Evolution of the Mobile Life: Part 2 – Day to Day

The honeymoon period with our Android based T-Mobile G1’s are now over.  Sure, both my wife and I love the phones.  They seem to work great, but was it really worth the money we laid out for them?  What kinds of tools exist that will make our lives better in some way?  Here I present to you some tips and review some of the applications that I use every day.  Most of these focus on personal use, business productivity will be covered in a subsequent article.

Google Maps

First, there is Google Maps which comes preloaded on the phone.  It integrates with the GPS already so finding where you are is easy.  I needed to drop something off at one of my utility companies; however I had never been to the office and I did not recognize the address.  Entering it in to Maps made it easy to find.  The integration is very nice.

It also has some of the “cool” features like a street view that integrates with the compass/accelerometer.  It actually changes the picture of the street based on the direction you are holding the phone.  Not very useful, but neat.  The directions and location; however, were very useful.

Quickpedia

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia.  I use it weekly to find information on just about anything, and more often than not, one of the first results when searching with Google is a link to a Wikipedia article about the subject. There are several applications that bring Wikipedia content to the Android, but the one that stood out for me was Quickpedia.  It seems that they agree with me over at cnet’s The Download Blog.

The free application makes it easy to search and browse Wikipedia for articles, throwing in a few tiny twists along the way to make navigating, reading, and learning interesting tidbits a breeze.

I have to agree with their assessment and would add that the formatting of the data is by far the best out there for a mobile device.  While other applications require you to flip pages or scroll endlessly, Quickpedia groups data into categories and lets you expand the sections you are interested in.  It is very handy to be sitting on the couch, in a restaurant or at a friends house and be able to look up information on something rather than promising to yourself to find it later (which we always do of course, right?).

Movie Finder

I love the movies.  I don’t go nearly as often as I like these days, but I still love them.  I cannot begin to count the times we have been running around town and started talking about a trip to the theater.

Me: We have have a couple of hours before we have to pick the kids up.
Wife: Yeah?  Let’s catch a movie!
Me: Sounds great!  What’s playing that you want to see?
Wife: I don’t recall.  How about you?
Me: Um…..
Wife: Hmmm
Me: Maybe next time.

Movie finder has a nice interface.  It uses the GPS to find your location and search out nearby theaters, or you can enter a zip code if you prefer.  From there, you can get a listing of the movies and times close by.  It also has links to trailers, IMDB entries and it gets user ratings of the each of the films.  We’ve used this a couple of times now to great enjoyment!  There are others out there, but so far this one seems to be the best.

Next Time

I hope you enjoyed some of these apps, tips and reviews.  Next time I will relate my experiences with Android productivity, including applications that help me stay on top of both work and home life.

Tags: android, mobile

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.