How My Droid Does

A number of friends that are considering buying a Droid have been asking me about the applications that I use and would recommend. To save myself some time I thought I would just create a blog post on what I'm using rather than repeat the discussion over and over. How's that for efficient collaboration!

Weather

I spent some time with weather widgets/applications from both The Weather Channel and Weather Bug and I've gone with WeatherBug. I think WeatherBug has the best UI of the bunch and the widget is awesome. It is free and more information can be found here.

Blog Reading (RSS)

I use Google Reader for all my blog aggregation and though Google Reader works perfectly in the Android browser I found one particular UI issue to be troubling. You can read about that experience in my earlier blog post "Uh Oh, Bad UI Design?"

I found an Android application that provides blog aggregation and does so by hooking into your existing Google Reader account. Perfect! It provides an Android tuned UI while interacting while keeping Google Reader in sync. It is called NewsRob and is free.

Facebook

Again, the built in Facebook application is fine for most but it is lacking in some areas. It seems that most people are very happy with an application called Bloo and I gave it a whirl. It is working very well for me and I'm amazed at how frequently the application is updated. Especially being that this is also a free application.

Twitter

There are a number of good twitter applications such as twidroid and the new Android application from Seesmic. I tried twidroid first and gave Seesmic a try but my personal tastes lean toward twidroid and I'm very happy with it as an application. It also provides a fast pace of updates including new features and fixes.

Those are my list of go to applications and are used most frequently. Others that I use and would recommend include:

• TripIt - if you have a TripIt account this is a very nice application for travelers.
• Google Sky - a lot of fun for the wow factor!
• Quickpedia - An application that provides wikipedia in a more Android friendly format.
• ShopSavvy - too cool! Just scan a bar code of something you are thinking about purchasing and it will provide you a listing of best prices either locally or on the internet. For local finds you can then use Google Navigation to take you there :-)
• Places Directory - uses your location to help you find places such as coffee shops, banks, places to eat, etc.
• Pandora - for those of you that use Pandora for music listening this will hook you up on the Android.
• WiFi Buddy - to manage your WiFi connections
• PhoneFlicks - manager your Netflix queue on the Android

I'll update this over time and provide more details on some of those other applications.