The Android market is slowly become more of a mess because of the sheer amount of android applications uploaded to it every month. If you are browsing through the latest additions you often find a lot of junk and it’s often hard to even understand what this Android app you are looking at does. Though they these Android applications are free, they are often also just a complete waste of your time.

The real high quality applications that also happen to be free are hard to find in the Android Market, especially for new users (like the lucky HTC Hero Sprint owners for instance!). Because it’s hard to find and hard to understand what certain applications do we made a list of a few apps that you really don’t want to pass on. If you are looking for Android Games go here.

GDocs for google Android

If you are using an Android device I’m sure you also own a google mail account, if you don’t you are obviously missing out on the amazing google account integration of the Android operating system.

If you have a google account I’m sure you have seen, heard or toyed around with goole documents. Google documents allows you to store your documents online and edit them from everywhere around the world on your Android phone.

GDocs allows you to edit these documents from anywhere you are in the world while using your Android phone to do the editing. GDocs is an amazing piece of software and it’s great to touch your documents up, find some information or do anything else with your stored documents. Find out more about GDocs in the following location: http://sites.google.com/site/gdocsforandroid/

Palringo for Google Android

Many Android users out there love to use their device to chat with friends and or family. I’ll don’t go around the bush on this one, if you are looking for an instant messenger client for Android you have to get Palringo. Palringo makes the default IM client look like the first ICQ client ever released. Palringo supports nearly every messaging protocol that excists:

• Google Talk
• AIM
• Facebook
• Yahoo
• MSN
• ICQ
• iChat
• Jabber
• And many more but you will find out when you use this application

Because Palringo supports all these protocols it makes it the best Android application for IM by far. It’s just very convenient to have everyone in one package and always use the same application for a certain task. If you have Palringo open you receive system notifications if you get a message and because we used it often while traveling (lose 3G network quite often) we have noticed that it works great on the Edge and even GRPS networks. To find Palringo just search for it in the android market.

These 2 free applications for Android devices are just amazing, be sure to at the very least try them out!

What are you looking at!??! Oh the chin..

So are you one of the lucky few people that already has their HTC Hero Sprint phone? If so I bet you have been tweaking and configuring to try and make your Sense UI look great and personal. So what is next? You heard the android app store is filled with amazing applications that you can get for free. But where to start? There is a most popular listing but of course this doesn’t store all the previous months and what applications you should get.

For our HTC Hero Sprint friends who joined us in the Hero community (Europe has had the phone for some months now) we devised a list of must get applications for your fresh new non-chinned Hero. And don’t worry nobody blames your chinless model.

SMS Popup
SMS popup is an application that allows any android user the luxury of having their Short text messages popup on the screen like the iPhone. Some people prefer this, some people don’t. It sure is a real fast way to reply to a message as you get the 3 options on your screen “Close, Delete, Reply”. The application looks great on the HTC Hero, sprint and chinned edition alike. Choose wisely when your girl or boyfriend texts you.

Twidroid
A freeware twitter application. Yes we know HTC Hero Sprint and chinned has an included twitter client. But this one is fast, has all the options and on top of it all it’s free. Try it, if you don’t like it you can blame the Germans.

Appmanager
AppManager is a valuable instrument to assist you back up your application/programs to your expandable memory card. Like to the application program manager in ASTRO but this is a free alternative, you are able to pick out individual apps or choose all apps and back them up or install from the SD card at any time. I use this day in and day out for saving certain apps to the backup memory card.

Mobile Defense
So now you have this amazing smartphone, obviously you realy want to keep it safe. I Recall checking Mobile Defense on the Android Market some time ago, just never went around to setting it up as it required establishing an account. After I took the few mins install, I realized all this time I have been leaving my telephone at jeopardy for getting lost or stolen. Mobile defense is the best security app for your Android smart phone. It installs a application that’s hidden (so people don’t know it’s installed), and you are able to access administrative controls on your phone via a browser at http://www.mobiledefense.com. If you lose your phone, load the website using a computer and access the administrative controls you have over your lost phone. Not only does it enable GPS and show you where your phone washes up, it’ll in addition to tell you the battery life left, and pass you data about the SIM card owner if the SIM card is changed. On top of that, you are able to enable “alarm”, which turns on the volume on your phone and activates a siren sound so you’ll be able to place it. There’s also “Lock”, which turns on the pattern lock on your phone to secure it. I’m astonished at all the characteristics this application offers up, and as well the other features if you upgrade to the paid version (remote backup, remote wipe). Your Sprint HTC Hero smart phone should not go without this application installed.

I know, it’s 4 apps but top 5 just sounds so much better. See you next time for some more recommendation for your brand spanking new HTC Hero Sprint.

SPB released a new WVGA Windows Mobile game called SPB Quads. Quads is a puzzle game where the goal is to make squares from a field of little squares with different colors and shapes. The object of the game is the same as the mini game that is called quadratic that you can find in the SPB Brain evolution 2.0 release. This game compared to the mini game from brain games has a big happy feeling about it, instead of the more boring looking mini game. The game does this with a vibrant color and shape theme, quality sound and music. The animation used throughout the game are fast and the input to the screen feels direct- as in no lag at all. In the options menu you can choose to have sound and or music and you can get the volume swell.

The game has two modes called ‘Ever Quad’ and ‘Time Quad’. In the ever quad mode you can basically keep on playing until you battery dies. In the timed mode you have to gain a certain amount of points before the timer runs out, as you gain more points the timer gains more time. Both games look equally good on the WVGA 800×480 screens we tested it on. When you get enough points before the timer runs out you are granted a new level, and the game increases the difficulty.

The game features different kind of bonuses and some hints when you are stuck. SPB Quads is not a hard game, but it can become hard as your skill increases and you wish to challenge yourself to a higher score every time. The game can be played whenever you want to, and the ability to set the volume to zero without changing your phone profile assist in this. When you exit the game it actually remembers the state of the game and you can continue whenever you want to or tap the option menu and start a new one.

SPB Quads is a fun little game and for $9,99 it’s worth the cost (if you enjoy it). Feel free to try it out like always SPB Softwarehouse has released a 15 day trial of the game on their website. You can ask yourself if you really care so much about the graphics, and would settle for the more simple version of the game in SPB Brain Evolution 2.0 which is $10 more to buy. I would however recommend the game to be played on the newer WVGA Smartphones (HTC ones of course!), they have bigger screens and make the game more fun to play with your finger instead of cramping with your stylus.

Free Windows Mobile applications, often quality can be hard to find. But today we compiled a list of five real gems. What they have to offer? Quality, usability and good looks, all in a free package for everyone on the Windows Mobile platform.

Opera Mobile
Let’s start with what is clearly the best browser available on Windows Mobile. Opera Mobile, weather it be version 9.5 that has been available for some time now, or the newest beta of 9.7 Opera Mobile will make browsing on your Touch screen device a breeze. The bookmark system, the speed and the looks and usability make it by far the best experience we ever had while browsing the net. If you have been using Opera Mobile 9.5 for some time now (it is included in many HTC ROMs) you should give 9.7 a try. Not everyone knows this but you can run the two versions side by side, so feel free to try out this beta, and if you don’t like it just uninstall it. Find it here.

Google Maps Mobile
Need we say anything about this application for your Windows phone? Google Maps works great on any Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android, Nokia device. Google has put quite the effort in this little application to make the experience great. The only thing I would really like to see for this app is that you can predownload some maps from Google themselves, so you can view the maps a bit faster when on a slow connection. Thanks for this great app Google! You can download it here .

Facebook
Microsoft released their own Facebook for Windows Phones application recently, I guess they finally noticed how important social networks are becoming to the mobile phone community. What can I say? The application does work, but seems a bit sluggish compared with the iPhone or Android version. Let’s hope this application will improve with time and bring a good experience to the Windows Mobile 6.5 phones that are hitting the market this October. Download it here.

Stay tuned to see more posts regarding some great freeware Windows Mobile applications getting a short review. There are many more hidden gems that few people know about and are often just as good if not better then a lot of the payed counterparts.

Looking for some quality games for Windows Mobile? Check out this post.

Unless you are into the habit of flashing your windows mobile phone with user-made ROMs there currently is no Windows Mobile 6.5 device out there yet. If you are interested in flashing your Windows Mobile device by the way, check out the following website (only the best website there is for custom ROMs (made by people other than phone companies): www.xda-developers.com. But Microsoft has announced that the first Windows Mobile Smartphone’s are just around the corner. 6 October is the date. So what is all the fuss about? What will they bring to the table that we haven’t already seen in Windows Mobile 6.1?

Windows Marketplace

Well for starters; Windows Marketplace (see screenshot below). Windows Mobile users will finally have proper way to get over the air applications and games, payed and free. Microsoft is quite the late bloomer in this department as both iPhone OS and android mobile phones have had applications shops for more than a year now. Let’s hope there will be a bit of a catch-up in windows mobile development soon. Handsets like the HTC Touch HD have had little attention from mobile game developers, of course there are exceptions.

New home screen

Windows Mobile 6.5 by default features a new home screen called Titanium. It’s very finger friendly and looks to be beautiful and smooth to the eye.

The home screen also allows for quite some customization. You can see a great video here that shows some of the possibilities.

New lock screen

The new lock screen offers a new slide left or right to unlock, wich is very finger friendly. Not only does the lock screen allow for a nice unlock mode, but also shows the current background you are using for your home screen. You can also see a battery, sound and reception indicator in the top right of the screen.

Next to these features the lock screen offers notifications for SMS, voicemail, missed calls and new e-mail. The great thing is that like how you unlock the phone with sliding to the left or right (as indicated by the arrows in the screenshot, you can also slide the missed calls, sms, voicemail and e-mail notifications to the left or right. This will take you directly to the notification you decided to drag. The phone will unlock and you will see your item directly.

Kinetic scrolling

Next to some other smaller UI tweaks Microsoft has made for Windows Mobile 6.5 one of the better ones is system wide kinetic scrolling. This means that when you scroll your contacts, a website, or just a file structure of any type it will not only look a lot better than before but also feel much more natural. What the kinetic scrolling really means is that when for example you give your phone a quick ‘flick’ and move your finger really fast, the list you are navigating will gain a much bigger acceleration, speed and longevity then for example a soft touch would.

For all us Windows Mobile 6.5 enthusiasts lets hope Windows Mobile 6.5 will not disappoint and brings some great hardware and software with it in the near future.