My foray into the Android world has sent me searching for the best available apps for my various needs. Here is the set I’m currently using along with some general thoughts:
- Email: K-9 mail. The built-in IMAP client on the Droid 2 is fundamentally broken. It fails to move and delete messages on the server. K-9 mail is better, but far from perfect. The mail client on iOS 4 is much nicer to use with the exception of the type-to-filter feature for folders when moving messages.
- Feed Reader: NewsRob. The Google Reader syncing seems a little flaky and the syncing seems to take a “check each feed” approach instead of utilizing the API to just get unread items. However, it’s pretty decent to use and makes nice use of the volume up/down rocker for quickly flipping through items.
- Podcasts: Google Listen. I tried a few other clients. This one is a little quirky, but seems to work best and the UI feels at home on the Android OS.
- Twitter: Twitter for Android. I’m using the official client – it works fine. It only supports one account, but I’m sure multiple account support will be added in the future. There are a bunch of alternatives out there, I’ve been lazy.
- Camera: I’ve used Retro Camera and am currently trying out Vignette. These provide some fun filters – if not quite the Instagram experience.
- Flickr: Flickr Free. It works, is slow to start up and lacks visual polish. I tried Flicka which looks pretty, but didn’t work great on my device.
- Sports Scoreboard: ScoreMobile. I love their BlackBerry app too.
Overall I’m finding acceptable replacements for just about everything I used on iOS and BlackBerry. I also really like the agenda and weather home screen widgets (I think these are Motorola specific). The apps as a whole don’t have near the polish of the iOS apps I use, but the trade-off of polish for background network activity is one I’m OK with so far. I haven’t used my iPod touch since I got the Droid.
Fellow Android users, what apps should I be using that I’m not?