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It’s BYO ROMs, but this $3 NES emulator single-handedly solves Android’s gaming problem by letting you play any NES game you can get your hands on. Bonus: The smug sense of satisfaction that this would never fly in the App Store. $3.49 From The App Developers: NESoid is an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment console.…
This is what we imagine a mythical Google Reader RSS app would be like, with two-way background sync and full feed downloads. (If you’re not a Google Reader user, we’d recommend the 99-cent FeedR, for its simplicity.) FREE From The App Developers: NewsRob is a RSS/Atom reader that auto syncs with Google Reader.
Never be forced to talk to a real human being to make a reservation again. (As long as the restaurant’s a part of OpenTable, anyway, which it probably is, if it’s worth eating at.) FREE From The App Developers: With OpenTable for Android you can make free, instantly confirmed restaurant reservations at over 11,000 restaurants.…
Turns out it was a tough decade for tech companies. First the bubble they helped create burst and took the rest of the economy down with them; now the credit markets have sunk them in return—with two notable exceptions. I’ll admit that this chart would be more readable if it had been a more competitive…
Pandora CTO Tom Conrad may have said, “I need Android like I need a hole in the head,” but Android definitely needed the best internet radio app around. It auto-suggests music based on other artists you like using sorcery. (Or algorithms.) FREE From the App Developers: Pandora Radio is your own FREE personalized radio now…
The ridiculously easy way to tether your laptop to your phone, over USB or Bluetooth, without rooting it. If you don’t wanna cough up $30 for the full version it’ll still connect to non-https:// addresses just fine. $24 From the App Developers: PdaNet provides you with FULL Internet access so all your email, instant message…
Google’s Places is our preferred directory app for finding what’s nearby—restaurants, coffee, banks, shopping, whatever—mostly because it’s easier to use than the arguably more jam-packed Where. But also because its information seems to be getting more detailed useful at an exponential rate. FREE From the App Developers: Places Directory allows you to browse nearby places…
Live video streaming over 3G or Wi-Fi, which one-ups the others with support for full res 720×480 DVD quality video from the Droid. FREE From the App Developers: Join Qik to share live video with anyone and everyone – or only share with the people you choose. Use Qik and start showing your audience of…
The gorgeous, and possibly definitive, Android tower defense game. $5 From the App Developers: Retro Defense is a tower defense game with a killer retro theme. Your goal is to stop the invaders from getting through the board. You know the path they’ll take, so you have to spend your money wisely and build the…
If you wanna make your own ringtone, Ringdroid is how, either using an MP3 you already have, or by making a whole new one. FREE From the App Developers: Ringdroid is an Android application for recording and editing sounds, and creating ringtones, directly on the handset.
A very pretty running application, it offers full stat tracking and everything else you’d expect from a fitness app, with more features, like multiple exercise modes on the way. If only it made the Droid light enough to actually run with. FREE From the App Developers: runstar™ is the only running application you’ll ever need;…
What’s that song playing in the background? Hold your phone up, and Shazam will tell you. It’s magic that never gets old. FREE From the App Developers: Create music moments. With Shazam you can identify music tracks, store them, and buy them; plus you can learn more about the artist and connect to their MySpace…
Slingbox can now stream whatever is on your home TV to your Android phone. With the Android app, you get full control over your at-home DVR box and remote, so you can pause, fast-forward, rewind the live and recorded shows you’re watching, and even schedule DVR recordings. Works over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi. $29.99 From…
Like Shazam, it’s an awesome music recognition app that’ll tell you what song is playing on the radio. Unlike Shazam, you can also sing or hum a song and it’ll give you the results complete with videos, lyrics, and a link to the Amazon MP3 store. Sadly, the free version limits you to 5 song…
Every year product life cycles in the consumer marketplace grow ever shorter. On the audio side, the latest and greatest receivers become yesterday’s news faster than you can say “HDMI 1.4.” Speaker companies show a little more restraint and “refresh” their lines every few years, but even then new models rarely demonstrate actual performance improvements…
Still the Twitter app for Android, even if the free version holds back features like bit.ly support, it gets better all the time. And with newly launched plug-ins, its potential seems limitless. FREE From the App Developers: Twidroid is the industry-standard Twitter client for android and among the most used Twitter applications across all platforms.…
You need a voice recorder app. This is it. FREE From The App Developers: This application is a handy voice recorder. The recordings are saved to your SD card.
You’d think that smartphones would have made traditional credit cards obsolete by now, but since they haven’t (in the US, at least), Mophie’s iPhone credit card reader may be the next best thing. Its full details will be shared with us next week at CES, but the system will consist of a hardware scanner and…
True, Wikipedia apps are glorified shrinkwraps, but Wapedia makes settling trivia showdowns at dinner really fast, with a clean presentation to boot. FREE From The App Developers: Wapedia is the fastest way to access the contents of Wikipedia on your phone.
Not every Android phone has HTC’s ginormous weather widgets to say whether it’s blistering hot or a Category 5 hurricane outside. So for everything else, there’s the Weather Channel, which gives you a choice of widgets to slap on the home screen and offers (optional) weather alerts in your notification bar to boot. FREE From…