14
Jan
2012

As promised, we've got another set of roundups for you this month. This time, though, we're not just looking at last month's best apps and games – we've got a short list of the very best apps and games from all of 2012.

To be sure, poring over all the apps we've covered in the past year was an arduous task. We've picked three entries for each category (in no particular order), but there were certainly more than four new apps worth talking about. To that end, we've also got plenty of runners-up. Without further ado, here's the cream of the 2012 crop.

18
Dec
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While Astrid may be one of the leading to-do lists on Android, there is a considerable amount of innovation to be done in the world of keeping track of things that need doing. Apparently! Enter Wunderlist, an app that Matt liked well enough, but couldn't quite manage to make him keep coming back. Perhaps today's update will change his mind, though, as it brings a host of new features such as improvements to the UI, push notifications, Smart lists, and a better widget.

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The previous iteration of this app had a nice-looking wooden background but, that aside, it still used the old Gingerbread-style tabs to switch sections.

08
Oct
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It's that time again – the time of the month when we give you our short list of the best new games from the previous month. This time, we've sifted through all the great Play Store entries from September to give you our top six favorite new games, all of which are worth at least checking out, at most becoming completely addicted to.

Bad Piggies

We couldn't pass up Bad Piggies. Rovio's latest entry into the Play Store, which builds on the wild success of Angry Birds, puts the pigs everyone loves to hate in the spotlight with the "Piggest Game Ever."

In Bad Piggies, players will build flying, rolling, or floating contraptions to safely transport pigs through environments that are fiendishly hard to master, aiming to collect three stars per level like always, but through increasingly unique and customizable means.

13
Jun
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As our address books become more advanced and we become more and more inundated with information, it can become difficult to keep up with all the people we need to interact with on a regular basis. NextCall augments your address book by letting you rank important contacts, set alerts for when you need to call them, and sort your contacts into business and personal categories.

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The app will keep track of how long it has been since you last called a certain contact, so you can keep track of who you've been neglecting. The app has a clean, ICS-themed interface, and is completely free, including free of ads.

06
Mar
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Verizon Wireless has just made public an official list of handsets on the network poised to receive Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OTA updates, most being devices for which such updates were a given at this point:

HTC:

  • HTC ThunderBolt™
  • DROID Incredible 2 by HTC
  • HTC Rhyme™
  • HTC Rezound™

Motorola:

  • Motorola XOOM
  • DROID BIONIC™
  • DROID RAZR™
  • DROID RAZR™ MAXX™
  • DROID 4
  • DROID XYBOARD 8.2
  • DROID XYBOARD 10.1

Samsung:

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab™ 10.1
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab™ 7.7

LG:

  • Spectrum™ by LG

No timeframe was provided, but this is probably the most authoritative ICS update list you'll see out there, if for only one reason: in the end, it's Verizon that decides whether or not a device on its network gets updated.

31
Dec
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2011 was a great year for Android - Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was announced. The Galaxy Nexus was released. A whole truckload of Android tablets came out. The first 4G LTE smartphones appeared. But there were some significant speed bumps as well. Here are, in no particular order, the five things in the world of Android in the last year that really got our hopes up, but ended up being a little disappointing.

1. HTC ThunderBolt / All Early Verizon 4G LTE Phones

It's really hard to know where to start with the ThunderBolt. It wasn't actually a terrible phone in terms of usability or performance, but the delayed release, abysmal battery life, overheating, and seemingly endless wait for Android 2.3 drew more angst from owners than probably any other device we've ever seen.

10
Nov
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How many task managers that keep track of To-Do items can we need on Android? The creators of Taskos, which in itself is a task list manager, thought we were in such dire need for one more that they had to one-up even themselves and create Any.DO.

Any.DO has a completely new interface that is so slick that you will find yourself wondering whether you're running an Android app at all. In fact, it's kind of reminiscent of a style Windows Phone 7 uses, but don't freak out - that's actually a good thing. Fresh, fluid, and extremely clean - it is a breath of fresh air from the second you start using it.

03
Sep
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Shopping lists. If you're in charge of food for a house with a lot of people, or just like to cook, they are a necessary evil.

How much do I need? Do I have some of that chicken left in the freezer? Is there enough cayenne left in that bottle for this recipe? You get the idea. Out of Milk aims to solve these problems and more - it's an app devoted (almost) solely to the organization of your food purchases and pantry stock.

Lists, Lists, Lists

OK, so just how much better can you make organizing a shopping list? I've always gone the route of copying/pasting ingredients from recipes into an e-mail, so I know just how much I need and know that my list is complete.

27
Apr
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Last Updated: July 24th, 2011

This is the third iteration in our 'Top Android Apps Every Rooted User Should Know About' series. Click here for part one or here for part two.

It's that time again - we've spent the last few months scouring the Android Market, and now we're ready to report back with nine more great root apps. There are a lot of good ones in this edition - read on for some of the best reasons to root your Android handset!

marketenablerMarketEnabler

One of the most frequent excuses for piracy has to be "The app isn't available in my country" or "Google doesn't allow paid apps where I live." No longer!

24
Jan
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It is pretty much accepted now that 2011 will be the year of tablets. Last year, after the iPad kick-started the revolution, we only saw a handful of devices that could challenge the giant. This year at CES, we saw over 100, most of them running - you guessed it - Android. The competition is on, and soon we'll see who makes it out a winner in the tablet war and who will head straight to the junk yard.

Shawn DuBravac, the official Chief Economist and Director of Research for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) that runs CES, attempted to tally up all the newbies and provided his results in a handy table that I've reformatted below, highlighting Android devices.

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