OneTipADay - What Will You Learn Today?

Posted: 04 Jul 2011 06:21 AM PDT

Posted on One Tip A Day - What Will You Learn Today?

tunein 580x434 Three Cool Android Applications

This is a guest post by Kevin Moor. If you want to guest post on this site, then please read our guidelines here.

The success of smartphones can be easily connected to the consumer's desire to spend some quality time even when he has just a few free minutes. When you are stuck in traffic or take the subway to the office, there are enough dull moments when you wish you would have a method to kill time. It's not like you can turn your laptop on and play some video games or read a book, because the environment is less than favorable for such activities. On the other hand, the smartphone is already in your pocket and the few applications installed on it can light up your day.

To extract the most from it, you can not rely solely on the few games installed by default and accessing the Android Market will open a whole new world of opportunities. This being said, most of the apps available for download will not cost you a dime and they range from games and video players to picture viewers and applications that enable you to listen a large variety of online radio stations.

TuneIn Radio Pro

Does your Android phone have an FM Radio? This option seems to be left out from most mobile phones these days, as it will just make the phone more expensive without any real benefit. How so? An avid radio fan may claim. Well even with the smallest data traffic caps offered by most mobile network operators, one can still listen to plenty online radios, as audio data over 3G doesn’t use that much of your monthly quota. Still, some may claim it’s hard to find an online radio of their liking fast, or that they just prefer the local stations for the news and things like that.

This is where TuneIn Radio Pro steps in. It doesn’t only offer all of your local radios based on the area you are currently in, but almost all the local radio stations in the entire world, grouped and sorted on areas, countries, cities, and regions. Your current region is of course favored in the menus.

TuneIn also offers customized presets, an online profile, with favorites and top listened stations, and even the ability to record everything you hear, so it can be listened later. So tune in today.

TubeMate

As the name suggest, this is one of those little apps that you can use do download pretty much anything found on YouTube. TubeMate not only offers the option to download videos from YouTube at various format to be locally played from your mobile phone later, but also it can convert them to mp3 for audio only playback. The downloaded files list can be sorted and tapping on one file shows options to play as audio or video with any of your installed apps.

TubeMate also has playlists and a lot of options accessible via the Preferences menu, offering the ability to tweak every little setting.

QuickPick

QuickPick is to date the best picture viewer application I could find for the Android operating system. Not only it is fast and uses less resources than any other app, putting the stock gallery app on the Android to shame, but it has various thumbs and list views to please everyone.

Multiple file operations can be applied directly from the app, you can use it to share pictures via internet, bluetooth and any other service: Facebook, Gmail, Picasa, etc.

Ever had one of those problems where game or random app pictures would just show up in your gallery mixed with your regular photos? No more, as QuickPic can exclude folders from indexing, and anything under them will not appear anymore.

In addition, it also offers a slideshow option, with a timer setting and everything related.

QuickPic can also include videos, you can change the background on which pictures are shown, and all files can also be sorted by path, by date or by name.

Hidden files can also be protected with a password, offering that selective picture showing that gallery doesn’t have.

Lastly, QuickPick can automatically or manually switch screen orientation depending on the picture’s format, and can also control brightness independent of the rest of the phone.And of course, QuickPickwon't cost you a penny.

This guest post is contributed by Kevin Moor, who writes for Top Speed Scan, which is seeking ways how to speed up pc.