Top Android App: Google Reader (Official)

Google Reader has finally been released as a native Android app!
Version: 0.8.0

• Size: 1.66MB
• Category: News & Weather
• Price: Free

The Google Reader app includes all of the essential core features you’d expect. Just “Allow” Google Reader to sync your reader account and you’re set. You can even add multiple accounts if necessary.

You’ll have easy access to your subscriptions in a clean, light-weight user interface (this is ideal for quick load times and readability). Additionally, the Home page of the app let’s you quickly access the “All Items” feed, Starred Items, “Your Stuff” (shared items), People you follow, and an option to “Explore” (discover new RSS feeds based on the content you already subscribe to).

With your Android phone’s menu button, you can refresh the feeds list, add a subscription, search, organize your feed, etc. While you’re actually reading an article, you can star, like, share, or tag it as well. The benefit of using tags and starring items is that you can easily search/locate particular articles later on.

A useful setting you may want to enable lets you navigate between articles with your phone’s volume keys.

 

 

Pros:

• Official, native Google Reader Android app!
• Complete integration/sync with Google Reader
• Minimalist UI

Areas for improvement:

• Offline caching/viewing is a must!
• Options like font sizes, notifications, widget, etc. need to be added in future updates

Conclusion: A promising, solid start to the official Google Reader app, although not as feature-rich as other RSS feed reader options like NewsRob or gReader.

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Touchdown! ESPN Fantasy Football 2010

Version: 1.0

Play fantasy football anywhere you are with the ESPN Fantasy Football 2010 app.

• Size: 0.89MB
• Category: Sports
• Price: $4.99

Once you login to your ESPN account, you can view all of your fantasy football teams. It’s easy to manage your rosters, make lineup adjustments (real handy for last-minute changes because of injury updates), propose/accept trades, and get live scoring updates. This app is quite functional and gives you access to team details, league standings, available players, schedule, message board, and league settings.

 

 

The most valuable function of this app is the ability to manage rosters on the go. Click the “M” next to a player and get the option to select a new slot to fill. If you’re wondering about the latest news/stats/injury reports on a specific player, click their name to bring up their player card. This app will surely come in handy when you have that “oh no!” moment when you realize you’ve left players actively on your roster during their bye week.

 

Personally, I haven’t experienced many of the problems (e.g. force close, connection issues) that other users have encountered. Additionally, even though a lot of this information is available on ESPN’s mobile site, the app is organized in a way that is much more functional than the mobile site. Hopefully as the features are added and updated, the price of this app will be justified for more people.

Pros:

• Manage your fantasy rosters on the go
• Well organized and highly functional
• Instant access to fantasy news/stats/ESPN articles

Areas for improvement:

• Support for Live Drafts
• Expand filter/sorting of free agent players
• Push notifications for scoring, player info, etc.
• Widget!

Conclusion: If you can live with the price tag, this app is a must-have for fantasy football addicts.

Top Android App: Celestial Bodies Live Wallpaper

Version: 1.0 (Beta)

Celestial Bodies is a 3D live wallpaper depiction of the solar system.

• Size: 414KB
• Category: Themes
• Price: $0.99

Like our Force Fields review earlier, this live wallpaper is for the astronomy/science nerds out there! First off, you can choose between a view of our solar system, or have a solar system randomly generated. A few of the settings you can customize are the orbital speed, your preferred view, and for music visualization. When you’re on your homescreen, tap the screen to cycle through the available views. If you’ve got a specific view that you only want displayed, make sure to un-check the “tap view” option.

 

If you’re worried about phone performance or battery life, there are render settings you can play with like the amount of planet detail displayed, whether or not background stars are shown, and the frame-rate limiter option.

Pros:

• Quality graphics for use as a live wallpaper
• Accurate solar system depiction
• Multiple viewing options and customization settings

Areas for improvement:

• May get cluttered, but adding moons would be a fun option

Conclusion: A great live wallpaper to add to your homescreen background repertoire!

Top Android App: MultiPicture Live Wallpaper

MultiPicture Live Wallpaper enables you to display a different picture for each panel of your Android device’s homescreen.

Version: 0.4.8

• Size: 111KB (no apps2SD)
• Category: Themes
• Price: Free

This MultiPicture Android app is not exactly a live wallpaper in the sense that we are used to. In essence, it’s an advanced homescreen wallpaper manager. To setup, go to [Home] > [Menu] > [Wallpaper] > [Live Wallpapers].

The easiest way to get this live wallpaper up and running is by editing the default settings (instead of changing the settings for each homescreen panel). First, in the “Type of screen” section, choose where you’d like the app to look for pictures. At first, this was rather confusing because the default was set to use a single picture but nothing would show up (even if it’s set to randomly use an image, it won’t initialize until you go in and adjust this setting at least once). I’d suggest the album option, which lets you check/un-check the albums you’d like pictures displayed from.

Other settings include background color, crop/resize ratio, saturation, opacity, and picture selection order. I’d recommend using some sort of crop/resize setting instead of fit to full-screen to avoid blurry images. Play around with the different transition types (for when you switch homescreen panels) and picture change intervals (anywhere from 5 seconds to 1 hour to never).

 

 

Pros:

• Assign different images to each of your Android homescreen panels
• Extensive list of setup options, e.g. transition effects, image settings, etc.
• Double-tap to refresh pictures

Areas for improvement:

• Initial setup was rather confusing, a short tutorial/help section would benefit new users

Conclusion: An Android live wallpaper that lets you display different pictures on each homescreen panel, a functionality that should be included with stock Android!

[AppBrain Link]