One of the most interesting Acquisition by Google was Android. A Product that has brought frightening fever to Nokia (Once the Monopoly of Mobile OS).
I have never been a great fan of Google. But the Linux Kernel based Mobile OS is sweetly sweeping away the mobile OS market.
75,000 Applications, 3, 00, 000 New Android Phone are bought daily. The No : 3 in OS Market and won’t take more than two years to achieve the Numero Uno status.
The most interesting part of any Smartphone is Applications. Not just applications the right applications. Android is not an exception unlike Apple, android accepts most of the Applications that are being submitted by the developers.
I have tested close to 550 Android Applications after extensive usage, my two month old phone looks tired. Here is my list of best Android Applications.
Note : Search the applications with the Search Tags provided below
1) Advanced Task Killer : You might tend to keep an application open unknowingly, but it eats lot of your battery life. Advanced Task killer helps you to close all Applications that are open at one shot
Search Tag: Advanced Task Killer
2) Fast Uninstaller: Helps to Uninstall Applications in magical seconds – Faster than any other App
Search Tag: Fast Uninstaller
3) Angry Bird : The most interesting & addictive game available in the Android Space
Search Tag: Angry Bird
4) Dropbox : One of my favorite and you would wonder how file storage and sharing, made it so easy in to a mobile phone these days.
Search Tag: Dropbox
5) Evernote : A Productive Application that helps you to remember all your passwords, yes that’s how I use it. An awesome note making Application
Search Tag: Evernote
6) Norton Security: Keeps your mobile phone healthy and safe from virus. Highly Productive in terms of features
Search Tag: Norton Security
7) Gesture Search: This Application will definitely take you for a shock. Now Search your contacts by roughly drawing the first letter of the contact (E.g if you are searching for Steve, Just draw “S” with your finger roughly, this Application will get you the contact details)
Search Tag: Gesture Search
8) Opera : P.S : Don’t think of downloading any other browser Application for your Android Phone, Opera is the best, sleek and fast
Search Tag: Gesture Search
9) Where is my Droid : Have you ever had the trouble of searching your mobile when it was in silent mode. If yes, not to worry any more. This particular does an amazing job of finding your mobile even when it’s in silent mode. Sure to Surprise
Search Tag: Where is My Droid
10) Twitter/ Facebook/Buzz/Foursquare: Ask me Twitter, Faebook and Fouresquare has got official Android Application and they do an awesome job. I have tested many alternative applications none had give me the simplest sharing option. If you still wanted to try some other third party application, go for “Tweetdeck” that integrates your Twitter, Facebook, Foursqaure and Google Buzz account
Search Tag: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Buzz, Tweet Deck
11) Google Apps: Google Owns Android, I would suggest you to try all of their official Products instead of going for a third part application : Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google RSS reader and Google Chat
12) Astrid Tasks : Simple Task Master and a Reminder with multiple deep options
Search Tag: Astrid Tasks
13) IMDB: Anything and everything about movies – The Most Trusted Movie Application, a must have for movie buffs
Search Tag: IMDB
14) Blogs: Huffington Post the most popular blog in the world is in Android now with a simple interface
Search Tag: Huffington Post
15) App Brain (Android Market Alternative) : if you are bored with your Android Market Application that is inbuilt in your mobile phone, now try Appbrian that suggests you application based on your usage history. A definite One
Search Tag: App Brain
Write to me if you need clarifications on any specific Android Application.
Google will get us loads of information based on the search tag, but the next generation search engines are meant to be knowledge engines and not search engines.
Wolfram Alpha is a sensible search engine startup that delivers interesting statistical results based on your search.
I do a lot of research at work, here is how I use Wolfram Alpha
To get basic information about a company at one shot (e.g Infosys)
Compare the Stock performance of two companies in a single window (e.g Infosys vs. Microsoft)
To get basic financial and growth statistics of a nation (E.g India)
You can try as many search attempts with Wolfram Alpha; unlike Google, this computational search engine will give you sensible results
Check out more ways to explore Wolfram Alpha
The war isn’t between Apple and Google for iOS vs. Android, but the war is between two different mobile platforms that are struggling hard to win people’s heart.
Smartphone’s are slowing becoming the necessary asset in our life; already there is an increasing population that is accessing web Via Mobile.
Lots of Infographic’s had been shared in the web about other Mobile OS, here I had a chance to look at one the well made Infographic’s (By Mobclix) on Android – The fastest growing Mobile OS in the World.
One of the simplest photo storage and sharing sites, that I came across in the recent past is Jalbum.
One problem with most of the photo sharing sites is, they take lot of time to upload the photos. Be it Flickr, Picasa or any other photo sharing site they have this issue.
With Jalbum your wait time to upload your photos gets much shorter and shorter. Just drag and drop the images in the Jalbum folder and share it with your friends in magical minutes.
Undeniably the best photo sharing site that I have seen till date for a simple reason Jalbum is simple in terms of interface and functionality.
Some of the best features :
1) Desktop Applications : Your images are stored in the cloud, now view it offline too
2) Create Slide shows with your images
3) Edit your images
4) Create multiple Albums and share it with your friends
5) Easy Upload
Please use the following link to get yourself comfortable with Jalbum
Jalbum Download : Windows – Mac
Tutorial : Link
You may not have a blog, but you may be active in all social networking sites and now how do you get them all together in a single page ?
Create a profile page for yourself in few minutes with About.me
About.me is an awesome service that allows you to create a profile page for yourself in the most simplest way.
About.me is a simple product with great design. I have always been a fan of Profile Page Tools (Earlier i have reviewed about card.ly, magntize) and with About.me being a new entrant in to the profile page segment am totally impressed with its design and interface
About. me can be used as your
- Online VCard
- Add all you Social Networks along with the feeds
- A Short bio about youself
- Write a crisp intro about your startup
- Add in your Facebook Page & Email Signature
P.S: About.me has not yet opened their service to the public completely. In case you are excited about their site, write to their founders for an invite. It worked well !!
Have you ever thought what exactly is a smart phone? This question had been bothering me for a long time.
Why do I have to worry about this, when every fortnight a smart phone gets rolling in the market?
Are the So-called Smart phones really smart? A Definite NO
Commercially Nokia & Ericsson were the first one to launch a smart phone during the year 1996-97. Eventually all other players Microsoft, Palm, Blackberry, Apple, HTC joined the race.
Year 2002, Blackberry introduced its first commercial phone supported by its own OS, when most of the other manufacturers where operating on a rented platform.
Year 2007 is one of the most significant years in the history of Mobile Phones with the launch of Apple iPhone 3G, later most of the players including Nokia started to mimic iPhone and they are still unsuccessful to launch a good smart phone.
Late 2008 HTC released the first commercial Android based Smart Phone HTC Dream and eventually more mobile players migrated to Android that had resulted to be a promising move. HTC had a long unproductive relationship with Microsoft Mobile OS which came to an end when Android was introduced in the Market. Eventually HTC now enjoys 10% of the smart phone market which could have been impossible with out Android.
Motorola that was marching towards its funeral, gained their momentum through one phone – “Droid” based on Android OS. Now Motorola competes with Blackberry with their newly launched Droid Pro
Now we have ample number of players that make exactly similar phones like Apple iPhone. Samsung Galaxy is nothing but a clone of Apple iPhone. Not sure why they recreated the wheel again. They could have just taken an iPhone and re labeled it as Samsung Galaxy.
Given the rave reviews about Windows 7 Mobile OS, Microsoft may gain more traction in the smart phone market, but looking at the track record Microsoft had been a successful failure in making smart phones.
Nokia have a laid back attitude towards a progressive move, they still stick to Symbian OS and frustrate the users. The Problem with Nokia Smart phones is, there is no intuitive interface in any of the Nokia Touch Phone. There is no seamless integration between the hardware and the software.
Nokia named a top business executive from Microsoft as their New CEO recently, all that Nokia needs now is a Product Visionary not a Business Legend. I strongly feel migrating to Android OS from Symbian can do more good to Nokia, else they would end up making colorful mobile toys.
Lessons are to learn just once. May be Nokia has a bigger bandwidth and money to make more mistakes and disastrous experiments though Nokia might hold the major 41% smart phone market. Celebrating their own home made Symbian OS in all their smart phones are not going to give them glory anymore.
The lesson is Apple & Blackberry does not provide us features. They provide us Experience that is inimitable and irreplaceable.
The Future of smart phones
Blackberry will continue to dominate the Enterprise segment. Apple will be your buddy as any of the apple products; with iPhone you will never feel lonely even during a breakup. That’s the gist of the 2 Legends
Given below are the latest 2010 Q2, market share stats of smart phones
Unlike Apple, Android has a Problem – There are no perfect mobile phones to run Android OS. Eventually Android will dominate the smart phone market in next two years. Apple cant, because they don’t want to see their OS to run on a lousy mobile phone.
More Mobile OS are to come in the future; they could be even out of your imagination. Mozilla, Opera and Facebook can also release their own mobile OS in the future. To me any of the successful Mobile application company will have Mobile OS as their long-term goal.
So, what is a smart phone?
“An electronic instrument that is seductively
productive.”
Its not very often, you get to see a creative advertisement from Microsoft, who often lose the battle against Apple Ads.
Below one is a creative advertisement from Microsoft and Creative too – Microsoft Hardware Divisions 25th Year Celebration
Knowledge is power and it is spread across beyond human existence
With Technology evolving in a rapid pace the sources of knowledge had also increased beyond imagination.
Today, Web is be the ideal source of information among all other sources. Apart from your normal sources like Search Engines, Wiki’s, News Aggregators, blogs and Tutorial Sites there are few unique and productive sites that can make you a “Man of the Information Age.”
2leep : Believe me, from the time you enter 2Leep, You cant take off your eyes from the site for the next 30 mins. Guaranteed !! Flooded with information across all categories. 2Leep is basically a Knowledge hub connecting the best interesting blogs & sites globally. Choose the category of your choice and master the art.
Oddee : Unusual information bank. Oddee is the best place to sharpen you knowledge based on List articles (i.e. Top 25 Silicon Valley Hero’s, Top 25 Highly Paid Sportsmen, Top 25 overrated actors). The content is spread across different categories, and your favorite category (i.e. music, films, technology) is definitely a part of the list as I already mentioned Oddee is a knowledge bank.
Other than information, you will also get to know some of the interesting blogs & sites across the globe as 2Leep & Oddee are basically News aggregators that delivers information from different sites.
What happens, when you built an awesome application sitting in Stanford dorm.
Most possible outcomes:
- You may get an instant job offer form a Top Tech firm
- You get an instant response from top VC’s & firms to acquire or buy your app
- You get instant Media Promotion
All 3 outcomes had been possible for Feross, a Stanford university student who had built YouTube Instant – a site that lets you search across the vast YouTube video database in real-time.
It all started out as a bet for with one of his roommate, to create YouTube Instant in 1 hour. Feross failed to score the bet and ended up finishing it in 3 hours and now YouTube Instant had got him a job with YouTube.
The most interesting part is, Feross received the job offer Via Twitter.
YouTube Instant is a cool application that makes your search an easy one with YouTube. Just type in the search tag, YouTube Instant will get you the most popular video, relevant to search tag. Surprisingly YouTube Instant has managed to get more than a Million Visitor in ten days.
YouTube Instant is very similar to the recently launched Google Instant, In fact Feross had mentioned in one of his blog post that he got the idea to built YouTube Instant after Google Instant.
Read his blog to know about the Complete Story of Google Instant, To know about How he met Chad Hurley, CEO of YouTube know about the Statistics related to YouTube Instant – Here
Xmarks is one the amazing bookmarking tool across the web, the saddest part is they are closing their service in next 90 days.
Xmarks had played a very major role in my blogging life and i was really disturbed to hear it from one of their blog post that they are shutting down their operations due to lack of business model.
For people who had never heard about Xmarks:
- An awesome bookmarking service that can be accessed across different computers
- A Firefox Add-on that would get you the list of best alternative sites across each category
With Xmarks marching towards its funeral, now we need some other application with similar functionality or even better.
AlternativeTo.net can be positioned as a Xmarks replacement that provides similar functionality but with different interface. What AlternativeTo does better than Xmarks is they have separate search tabs for different OS Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and android
AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Just type the application that you want to replace and they give you great alternatives, based on user recommendations.
E.g: You are tired of Google Search and you wanted an alternative search engine, AlternativeTo gets you a list of best alternatives to Google Search in the most effective way.
Xmarks is a star in the bookmarking league and Todd Agulnick founder & CTO of Xmarks wrote in a blog post Xmarks couldn’t find a Business model for itself and their hunt for a potential buyer ended with a negative note.
Hope Xmarks find a Potential buy and to continue its remarkable service