Songkick Concerts tops Android Apps of the Week

Songkick Concerts tops Android Apps of the Week

Making its debut on Android, Songkick Concerts tracks your favorite bands on a personalized concert calendar, the perfect app for groupies and music lovers. Evernote continues its porting of popular apps to Google Play with the launch of Evernote Food, helping the foodies out there contextualize their experiences. Making your Android home screen a little more personal is Tagy, a new app that shows your most frequently used apps in the form of a tag cloud, giving you easy access to the apps you know you’ll be using regularly.

After building popularity as an iPhone app, Songkick finally emerges for the Android audience. Songkick Concerts tracks your favorite bands so you never miss a live show. Create a personalized calendar based on the bands you follow, your actual location and get recommendations for concerts based on the music library on your device or your Google Music account. You can also import your favorite artists from Facebook, Pandora or Last.fm, which kickstarts the recommendation process. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich users get the added benefit of a Songkick homescreen widget that displays recently added events.

Shortly after the Android launch of Evernote Hello^[1], the productivity company’s revealed another app in the Google Play market: Evernote Food. The app lets you capture, remember and share your food experiences, contextualizing photos, geotags and even the time of day you were at a particular restaurant or ate something fantastic. Evernote Food includes swipable snapshots with captions, and you can also add titles and tags. The app will automatically display venues and restaurants nearby, helping you discover new places to eat as well.

Android is all about personalization, and Tagy takes things to the next level. It builds a tag cloud widget for your home screen, displaying your app names according to size. The more often you use a particular app, the larger it’s represented in the Tagy tag cloud. The less frequently used apps appear tiny within the tag cloud, growing larger if you open them more often and smaller if rarely used. Not to mention, it’s a convenient way to access the top apps used on your device, while offering up a bit of user data based on your regular activity. While Tagy is free for the first 10 days, you’ll have to pay about $2.60 for the unlimited version^[2].

After a major update to their iPad app and a beta release for Android, Spotify’s pushed out a noteworthy overhaul to its Android app, which hit the Google Play store this week. The music cloud app has a faster interface, ICS support, high-res artist images and a playback queue. You’ll also find folders to organize your playlists, and a home screen widget for one-touch access to what’s playing. Working much more like the Spotify desktop app, you’ll also get gapless playback, crossfading and the ability to stream music at 320kbps.

In Microsoft’s effort to be all things to all people, across all devices, they’ve launched a new app on rival platform Android. With on{X} you can program your phone to perform certain tasks, like reminding you to buy milk when you leave the office, or to send a reply text to your significant other with your location when they text “where?” Built for regular users and not computer programmers, on{X} uses a JavaScript API to program tasks. You can delete or turn off a particular task at any given time. There’s some pretty cool functions you can program around the basic apps on your phone, including SMS, alarms and calendar. Microsoft plans to add more features in the future, and says that no info from the app is shared or saved.

If you’re one of the millions of Android device users still without Ice Cream Sandwich, Holo Launcher is your reprieve. Replacing your current Android launcher with an Android 4.0 ICS-inspired theme, Holo Launcher offers a sleek and much-improved interface for your smartphone. While Holo doesn’t include all the features of an official ICS update, it does offer some perks, like support for up to nine desktop pages, a scrollable dock, swipe gestures and the ability to backup and restore your settings.

Find great Android games right here^[3]

References

1. ^{^} Evernote Hello (www.androidapps.com)
2. ^{^} unlimited version (www.androidapps.com)
3. ^{^} Find great Android games right here (www.androidapps.com)