This week’s best Android apps have a festive twist. The arrival of December doesn’t only allow folks to put up the decorations guilt-free and developers to churn out Christmas shovelware. It also robs the rest of us of our right to complain about all this non-denominational Winter Festival nonsense.
That November joy of complaining as mince pies and overpriced selection boxes start appearing on supermarket shelves disappears. Do the same thing in December and your true identity will be revealed – as a miserable old so and so. It’s a good job we got more than our fair share of moaning done last month then…
Before we start, search for, download and install Barcode Scanner, then point the Barcode Scanner app at the QR codes on this page to zip straight to the Android Market to install everything listed. Chop chop!
Britain’s Finest (Free)
Some of the best Android apps are out to show you where to have a good time, from augmented reality apps that’ll show you to the nearest lingerie retailer to simple pub finders. But if that all sounds like the preserve of the riffraff to you, Britain’s Finest might be up your boulevard. It’s dead classy, like.
Instead of just finding you the nearest public toilets or booze dens, it’ll let you scout out museums, galleries and public gardens. If you need to impress someone on that first date, need somewhere to take the folks over the Christmas break or just fancy a boost of culture, it’s one of the best apps around. The interface is fab, telling you how far away each attraction is, and even the pop-up messages inside the app are polite. It’s a cut above. The price for class? Nowt, it’s free.
Google Reader (Free)
Android benefits from integrated Google features like Google Maps and Google Navigation, but it doesn’t always benefit from them very speedily. Take Google Reader – it’s a simple news aggregation service, an RSS doodad that links-in with your Google account, yet it has only just made it to Android in app form.
Oh, it’s fine. Android’s only been around for… twoyears!
The best things may come in small packages, but do they also come very, very late? As one of the best Android apps for news reading, Google Reader suggests so. It looks much like its desktop equivalent – simple but effective – and lets you sort and search through your results to help you find out what you’re after without too much fanfare.
Waitrose Christmas (Free)
Waitrose or Marks & Spencer? It’s one of the most enduring questions for the buggy-pushing, humous-dipping middle classes, and this week’s victory goes to Waitrose thanks to Waitrose Christmas – one of the best Android apps so far in the run up to family festive stress time.
Offering similar content to the Waitrose in-house magazine, Waitrose Christmas is packed with recipes and has an advent calendar feature that brings a new nugget of content to your attention each day. If you’re the kind of cook that’s reduced a few turkeys to charcoal in your time, Waitrose Christmas also comes with a few virtual gadgets may be of interest. The Turkey Timer, Canape Calculator and Big Day Planner are a must for any kitchen-bound Xmas dinner virgins.
Pocket God (63p)
This 59p iPhone smash may not have grabbed headlines since Angry Birds became the casual iPhone game on everyone’s lips/beaks, but Pocket God was bothering charts almost a year before the first bird was launched into the first green pig on iPhone. And now Pocket God is available on Android too.
More cruelty sim than game, Pocket God gives you god-like power over a small, one-screen island inhabited by pygmies. You might play the benevolent leader card for a minute or two, but seeing how much death and destruction you can wreak on your helpless minions is far too strong an attraction to resist for long. Pocket God also includes some mini-games, to lend a little structure to the relentless killing.
Angry Birds Seasons (Free)
Here’s the biggie. The Christmas edition of Angry Birds is out, and it’s yet another reason for Android fans to blow a raspberry at their iPhone-owning mates. Not only did the Android version beat the iPhone’s Angry Birds Seasons to market, it’s also free while the iPhone version costs a whopping 59p. Zounds!
Angry Birds Seasons plays just like its forefathers, seeing you launch violent birdies into enemy pigs. The pumpkins and wooden blocks are gone though, replaced with snow and crumb presents. Angry Birds Seasons replaces Angry Birds Halloween on iTunes, so if you have already splashed out on that spooky edition, you can sample the advent calendar-style 25-level Christmas edition for free. If you can restrain yourself to one level a day though, you’re stronger than us.
