Come shelter from the sweltering summer heat and feast your eyes on the Best Android apps of the week! This time around we’ve got some truly scrumptious slices of download brilliance for you to savour, with games and apps that you’ll be proud to have on your smartphone.
The most expedient way of plucking these lovely apps from the ether and installing them onto your phone is to use Barcode Scanner (in conjunction with your phone’s camera) and simply zap the QR codes we’ve supplied below. You can also click the title of the app to achieve the same effect.
Free
There’s a surfeit of fitness-related applications available on the Android Market right now but the recently-released Sports Tracker is by far the most polished. It does everything you could possibly want from this kind of application – you can track your runs and cycle routes, analyse your performance and share your activities with other like-minded fitness freaks. It’s backed up by a robust social networking framework that allows you to share your regimen with friends, and that encourages a spot of good-natured rivalry that can push your exercise aspirations to new levels.
Zenonia 3 (Xperia Play Compatible)
Free
Gamevil’s Zenonia series is about the closest thing that smartphone users are going to get to The Legend of Zelda, and this third entry shows the franchise going from strength to strength. The visuals are crisper, the storyline is more engaging and the quest is even more expansive. Intuitive touch-screen controls make the gameplay a real pleasure, and it even comes with support for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play’s physical interface, too. Amazingly, it’s being offered entirely free of charge at the moment – something that cannot be said for the iPhone version of the game. Yet another reason for Google Phone lovers to feel unbearably smug in the presence of their iOS-loving peers.
Free
Photo-sharing on social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter isn’t anything new, but Path’s objective is very noble. Instead of broadcasting your snaps to all and sundry, Path limits you to a network of just 50 people. That ensures you only add those who are really important to you – so the kid you barely said two words to who used to sit behind you in maths at school is out, but your closest buddies and family members are in. It’s a more intimate way of showing your world to others, and it makes sharing more rewarding as you know the people who are seeing it are those you trust – and not complete strangers that you haven’t seen for the past twenty-odd years. If you don’t believe us, check out the heart-warming and very slickly-produced promotional video below.
Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for the past week you’ll be aware that Google has finally launched it own Facebook killer in the form of Google+. The jury is still out on whether or not this concept can really usurp Mark Zuckerberg’s insanely popular web portal, but early omens – such as this dedicated Android application – are very positive. It functions in very much the same way as the dedicated Android Facebook app (which should come as no surprise as Google was heavily involved with the design of that program), and everything is straightforward and intuitive. You can post items, comment on the posts of others, organise your ‘circles’, get involved in ‘Huddles’ and enable notifications. Time will tell if Google+ can gain traction and avoid the fate of Google Wave and Google Buzz, but right now we’re enjoying the experience.
£1.30
If you cast your mind back to the first time you ever played Angry Birds or Cut the Rope or any similarly addictive Android game, then you’ll know exactly what it feels like to fire up Apparatus for the first time. This incredibly slick 3D physics-based puzzle title involves dropping a ball into a cage, but to do this you need to make use of various items scattered around each level. At the basic end of the scale, wooden planks must be re-located to provide the ball with a path to follow, but on later levels you literally have to construct your own solution, creating carts, catapults and all sorts of contraptions. You can even build your own fiendish conundrum and share it with other players. At times it can be brain-bustlingly difficult, but it never, ever fails to amaze. It’s currently being sold at half price, so grab it as soon as you possibly can.
