Your First 5 Essential Apps For Your Android Phone

Having used an Android HTC Hero handset for a few weeks now I have gather around 70 apps. However, some of them are essential and almost seem missing from the released operating system. So I will document the 5 most needed apps to get you started and another five later this week. You should be able to find all of these in the app store. However, with some market restrictions in place, you may need Market Enabler on a Rooted Handset. Market Enabler details are below.

1. Taskiller – Free

This is so important, especially if you are on the stock ROM. Android allows for multi-tasking, which is great until your handset gets down to about 30mb of memory and everything is crawling. This problem isn’t so bad since I rooted my handset and flashed 2.1. But I still rate this app as essential even on this ROM. Taskiller has two parts and is free. First of all it has an application in your phone hat lists all running  apps and clicking on the main button or individual apps icons kills them all or one by one. Holding down the icon allows you to choose to ignore the app so Taskiller doesn’t kill it. The second part is the widget. This allows quick access to whats running and a kill all button.

2. Dolphin Browser – Free

The stock browser is good. But the Dolphin Browser is fantastic. It mimics some popular iPhone features like pinch and spread to zoom in and out. It has a great auto RSS feature and the usual others. Its very fast. It supports gestures and quick tab changes. Yes, it has tabs! It has a nice start page with a widget like experience on the side. It has multi-touch support built in. It make sit really easy to share links or email/sms the link to a contact.

3. Feedr – 99c

If you need a decent RSS feed reader then this is it. I depend on a decent RSS reader and on windows mobile, I opened about 20 times a day to keep up with latest news. I tried every one I could find and none were as good a Feedr. It allows syncing with Google Reader. So if you have all your feeds already added to Google Reader then the work is cut down. It works by displaying the feed inline with jump buttons. This took getting used to but works much better. Its quick. And it makes it simple to star or mark and share a feed for someone else or for later reading. It has a great feature of mark all and close feed. So you are quickly back to the next available unread feeds. Another great feature is the widget. You can add any feed as a widget to your desktop screen.

4. Handcent SMS – Free

This is a really fun application and an absolute must replacement for the standard messaging app. The standard one is good but this is great. You can customise everything. Individual colours for each contact. Unique sms/mms ringtone for each contact. Different backgrounds.. different fonts.. different sizes.. the list goes on and on… The best feature is the popup widget when a text comes in. You have a small box with the text details and contact name and picture. You can quickly type a message back or press listen and have the text read out loud. Then you can hit the mic icon and speak your reply. If driving and texting was legal.. this would be really useful. When your done it automatically marks the text as read. Just a tip: go to the standard messaging app and turn off notifications.

5. Market Enabler – Free

This is great if you have rooted your handset like I mention earlier and how to here. Simply due to international restrictions and so on.. blah blah.. you don’t get all the apps available to the market. Market enabler allows you to choose a region and then you get to choose from all the apps. really useful. I will post another  5 soon. But these will get you started……..

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