Continuing on a theme I’ve been on for some of the last few posts, the last time I talked about Android applications I’m using that I liked was December 2011; man, I’m slow in getting back to stuff, but at least this time I’m not as far from the last time.
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I know for sure that 4 of these I downloaded independently; the last one I’m not so sure about. I know I’ve written about #4 here, but it earns a second mention:
1. Dropbox I have to admit that I was really hesitant to add Dropbox. Sure I had added Evernote, but I wasn’t moving any large files or personal files to it, just some notes and such. But an organization I belong to wanted all of its directors to set it up, and I did and it’s been a godsend.
How? Most of you know I’m working out of town. Over the winter I’ve been staying out of town almost an entire month, then going home for a long weekend. I’ve always needed stuff, and finally I decided to move all my written files, all my web files, and a host of other files over. Then the other day my wife called me while I was leaving work for lunch and was frantic because she didn’t have a couple of files she needed. I had them in Dropbox so I pulled them up, and you can email files from Dropbox. She had them in a minute; catastrophe solved.
Here’s the thing. It’s free, and the more things you add to it so you can access it, such as your computer, laptop, smartphone and, for me, my Nook, the more free space you get. You can also pay for 100 GB at a nominal rate. And if you get other people to download the software via your link, you earn 500MB per person, up to 16GB of space. I don’t know if that’s forever but hey, here’s my link if you want to download it or check it out; help a brotha out! 🙂
2. WatchESPN Y’all know I’m a Syracuse Orange sports fan. I’m also in the south right now. Because they’re a top flight team I’ve been able to watch many of their games on ESPN, but not all of them.
The WatchESPN app lets you watch any game for any sports that ESPN happens to cover for free online via their app. So the night Syracuse beat North Carolina State with a final steal and scoring with 9 seconds left, I was sitting at a desk in my hotel room watching it in high definition on the Nook; life doesn’t get better than that.
3. Flixster I hadn’t paid any attention to having a Flixster account previously. I knew I had an Ultraviolet account, but at some point they must have merged. Anyway, turns out that I have 2 digital movies that I can watch either on my smartphone or on the Nook, and I can add more via streaming from their site or purchasing the digital rights via Barnes & Noble. Here’s one more thing; if you purchase any movie anywhere and it offers you a digital copy, you can hook it up so you can watch it on your platforms without having to find someone to crack the software… not that I know anyone who knows how to do that anymore (cough).
4. Instagram I wrote about this in June 2012 once it was finally available for Android and I still love it. Not only can I share my pictures with others but if I don’t have it downloaded to my computer I can link my own pictures to my blog via a link. Also, it’s a great way to store pictures if you want to download them to your computer or other platforms later on. And now you can upload 6 second videos, although for the life of me I can’t seem to figure it out; oh well…
5. DU Speed Booster I was having problems getting a couple of apps to work on my phone one day and I happened to come across an article in PC World Magazine about this one. It runs optimization processes on your smartphone (they don’t have it for the Nook so I don’t know if it’ll work on the iPad) that not only helps to resolve conflicts, but clears out all those extra files for whenever you upload, download, or update programs and other apps. It’s fast and speeds up your smartphone at the same time.
There you go, a recommendations post and, funny enough, post #1,499 on this blog. I wonder what’s coming up next…
