Mobile software Monday: 11 3rd party applications from the Android Market
The T-Mobile G1 is showing up in the hands of those who pre-ordered one this week (mine is schedule for Tuesday arrival) and I have been seeing new applications appearing in the Android Market almost daily on my review unit. There are still a very limited number of games and I think only one or two were added since I started my review. I loaded up eleven applications (a couple of these just appeared yesterday) and took the below video of eight applications in action on the G1. I covered the Video Player in my full review since that was really an application that should have been included by T-Mobile and Google. As I stated in my full review you only get 128MB of onboard storage to load up applications and you cannot currently load them on the microSD card. With the eleven applications I tried, I only had 34MB of remaining memory. However, in looking at the space allocation settings it looks like your data is stored in this area too so if you have a ton of contacts and lots of calendar entries your space may fill up faster.
The eight applications shown in my video below include (in order of appearance in the video), Android Says, Accuweather, Plusmo Pro Football Live, PacMan, Bonsai Blast, Compare Everywhere, Ecorio, and QuickList. I also recently loaded up and tried Shazam, Wikipedia Mobile, and iMap Mobile. Several of these applications won prizes in the Android Developer Challenge and can be found in the ADC Gallery. I look forward to seeing ShapeWriter launch soon with its onscreen text entry method.
I enjoyed playing Android Says (Simon), PacMan (classic game), and Bonsai Blast and think the games are great for mobile game playing with good sound and graphics. I liked Accuweather a bit better than the iMap Mobile weather application because it seemed to give me more information (taking up more of the display) and longer forecasts. iMap Mobile has a cool weather icon in the notifications area for alerts, but even when I turned them off the notification kept appearing.
Plusmo Pro Football Live as fun to follow the NFL while I was at my daughter's soccer game, its just too bad my Seahawks are so bad this year. I used QuickList several times as a way to take notes when a thought entered my head, but want a better note taking application. I never tried Compare Everywhere yet since I haven't been shopping since I have had the G1. Shazam worked like a champ at identifying the song that was playing and then gave me options to search the Amazon MP3 store or YouTube for related information.
I tried Ecorio for my train commute, but it required the GPS receiver to be on all the time when traveling and I didn't want to leave it on that long on my commute. It was cool to see updates from across the U.S. though and may have to play with this some more on my own G1.
The new Wikipedia Mobile (may have a different name, but I sent away my G1) application is a handy way to find things in Wikipedia and also just browse through interesting topics.
FYI, you can also download and install applications that may not yet be in the Android Market. Check out this video on the Phandroid site to see how to get the iTunes Remote on your G1. I also tried and installed the new ContactsSync application that lets you sync your Exchange contacts to your G1. Unfortunately, my IT guys just setup Exchange so I don't have the ability to use this yet.
I hope that T-Mobile/Google or a 3rd party developer soon adds the ability to install applications to your microSD card because with the applications being one of the possible strong points of the new OS you really need the ability to load up what you want without restrictions.
So far all of these applications are free and we haven't heard how you will be paying for them. You may pay through your T-Mobile account or via a credit card you input and store in your store account.