The bit that's interesting to Android developers is that Rubin doesn't consider the Marketplace done, as in, they're still working on optimizing and making the experience better for both the consumer and the app maker. One of the complaints that paid apps had was that they didn't sell as much as say, a paid app on the iPhone App Store. Andy said they've been working gradually and iteratively, first separating paid apps from free apps, and then working on improving visibility of the apps themselves. So it's something they're aware of, and the fact that the "best" selling apps are only doing somewhere along the lines of 1000s of sales isn't going ignored among the Android people.

As for future Android OS development, Andy claims that you can expect more of the type of things Motorola has done, that is, replacing some of the core apps and core functionality the default Android offers with customized ones like the Cliq's social network streaming and integration.

The company will launch a smaller all touchscreen phone (around the size of the iPhone is our guess) in early 2010 that will run Google's Android and be powered by Texas Instruments' OMAP TM3 platform (the same that is in the Palm Pre). The 3G enabled smartphone will most likely be sold unlocked but also through carriers. My guess is that it will hit Europe before anywhere else.

Oh and don't forget Motorola announced its Android running CLIQ today. Mmm loads of Android landing in our hands. [Archos]

The hardware on the new mobile internet devices looks to have been redesigned from the Archos 5. It has the typical Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and while the user manual mentions 3G (or SIM Kaart) the FCC didn't test it.

As for the OS, Android has to be it with all the rumors swirling and would make the devices a whole lot more exciting, but the one shot of the device powered on has an interesting UI. Looks like some sort of media bar type interface along the bottom. Is that an app drawer on the right?

I am trying real hard to get excited about this tablet especially without a price. Chances are it will get a tag north of $300 and in that case I am just not sure why you don't get a Android phone or a netbook and put Android on it yourself. [FCC via Engadget]

Why put Android in a desktop phone? For one, plenty of apps, including visual voicemail, calendars, SMS, and email. Cloud Telecomputers also expects lots of third party Android apps to be built especially for the business phone platform. And as it supports landlines and various VoIP and SIP clients you will be able to set up a Google Voice app with a Gizmo5 SIP account to make it the ultimate phone booth. The start-up company also throws in HD audio and Bluetooth.

Cloud Telecomputers expects the Glass to be available in the first quarter of 2010 with a price tag somewhere in between $600 and $700. [Cloud Telecomputers via Electricpig]

Done? Good. This phone is exactly the same, except that the myTouch has a slightly different finish, and T-Mobile released an App Pack filled with two handfuls of essential apps on the Android Marketplace for it. That's what we're going to review today. Also, keep in mind that this is running on T-Mobile's 3G network, which isn't quite as good as if you imported the device and used it on, say, AT&T's 3G network, which has more coverage.

FreshFace: A theming app for your Android. It has the ability to add small widgets like an RSS reader and a notepad onto your desktop. The FreshFace desktop pretty much takes over your real desktop, which is good, because FreshFace offers five pages of apps instead of three, but bad, because it's buggy.

Adds a little bit more functionality and theming, including new icons

Themes are mediocre

Occasionally buggy

imeem Mobile: Free streaming internet radio.

Decent enough for a free app, but not outstanding, considering Pandora and LastFM do this kind of thing much better.

T-Mobile Mobile Backup: A free contact list backup service from T-Mobile. Kind of unnecessary, since your phone already syncs with your Google account.

Not really sure what this app does that your Google account syncing doesn't already do. Maybe if you want to switch to another phone that's not an Android phone?

Movies by Flixter: A movie showtimes app that also lets you watch trailers, read reviews and browse DVD catalogs.

Pretty decent movie catalog app that does as much as you'd expect

T-Mobile My Account: Quick and easy access to all your phone's account info, including your activity billing, your plan and any alerts you may have. For some reason this only works over your cellular connection, so you'll have to shut off Wi-Fi.

Easier than loading up the T-Mobile site

Phonebook by Voxmobili: A replacement phonebook that sorts your contacts into a more usable manner. Plus, it's colorful.

Better, in many ways, than the official Android dialer. Definitely replace your contact list with this

Sherpa: A fancy Yelp-like app that can help you find local shops (eateries, theaters, cafes, grocery stores) using your phone's GPS.

It's just like Yelp, and quite useful if you're trying to find stuff within walking distance

Visual Voicemail: It's visual voicemail.

It's visual voicemail.

WorldTour: Periodically sets your wallpaper to live webcams around the world, like Paris

A little bit goofy. Would be better if the wallpapers were higher quality