I’ve had my HTC Hero now for over a month, and have already settled on a number of apps, after much installing, trialling and uninstalling. I therefore thought I’d share my results, all neatly categorised.

I haven’t linked to any of the apps, as they should all be searchable in the Android Marketplace.

Oh, and I haven’t listed games (they’re a lot more of a personal choice, I find).

Information

The BBC news widget is particularly useful, providing easy access to the various BBC news feeds.

Movies, by Flixster, uses GPS to good use by displaying nearby cinemas and listing for their current shows. However, when viewing other information, such as trailers, it does appear to have constant network issues and this feature therefore doesn’t appear to work. A shame.

Google Sky Map is a fascinating educational tool that lets you point your phone heavenward and view the stars and planets whilst moving around.

ShopSavvy is a barcode scanner that will then look the product up to try and find prices. Useful for when you’re out shopping.

WikiMobile provides a mobile interface to Wikipedia.

Media

Until an official BBC iPlayer app appears, beebPlayer will help – it will let you view iPlayer TV content, along with listening to live Radio. Sadly, there’s no iPlayer radio content available.

Amazon MP3 provides access and purchasing capabilities for MP3 tracks from the Amazon website. They also have free tracks, although it’s best to look these up on the main Amazon site and then search for them on the app, as there’s no option on the app to list free tracks.

Last.fm is a streaming music player for the popular website, whereas Simple Last.fm Scrobbler will send details of all the music you’ve listened to, to the very same site for statistics purposes.

And for those who haven’t come across Shazam before, it may come as a bit of a revelation. The next time you’re at the pub and can’t identify a piece of music, simply use this app and it will work it out for you.

Lastly, I come to Podcasts. I initially used Google’s own Listen app but that simply failed to pick up new episodes of subscribed “shows”. I’m now trying out BeyondPod, which is only free for the first week. So far, it seems to work nicely.

Messaging

Meebo is a good, all-purpose instant messaging client.

And, if you find the default text messaging software a little bland, you could try Handcent, which includes speech bubble style conversation threads and is generally, well, a little more inspiring.

By default, reminders on Android are a bit lacking – you get a text or a missed call and you don’t get to hear about it after the initial reminder. Missed Reminder will keep nagging you and has a plethora of options, from LED colours to flashing the trackball.

Network

3G Watchdog is an excellent way of monitoring your data usage (you just need to know what your data usage  limit is and when it runs to/from).

In an attempt to preserve battery power, the phone will automatically drop wi-fi connection when the phone is in standby. This option can be changed via the settings, but you may want to be able to switch this on/off as required. Wi-Fi Lock is a useful widget to do just that.

Office

AK Notepad is, well, just that – a useful note facility. However, if you want to stick a note on your screen, then I’d recommend Sticky Note.

Integrating with my existing online services, Quick Save will add a facility to quickly add links to Read it Later, and Astrid will synchronise and allow me to update my Remember the Milk to-do lists.

A more recent find is cloudList which allows you to create “tick lists” which can be accessed on both your phone and on their website.

WordPress have released their own app, WordPress for Android, which allows the quick editing of posts.

Sadly lacking is an app for Google Reader.

Social Networks

Facebook have their own App and, for eBay, Pocket Auctions works well.

I’m not mentioning a Twitter client right now, as I’m in the middle of reviewing a number – more on that in a later post!

Tools

Advanced Task Manager provides quick lists of running apps and ways to quickly “kill” them. There’s even a widget to perform an instant kill.

For file management, I’d turn to ASTRO which, erm, does just that.

Profilechanger is not very pretty but does exactly what I want – allows me to change profiles at certain times of the day – in my case, it goes silent overnight.

One the facilities sadly lacking in Android is the ability to backup your data and your apps. MyBackup Pro does just that – both onto your SD card and online. However, unlike most of my other recommendations, this isn’t a freebie. Give the trial a go though!

I can see the attraction of a tablet PC (which, no matter how they try and dress it up, is all the iPad is) but all Apple have done is dress theirs up with their funky phone OS and a quality touch screen.

None-the-less, because of the drum banging and ceremony that goes with an Apple launch, BBC feel the need to allow people to submit their comments. My favourite is this…

Apple never just produces ‘gadgets’; they engineer solutions that people can see fitting into their lives eventually.

It’s that last word… eventually. What he’s trying to say is that Apple find solutions to problems that don’t currently exist. Whoever could accuse Apple customers of being vain, purchasing style over price and function?

Having said that, I quite like this comment…

You can just hear the money being poured into the Apple bank account as the brainless tech sheep of this generation rush out to by this fantastically overpriced netbook.

<snigger>  The worst comment award though must go to..

Finally stupid netbooks will disappear. But if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch so-called pad why not just buy a Macbook with more power, to do work, play DVDs and all that added functionality?

Yea, those stupid netbooks. Good case against them. Erm. But, yea, if you’re going to carry around a 10-inch computer, why not just buy a much, much bulkier 13-inch Macbook at not far off twice the price of an iPad<snort>?  Stupid consumers eh? And there they are buying 10-inch £200 Netbooks. What are they thinking?

I missed this at the time – I also got a mention (and more links) on the BBC Internet Blog weekly round-up.

…blogger David Artiss was pleasantly surprised that he had some BBC bods commenting on his Wii post and more so that we’d linked to him from the blog

After yesterdays post about the iPlayer on the Wii, I was surprised to have a couple of BBC techie people commenting on it.

I was, however, even more surprised to come in this morning and find that the same post had been referenced on the BBC website!¹ I suspect they’ve not seen my update though, where I had constant problems with bandwidth problems and the resultant pausing of playback.

Oh well, 15 minutes of minor fame…

1. in case you’re wondering how I knew, I use Google Alerts to inform me of any reference to my site [↩]

Last night, or rather at midnight, the BBC iPlayer channel was released for the Nintendo Wii.

The iPlayer has been usable in the past using the Opera-powered browser channel, but has been of limited quality and, well, not very easy to use. Now we have a very specific channel just for iPlayer. And it’s been a long time coming – the BBC have been talking about it for a year and a half.

However, I can only assume they’ve spent this time time on development and testing because the end result is superb.

The download is quick and quite compact (I wonder if it’s using components of the browser – e.g. Flash – I didn’t have time to check if this was the case). It’s slick in use (although there is a delay each time you start it) and very polished. Most importantly, programmes are easy to find and, best of all, show in full screen without any obvious problems. Considering the Wii only has 512MB of memory and no hard drive, I thought that buffering would suffer and there would be delays during playback. During the (admittedly limited) time I had to test it this morning, I didn’t see any such problems.

I headed towards last Saturdays Doctor Who episode – it looks good. A little grainy, but no obvious over-compression during fast moving sequences (such as the opening titles). Hey, it’s not HD quality, but then the Wii isn’t an HD console!

As I watch more on it, I’ll report back if I do come across any problems with stuttering or compression artefacts.

Overall, I’m damn impressed. I can see the Wii being used even more now – my wife and I missed a BBC programme at the weekend, and will be watching it on the Wii iPlayer tonight. Now we just need the other channels to do something similar…

Update: My wife used the Wii iPlayer during the day to watch a half hour show – 20 minutes in it stated “insufficient bandwidth” and wouldn’t proceed. This even we watched another half hour show and it froze 6 times during playback. There were also some sound sync issues as well. So, not so good. My broadband isn’t too bad either – usually about 2-3 meg and the wireless router is about 2 metres away from the Wii.